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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.

Data collections are essential for historical research. In addition to official archives and state institutions, collections from research institutions and private holders face different challenges in creation and consistency, preservation and use. While most private collections are stored in official and state archives due to donations or the acquisition of private holdings, crowdsourcing data as private collections is a different approach. Crowdsourcing has become popular in Citizen Science and public history projects in the last decade. Although crowdsourcing is not (always) meant to create an archive, the data or contributions collected are an archive nonetheless. This paper aims to highlight the possibilities and pitfalls of crowdsourcing to build an archive of private origin. In February 2021, a team at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg launched a call for contributions to collect ego documents about the war generation. As part of the project, "WARLUX - War Experiences in Luxembourg", the team is researching the personal side of the history of the Luxembourgish war generation. To uncover the individual experiences of these men, women and families, the team asked the public to share their family stories, letters, diaries, photographs and other personal documents. The researchers aimed to enrich records on individuals, which had not yet been collected or published. While the crowdsourcing campaign was intended as complementary research material, we have created a unique digital archive of personal memories and individual voices in the form of first-hand documents and a novelty in the cultural landscape in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. In my presentation and paper, I will explore the possibilities of crowdsourced (digital) private archives, their pitfalls and challenges such as copyright and GDRP and sensitive information and its future implementation into official cultural institutions.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was de facto annexed and incorporated into the German Reich during the Second World War. The laws and ordinances of the Reich applied to the local population, and male residents were drafted into the Wehrmacht and thus subject to military jurisdiction. The main reason for Luxembourgers to be tried by the Wehrmacht courts was for disobeying orders, mostly desertion. Wehrmacht court records contain not only individual and personal information about the motives of the convicts and the findings of the court but also details about their families and backgrounds. As a result of deserting from the Wehrmacht, thousands of family members of deserters were resettled in East German territories such as Boberstein (Bobrów) in Poland, and their assets were confiscated. Given these men’s forced recruitment and non-German identity and the fact that they were being asked to fight for a foreign country that had invaded their home territory, the reasons for their desertion and disobedience are self-explanatory. However, this contribution will examine the efforts of the courts and the military justice administration to capture and arrest them, seizures made in their homeland and threats and arrests of their families. These efforts reflect the cooperation between military courts and local police forces used by the occupying authorities to terrorise the inhabitants of occupied territories and to put pressure on the men in the Wehrmacht not to defect. The contribution examines the consequences for individual soldiers and their families in occupied territories such as Luxembourg. It aims to use court records and trials, as well as the corresponding police files related to the interrogation and resettlement of families, to establish a link between persecuted soldiers and the consequences for their families, thereby showing the impact of the Nazi military machine on individuals during the Second World War.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions have contributed to accelerating the rise in commodity prices (including energy), triggering inflation, and exacerbating instability in an already convalescent Europe. The war has also sparked a massive refugee crisis, the most impressive in speed and size since World War II, whose economic impact is likely to be significant. As of mid-May, the stock of Ukrainian refugees who have fled their country due to the Russian invasion slightly exceeded 6 million, and some 8 million more were displaced internally.1 This refugee crisis imposes huge stress on the humanitarian protection regime and reception capacity of most European countries. This is not only the case in frontline countries such as Poland (3.3 million), Romania (0.9 million), Hungary (0.6 million) or Moldova (0.5 million), but also in other EU member states where the numbers of arrivals has almost reached (and sometimes exceeds) the levels of the 2015-16 refugee crisis in two months only. As of early May, the stocks have risen to 610 thousand in Germany, 70 thousand in France, 40 thousand in Belgium and 5 thousand in Luxembourg. These numbers are likely to grow in the coming weeks, as the war is far from over.

In the Euclidean case, it is well-known, by Malgrange and Ehrenpreis, that linear differential operators with constant coefficients are solvable. However, what happens, if we genuinely extend this situation and consider systems of linear invariant differential operators, is still solvable? In case of Rn (for some positive integer n), the question has been proved mainly by Hörmander. We will show that this remains still true for Riemannian symmetric spaces of non-compact type X = G/K. More precisely, we will present a possible strategy to solve this problem by using the Fourier trans- form and its Paley-Wiener(-Schwartz) theorem for (distributional) sections of vector bundles over X. We will get complete solvability for the hyperbolic plane H2 = SL(2, R)/SO(2) and beyond. This work was part of my doctoral dissertation supervised by Martin Olbrich.

In February 2021, a call for contributions was launched through the media (newspapers and radio) to collect ego-documents about the men, women and their families affected by the Nazi draft during the Second World War. The response was overwhelmingly successful, and the team received more than 200 calls and messages in the first few days. The collection phase (February to October 2021) involved visiting families to bring the originals to campus, where they were scanned and indexed. Interaction with donors and the public was a pivotal activity to enrich the personal documents with additional information about the individuals' backgrounds for an in-depth analysis. After completing the survey process, the team collected 160 collections (from 160 contributors), creating the central source of documentation for research into personal experiences of war.