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In this post we continue our series — ‘Historical Research in the Digital Age’ — which explores historians’ use and understanding of the digital tools and sources that shape modern research culture. The series explores the impact and implications of digital resources (positive and negative) for how historians work today. In Part Five we hear from Gerben Zaagsma who is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg. Here, Gerben explores the concept of ‘digital abundance’ in global perspective. Allocations of digital resources, and the capacity to access digital content, reflect wider divisions between Global Norths and Souths. However, as Gerben argues, the realities of digital imbalance also cut across these binary divisions. For many, a crucial impediment to research remains the lack of digital discoverability for analogue sources. Gerben also offers ways to better facilitate digital provision in the Global South and connect Northern / Southern research cultures.

Egberdien van der Peijl presented some artworks based on the ZWANG-proeject photograph sollection of the Ostarbeiters, made on the forced labourer camp sites and or in the steel mills together with DJ Yoni. The musical improvisation together with a theatrically played performance imitated the life of an Ostarbeiter in the gallery's basements. The venue was Fellner Contemporary in the city.

Während sich die Materialitäten und Funktionsweisen von Grenzen in den letzten Jahrzehnten drastisch verändert haben, besteht das ordnende Prinzip der Grenze weiter fort. Dabei zeichnet sich der selektive Charakter von Grenzen in einer in Europa bisher kaum gekannten Deutlichkeit ab. Hier setzen die Beiträ-ge an und diskutieren die Beobachtung, dass Grenzen nicht für alle Menschen in gleicher Weise bedeut-sam sind. Dafür arbeiten die Autor:innen mit dem Begriff der Multivalenz, der unterstellt, dass Grenzen soziale Wertigkeiten oder Relevanzen besitzen, die sich mit Blick auf bestimmte Personengruppen un-terscheiden. Das Themenheft mit Analysebeispielen von Governance, Flucht, Berichterstattung, Film und Literatur zeigt multiple Valenzen von Grenzen auf, die für Ungleichheiten stehen und auf wirkmächtige kulturelle Ordnungen verweisen. Alors que la matérialité et le fonctionnement des frontières ont considérablement changé au cours des dernières décennies, le principe ordonnateur de la frontière persiste. Le caractère sélectif des frontières se dessine avec une netteté jusqu'ici inconnue en Europe. C'est à partir de là que les textes du cahier discutent de l'observation selon laquelle les frontières n'ont pas la même signification pour tous les êtres humains. Pour ce faire, les auteurs utilisent le concept de multivalence, qui suppose que les fron-tières possèdent des valeurs sociales ou des pertinences qui se distinguent en fonction de certains groupes de personnes. Ce cahier thématique, qui présente des études de cas de la gouvernance, de la fuite, du reportage, du cinéma et de la littérature, montre les multiples valences des frontières, qui sont synonymes d'inégalités et renvoient à des ordres culturels puissants. While the materialities and functionalities of borders have changed drastically in recent decades, the ordering principle of the border persists. At the same time, the selective character of borders is emerg-ing with a clarity that has hardly been seen in Europe before. This is the point of departure for the issue papers, which discuss the observation that borders do not have the same significance for all people. For this purpose, the authors work with the concept of multivalence, which assumes that borders have social values or relevances that differ regarding certain groups of people. The thematic issue with case studies of governance, flight, reporting, film, and literature shows multiple valences of borders, which stand for inequalities and refer to powerful cultural orders.

Natural language processing (NLP) for detecting lexical semantic change and linguistic linked open data (LLOD) are two areas of research that have shown promising results in the latest years. However, their potential of being considered together for analysing and representing semantic change from a humanistic perspective needs further study and development. The talk will present an overview of theoretical aspects, NLP techniques and LLOD formalisms intended to this purpose, and will focus on a project developed as a humanities use case within the COST Action “Nexus Linguarum - European network for Web-centred linguistic data science.” The discussion will include preliminary thoughts on the conception of a system that combines dictionary information with corpus evidence, and provides multilingual diachronic ontologies for humanities research.

We consider a novel hybrid active-passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) air-ground communications system. Unlike the conventional passive RIS, the hybrid RIS is equipped with a few active elements to not only reflect but also amplify the incident signals for significant performance improvement. Towards a fairness design, our goal is to maximize the minimum rate among users through jointly optimizing the location and power allocation of the UAV and the RIS reflecting/amplifying coefficients. The formulated optimization problem is nonconvex and challenging, which is efficiently solved via block coordinate descend and successive convex approximation. Our numerical results show that a hybrid RIS requires only 4 active elements and a power budget of 0 dBm to achieve an improvement of 52.08% in the minimum rate, while that achieved by a conventional passive RIS with the same total number of elements is only 18.06%.

Previous surveys on the reading habits of Luxembourgish secondary school students (conducted within the framework of the national school monitoring programme Épreuves Standardisées (ÉpStan) in 2016 and 2019) revealed better reading comprehension results in French and German for those students who frequently read printed narrative texts in their leisure time. However, these studies only focused on different reading modes and text types. They did not investigate which digital and/or printed books students actually read for pleasure, nor which text features determine the positive impact narrative texts have on their reading performances: Is it, for example, the language quality, the richness and complexity of content, or simply the amount of written language they need to process? Therefore, we conducted an explorative follow-up survey within the framework of ÉpStan 2020 and asked secondary school students (Grade 7: n=3055; Grade 9: n=5781) to indicate up to three book titles – printed and e-books respectively – they had read in their leisure time. Despite the omnipresence of digital media, preliminary findings show that both age groups prefer paper-based reading activities when reading longer texts (or books) for pleasure. Nevertheless, the most popular text types and book titles are the same for printed books and e-books: Among them, we find the novel series “Harry Potter”, the rather comic-like book series “Gregs Tagebuch”, and the mangas from the “Naruto”/“Boruto” series. The linkage between students’ leisure time reading activities and their ÉpStan reading performances will be drawn, and some first linguistic text analyses of extracts from the most popular book titles will be conducted in order to reveal some of the text features that foster reading comprehension skills.

Teaching materials, and particularly textbooks, play an essential role in the socialisation of children through the communication of values. As „textbooks are not a reflection of reality, but an arrangement of the representation of a society that they legitimise” (Brugeilles & Cromer, 2008, p.42), we argue that they contribute to challenging, perpetuating, or increasing gender inequalities. The results of our first study on Luxemburgish primary school textbooks, already published, indicate an androcentric view (Kerger & Brasseur, 2021). In every textbook, we counted more male than female characters in the texts and the illustrations. Men are more often represented in professional activities, while women are more likely to perform domestic activities. The celebrities represented are more often men than women. This poster presents the results of history textbooks in secondary school. It shows an ethnocentric perspective on the representation of non-white characters and those with disabilities. People with disabilities are almost exclusively portrayed when disability as a subject is being discussed. Use of racist language. These representations do not transmit the realities of societal complexities and they contribute to the marginalization and discrimination of non-white people and people with disabilities.