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Digital Reconstruction in Historical Research and Its Implications for Virtual Research Environments

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3D Research Challenges in Cultural Heritage II

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10025))

Abstract

This articles deals with (digital) reconstruction in historical research and reflects on the use of digital methods within the research cycle. For historians, reconstructions of varying degree, detail and focus are an invaluable research tool. We argue that different stages of reconstruction result in different reconstructed objects, outlining the implications in terms of publication, citation practices and the research cycle. The paper contends that these aspects need to be reflected in virtual research environments. The process of reconstruction needs to become transparent revealing the parameters of the different stages that resulted in the reconstructed product.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One approach to this is the use of electronic laboratory notebooks; see Rubacha et al. [1].

  2. 2.

    This is not only an issue in war zones. Other disasters cause irretrievable loss of cultural heritage material, e.g., the collapse of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne in 2009.

  3. 3.

    The EC-funded project ENUMERATE is currently running its third survey on digitization practices in cultural heritage in the EU, see http://pro.europeana.eu/enumerate/. Accessed 26 July 2016. The results of the previous two surveys suggest that museums progressed the most in digitizing their collections (24 % of analogue heritage collections were digitally reproduced) whereas archives and libraries (11 % and 12 %) lag behind. As the report states, these numbers should be interpreted with caution as the institution size was not weighted in the average [2, p. 21].

  4. 4.

    http://www.europeana.eu/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  5. 5.

    http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/home. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  6. 6.

    http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/index_html. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  7. 7.

    https://arb.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  8. 8.

    Analysis of social networks is one increasingly popular method of historical research in this category, e.g., [6]. Maybe the best overview over this topic can be found at http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/. Accessed 26 July 2016.. Attached to this is a Zotero group https://www.zotero.org/groups/historical_network_research which compiles most of the relevant literature. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  9. 9.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_%28Star_Trek%29. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  10. 10.

    One example is the reconstruction of the camera obscura, see [10]. The reconstruction of the creative process of drawing in a manuscript [11]. The University of Oldenburg was at the forefront of reconstructing experiments as part of historical research. See the work of Hans Otto Sibum.

  11. 11.

    https://www.archivesportaleurope.net. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  12. 12.

    http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  13. 13.

    http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  14. 14.

    http://www.cidoc-crm.org/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  15. 15.

    E.g., for statues http://www.iflscience.com/technology/ct-scans-reveal-mummy-inside-statue. Accessed 26 July 2016, and the “Ancient Lives” exhibition at the British Museum http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/past_exhibitions/2014/ancient_lives.aspx. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  16. 16.

    Material data and scholarly analysis also need to be combined in other contexts, e.g., ink analysis to date the writing on a manuscript, e.g. [11].

  17. 17.

    https://vimeo.com/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  18. 18.

    https://www.youtube.com/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  19. 19.

    http://kjc-sv006.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de:8083/home. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  20. 20.

    https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  21. 21.

    https://drupal.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/workshops/node/63. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  22. 22.

    For online representations of color recipes, see the “Colour Context” database: http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/transitions/colour-context-2/ and the database of medieval and early modern art technology recipes by Doris Oltrogge: http://db.re.fh-koeln.de/ICSFH/forschung/rezepte.aspx. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  23. 23.

    This insight is not new. The collaboration of artists and scholars in print has been a topic of historical research for decades.

  24. 24.

    http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  25. 25.

    http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/about/goals.html. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  26. 26.

    http://cdli.ucla.edu/. Accessed 26 July 2016. For the context of counting and calculation methods in reconstruction, see [20], and for a brief history of computer aided reconstruction see http://damerow.mpiwg.de/doku.php/obituary. The history of this early digital humanities project still has to be written.

  27. 27.

    http://archimedes2.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/archimedes_templates. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  28. 28.

    see [21] and the website of the museum http://www.museogalileo.it/en/index.html, for the wider context. Accessed 26 July 2016, please refer to [22].

  29. 29.

    http://einstein-virtuell.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/VEA/SC879771616_en.html. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  30. 30.

    http://virtualspaces.sourceforge.net/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  31. 31.

    https://de.dariah.eu/. Accessed 26 July 2016.

  32. 32.

    https://github.com/Tadirah/TaDiRAH. Accessed 26 July 2016.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Klaus Thoden from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for giving feedback on this article.

URLs quoted: The nature of this article made it necessary to quote a number of websites. We last checked all the links while finishing this article in July 2016. We chose URLs that we believe are stable enough to serve as examples for this article for a reasonable amount of time. We are in doubt about the sustainability of these references but think this only reiterates the importance of establishing a sustainable infrastructure for the (Digital) Humanities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Dorotheenstr. 26, 10117, Berlin, Germany

    Juliane Stiller

  2. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, Boltzmannstr. 22, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Dirk Wintergrün

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  1. Juliane Stiller
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  2. Dirk Wintergrün
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Correspondence to Juliane Stiller .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. TU Dresden , Dresden, Germany

    Sander Münster

  2. TU Darmstadt , Darmstadt, Germany

    Mieke Pfarr-Harfst

  3. Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany

    Piotr Kuroczyński

  4. Cyprus University of Technology , Limassol, Cyprus

    Marinos Ioannides

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Stiller, J., Wintergrün, D. (2016). Digital Reconstruction in Historical Research and Its Implications for Virtual Research Environments. In: Münster, S., Pfarr-Harfst, M., Kuroczyński, P., Ioannides, M. (eds) 3D Research Challenges in Cultural Heritage II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10025. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47647-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47647-6_3

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