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HDSM members will be presenting at The Connected Past 2025 in Portugal

It is with great pleasure that we announce the forthcoming presentation of two papers by HDSM (TU Darmstadt) at The Connected Past 2025 Conference, to be held in Coimbra, Portugal. The first paper, entitled ‘Towards a Network of Recollection in Oral Histories’, will be presented by Jiajie Zhang and Andreas Vlachidis (UCL) in collaboration with Frieda Schmidt (HDSM). This paper is part of the MeDoraH project and has been co-authored by Marco Humbel, Julianne Nyhan, Andrew Flinn, Valentina Prishchepova, Aleksey Varfolomeyev, and Florian Elleringmann. Additionally, Frieda Schmidt will present her paper, entitled ‘Networks of Mass Appropriation: The Distribution of Aboriginal Cultural Material within European Museum Collections’, which is based on her EMCAM dataset and forms part of her postdoctoral research efforts.

More information about The Connected Past 2025 can be found here: https://connectedpast.net/

Abstract of ‘Towards a Network of Recollection in Oral Histories’:

“Recollected narratives of past experiences and events offer unique insights into historical research (Abrams, 2016). While oral historians have embraced technological innovation for recording and digital publishing, the potential of network analysis for the nuanced study of Oral History interviews remains untapped (Smyth et al., 2023). The Mixed Methods Digital Oral History (MeDoraH) project draws on the history of the digital humanities discipline to explore the potential of semantic web technologies to represent networks of recollections, facilitating interpretive analysis for hermeneutical discovery. Our study presents an explorative network, focusing on the semantic interconnections among people, places, time, technologies, institutions, and academic disciplines within the Hidden Histories interviews (Nyhan and Flinn, 2016)1. Initial results reveal a sparse network with minimal local clustering, suggesting a selective representation of relationships. Further work is underway to deepen our understanding of connectivity dynamics within semi-professional discourse (HumanistListServ), comparing these with network representations of recollection in Oral History interviews. We identified the narrative structures underlying interviewees’ memories and assessed the feasibility of representing the subjective nature of Oral Histories in networks. Network metrics reveal gendered engagement patterns indicating that women, despite their smaller numbers, establish more connections and fulfil crucial bridging roles, resonating with bibliometric perspectives of Digital Humanities (Gao, Nyhan, and Duke-Williams, 2022). This work addresses fundamental methodological challenges in representing narrative knowledge through network structures, including temporal uncertainty, individual and collective memory, and the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of Oral Histories. Ultimately, this study enriches our understanding of network dynamics within historical narrative accounts, contributing to theoretical insights into interconnected memories and their impact on Digital Humanities.”


Abstract of ‘Networks of Mass Appropriation: The Distribution of Aboriginal Cultural Material within European Museum Collections’:

“European museums are in possession of considerable quantities of artefacts of Australian Aboriginal cultural provenance. The acquisition and distribution of such artefacts necessitated the establishment of extensive networks. This article examines the interconnections between European museum collections of Indigenous cultural artefacts from 19th and 20th century Australia and the mass character of the personal and institutional structures of European appropriation practices from a postcolonial perspective. By applying a quantitative-empirical approach that takes a comparative perspective on the appropriation processes, this article offers a unique view of the entanglements of local cultural material and global networks of mass appropriation. To this end, the European Museum Collections of Aboriginal Material (EMCAM) dataset is presented, which contains information from the 13 largest national collections of the EU Member States on 4,862 Indigenous cultural artefacts. The subsequent analysis of this novel dataset reveals three interconnected network levels: (i) institutional collaborations, (ii) personal relationships between the appropriating actors, and (iii) the distribution of cultural material across different collections. Furthermore, within these three levels, structural patterns of commodification of cultural material and mass production of forgeries are identified, calling into question the authenticity of some of the appropriated materials. These findings support the use of structured data collection and standardised analysis procedures to achieve greater transparency in the study and (re-)analysis of particularly sensitive historical events.”


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
friedaschmidt (April 22, 2025). HDSM members will be presenting at The Connected Past 2025 in Portugal. HDSM. Retrieved June 15, 2025 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/4923


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