logonom

PhD-FHSE-2020-29

The Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine The Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance The Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences

DISSERTATION

Presented on 16/09/2020 in Esch-sur-Alzette

to obtain the degree of

DOCTEUR DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DU LUXEMBOURG

EN Histoire

Anita LUCCHESI

Born on 25 Abril 1986 in Teresópolis (Brazil)

For a New Hermeneutics of Practice in Digital Public History:

thinkering with memorecord.uni.lu

Abstract

This thesis is built upon an experimental study of doing digital public history. I aim to study the digital interferences of the digital component on the historiographic operation as a whole. While the fields of digital and public history are advancing fast with abundant work on development and application of new methodologies, tools and approaches, the discipline of history is still lagging behind in terms of theoretical reflection on the new practices emerging from it. Researchers have been exploring alternative forms of source criticism, storytelling and publications for years now, yet the greatest attention still goes to the outputs, while little criticism, if any, is devoted to the process of doing digital work. By building and analysing a digital public history platform, this research aims to make a contribution in this direction. To do so, the research takes a fully hands-on approach and offers an evaluation of digital methods that to great extent emerge from practice and the researcher’s first-hand experience with the digital.

The empirical study consisted of investigating memories of Italian and Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg through the establishment of a collaboratively shaped digital memory platform. The process of building the Memorecord platform, activating the crowdsourcing through social media and analysing the born-digital data originated from this collection informed the theoretical reflection of this thesis. While in the more practical layer, hands-on work and collaboration were highlighted, from the more speculative layer, the main theoretical contribution verse on the hybridisation of old and practices and capacities synthesized in the emergence of a hermeneutics of practice, derived from the heuristics gesture of creative and playful experimentation, (i.e. thinkering) around the digital tools and methods.

This specific hermeneutical approach may function as a visibility broker, assisting historians in the process of unveiling the unspoken and implicit aspects of historical inquiry in the digital age. Hermeneutics of practice, hence, should facilitate the identification of the digital interferences we encounter throughout the research process and improve the researcher’s readiness to face the new research conditions placed by the digital component. If a new style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history should be stabilised, hermeneutics of practice could become an important procedure to ensure historical objectivity in 21st Century.

Acknowledgements

“It takes a village”, they say. Originally, this proverb refers to raising a child. Somehow, this thesis is it, a child, and to a great extent, this is the fruit of a community effort. First of all, I would like to sincerely thank every person who contributed to the realisation of Memorecord. Your energy and willingness to build and animate it with me were fundamental to make it happen. Thanks for having joined the harvest! I am also thankful to the Luxembourg National Research Fund and to the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History for their financial and institutional support to my project.

As I write these acknowledgements, many faces are popping up in my mind. Perhaps due to the habit of the profession, I tend to go far back in time thinking about everybody who supported me in the educational path that brought me to Luxembourg: my birth family and my dear Único school teachers. Família querida, especialmente minha mãezinha e Caroline, pelo perene cuidado que atravessa oceanos. E também, meus amores Únicos: Memelo, Thuenny, Pedro, e Magah, obrigada por terem sempre me encorajado a olhar além do Soberbo. Não sabia que depois da Baía de Guanabara eu viria parar tão longe, graças ao estímulo e apoio que vocês me deram. À minha família do coração, os Moura Ribeiro, deixo meu abraço co-movido como desde a primeira descida da Serra.

For becoming a historian, after them, I am in high debt with the Brazilian public university. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro was the venue of my first passions as a historian: teaching, methods, theory. To my UFRJ’s fellows, I am deeply grateful for the indelible mark of resistance and contestation they left on me, with special mentions to Manoel Salgado (in memoriam) and Andrea Casanova for the encouragement to begin and stay in research. Bridging Rio and Sergipe, it was digital history that brought me to the same path as Dilton Maynard. Dotô, infinitos obrigadas pelas nossas perenes trocas, pelo respeito e amizade. No caminho para esta tese, nossas trocas me levaram a lágrimas, me ampararam e inspiraram a seguir.

On my way to Luxembourg, before becoming a member of the jury, Serge Noiret is most responsible for... everything. Serge was the one who introduced me, back in 2008, to the very first references on digital history after I had chased him at the European University Institute. Grazie mille per avermi presentato questa strada, Serge e poi, quella della Public History, che ci ha portato altrove insieme: Ottawa, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Bogota, Ravenna ed ora Esch-sur-Alzette.

In the Grand Duchy, I could not have been more lucky. If I was looking for hands-on experience with the digital when I left Brazil, I met the right environment and the most enthusiastic companion for this explorative journey. Andreas Fickers, beyond being a super approachable supervisor, over these past years, have showed me in many ways how life in academia can be adventuresome, human and gratifying. Andreas, there would not be enough words to express my gratitude to your support and encouragement along this way; acknowledgements should also allow inline multimedia, multisensorial content. I learned a lot with you, about research and about being a researcher, and for this I thank you the most. Thank you also for taking the risks with me.

Teaming up with Andreas and Serge, Elisabeth Boesen, reminded me along the way that I also belonged to the second floor. Elisabeth, apart from your generous intellectual attitude as one of my in-house supervisors, I have to thank you a million for the numerous times you let me pop into your office for academic and non-academic reasons. Thanks for the teaching invitations, for the improvised coffee breaks and your always remarkable, considerate listening, deeply appreciated both in times of excitement and crisis.

I wish I could have more moments of exchange with the other members of my jury as I had with my Thesis Supervisory Committee. I hope academia will present us with further encounters in the near future. For now, I am most thankful to Machteld Venken, Jane Winters and Thomas Cauvin for having accepted to take part in such an important moment of my career path, my life, indeed. Machteld, Jane and Thomas, I was thrilled when we confirmed you would be taking part in my PhD Defence Jury. Thank you very much for your time and willingness in reading my work and being available to enrich this discussion with your expertise.

I could not have gone through all these years of intense work in Luxembourg and so many ups and downs in my personal life without counting on the friendship and support of my Luxembourg ambassadors - Marinella, Thierry and Nicolas - and my C2DH crew. The saudade from home and the bitter surprises of life became a bit easier with you guys. Obrigada! Grazie! Merci! Thank you very much to you all, with special thanks to Dominique, Shohreh, Jessica, Fabio and Richard for their hugs, the laughs, the meals together, the drinks and the eventual group therapies. On the other side of the corridor, to my savior and hero of all the hours, Daniele! Grazie infinite, Dani. Per tutto, ma soprattutto per aver messo tanto cuore in tutto ciò che abbiamo costruito per Memorecord.

Digital Hemeneutics... What Else? Ask Brigitte, she knows everything! My dear Brigitte, I will miss you. I wanted to thank you deeply for everything you did to me, but most importantly for the Brazilian hug style. It was a real chance to have around and I know that concluding this PhD would not have been the same without your moral, emotional and administrative support, above all in one of the most critical moments in my life. I do not forget your calls, your emails, your kindness.

Arriving at the end of this journey was almost an Odyssey, I often thought about it. Moving here and there, hospitals, trains, trolleys, tents, apartments, places in North and South. It would not have been possible without holding hands with my Barbara. Vida, eu não poderia chegar lá (aqui? aonde mesmo? horas são?) sem você ao meu lado, me encorajando com a força dos Guimarães que te incorpora. E aqui aproveito para agradecer imensamente à D. Clea pela coragem enviada todos os dias. Te agradecer pra valer pela valentia através de todos os perrengues é impossível. Só posso te dizer do quão lisonjeada sou pela tua companhia e por dividir contigo e com nossos peludos esse momento tão singular da minha vida. Que sigamos compartilhando a vida boa, mas quem sabe, daqui pra frente, com menos trechinhos, edições, correções e correrias. Obrigada por cuidar de mim e da tua xará e de formar com ela a dupla mais bárbara de encerramento de trabalhos jamais vista na face da terra. Babica, te agradeço de novo porque uma só vez é pouco.

And going back to the trains... Andy, my friend, thanks a million for embarking with me, to Aachen, to Lisbon, Kautenbach and elsewhere. You taught me many things, beyond scanning, tiny and great ones. Your 360 reading of Memorecord and your 360 friendship made Luxembourg home again after some great times of despair. Thanks for being there, holding my back, scanning my books, writing me notes, reading my drafts, bringing masks and alcohol gel to my door, walking my dog... I am so glad you are part of our pack.

And beyond Belval? Coisas Bunitas, mapas astrais, sonoros poderosos para a escrita, cozinha cheirando a bolo fresco, gargalhadas adultas e risadas de neném. Anne, Duci, Heidi, Luisa, obrigada pela acolhida, pelas trocas, pelos ombros e ouvidos emprestados. Heidinha, haja bareilless! Obrigada pela partilha, pela leitura, pelas filmagens e pelas palhaçadas que tornaram essa aventura menos angustiante.

To my friends spread over the world in different time zones and quarantine regimes, I only wish I could meet you all in a boteco at the end of this long day. COVID may prevent us from reuniting as soon as I wish, and that saddens me. But it is a great relief to know that you are there and we may talk over the tira-gostos of this thesis in no time. Gensa, mentre scrivo questo penso a te, alle nostre risate e alla nostra amicizia. Grazie per avermi insegnato tanto di quello che sai, dalla schiuma per il macchiato al fiorentino più sestese di tutta Toscana. Per la tua immensa pazienza in accompagnarmi così da vicino in questa mia lunga camminata verso la storia, grazie.

And to the team of proofreading and emotional support warriors, I can only hope to be there for you when you need me like I needed you. Jessica, Cale, Kanu, Rodrigo and Aryana, thanks for following me along this journey. It felt so good sharing part of this process with you. Chloé, Karina, Eliza, Gil, Poly, Harley, Jose, Marilia, Rapha, vocês também, de maneiras diferentes, me ajudaram a compor o grande quebra cabeças deste trabalho. Obrigada sempre pela escuta.

List of Figures

Figure 1. #Memorecord’s roadmap by myself 2019. 26

Figure 2. Invitation card for Racontez Votre Histoire... 32

Figure 3. How to Make a PixStori, by Talking Pictures LLC. 37

Figure 4. Pixstori recorded by Paulo Lobo, Portuguese migrant. 40

Figure 5. Contribute tab for The September 11 Digital Archive, developed based on Omeka (http://911digitalarchive.org/contribution) 44

Figure 6. The first attempt of developing the platform on WordPress. Full screenshot of the homepage 46

Figure 7. The first attempt at developing the platform on WordPress. Full screenshot of the “Tell your story” section, including information on how to use PixStori. 48

Figure 8. Social media usage in Luxembourg 2017, by platform. Source: TNS Ilres (MyPanel Échantillon). Survey period: March 2017. Number of respondents: 503. Age group: 16 years and older. 53

Figure 9. First sketch of Memorecord crowdsourcing mechanism, including social media. 54

Figure 10. Draft of site map created by myself with annotation on content and features for the section “The Project”. 55

Figure 11. First draft of the in-house developed version of the digital memory platform, by Daniele Guido. 56

Figure 12. A visual outline of the Memorecord Harvest Machine 56

Figure 13. Visuals available on the official website mobilitegratuite.lu, alongside the hashtags quoted in the press kit material – #mobilitegratuite, #cestungrandjour and #freemobility 62

Figure 14. Detail cropped from Memorecord’s home page, slide “Memorecord is a simple hashtag” on the dynamic carousel available at memorecord.uni.lu 63

Figure 15. Detail of the Google Sheets with the data harvested by Zapier to Memorecord. 64

Figure 16. Development of the project logo in collaboration with Emmanuelle Hingray 66

Figure 17. Memocord’s advertisement in the American Bar Association Journal, Chicago, 1974, p. 1430. 67

Figure 18. Memorecord official logo developed by Emmanuelle Hingray 68

Figure 19. English version of the Memorecord e-flyer 69

Figure 20. Animated invitation to the exhibition Memória Episodika, by Edmond Oliveira. 70

Figure 21. Hotspots for distribution of flyers and posters. Detail: Gare and Bonnevoie, Luxembourg City. 71

Figure 22. Memorecord poster hanging at the entrance of the Comité de liaison des associations d’étrangers (CLAE). Gasperich, Luxembourg Ville, January 2019. 72

Figure 23. Detail of a post from Facebook figuring on the Memorecord website. 74

Figure 24. The Memorecord homepage, as in https://memorecord.uni.lu/ 75

Figure 25. String with stories previews from the Memorecord read stories section, as in https://memorecord.uni.lu/stories/ 76

Figure 26. View of the world map section, with the preview of a story on Memorecord website, as in https://memorecord.uni.lu/map/ 77

Figure 27. Internet meme image on an old trick to enhance the signal of analogue TV. 94

Figure 28. The article by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “La fin des érudits”, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 May 1968. 98

Figure 29. : Illustration. Wooden Fingerposts, Source: Saxonia monumentis viarum illustrata 1726, by Carl Christian Schramm. Wikimedia Commons. 100

Figure 30. Illustration, “Encruzilhadas” (Crossroads). Photo collage of sixteen different types and designs of crossroads around the world. By Barbara Menezes 103

Figure 31. Hercules at the Crossroads, Annibale Carracci, 1596 (oil on canvas). Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Click to view on Google Arts & Culture. 109

Figure 32. Intersectionality. Flowchart of the Declaration of the Occupation of NYC, Rachel Schragis. Go to zoom.it for the zoom view of the chart 113

Figure 33. The Valley of the Shadow homepage 125

Figure 34. The Eve of War section, Reference Center page view 125

Figure 35. The Differences Slavery Made, Overview 131

Figure 36. The Differences Slavery Made, Reading Record tool detail 132

Figure 37. : Photo of a university wall in the South East of Brazil, “Does your academic knowledge get to the periphery?”, Unknown Author. Became viral in 2017. 139

Figure 38. Illustration, Roundabouts. Photo collage of sixteen different types and designs of crossroads around the world. By Barbara Mello. 146

Figure 39. Detail of Memorecord home, accessible on memorecord.uni.lu 156

Figure 40. Google Analytics summary for memorecord.uni.lu, 2018 162

Figure 41. Coding model adapted to Memorecord by myself. 165

Figure 42. Sample of story coding on interviews, by myself. 165

Figure 43. In the Memorecord collection, only in a few contributions’ participants tagged their geolocation, however, if we look at the map, the distribution of memories in different places, speaks up for the impossibility of limiting memories to the perimeter of the national borders. Detail of world map view in: https://memorecord.uni.lu/map/ 176

Figure 44: Overview of the monument Porte d’Italie with the biblical inscriptions nailed on the stone in Luxembourgish and Italian Language “Ero straniero e mi avete accolto.” 178

Figure 45: Details of the monument from a picture on the website of the artist Yvette Gastauer-Claire. In this picture, we can see the welcoming family waiting for the Italian. 179

Figure 46: Details of the monument from a picture on the website of the artist Yvette Gastauer-Claire. In this picture, we can see the representation of an Italian family with their suitcase. 180

Figure 47: Overview map of the Sar-Lor-Lux industrialisation area studied by Stefan Leiner, showing cities of Malstatt-Burbach, Diedenhofen (Thionville) and Esch-sur-Alzette. (Leiner 1994, 27). 182

Figure 48: 1895, Group of workers. Archives de la Ville de Dudelange, Fond J-P Conrady 185

Figure 49: The 1920’s, Italian districts in the Mining Basin (Gallo 1992, 09, as in Kathleen Griffin “Population movements in Luxembourg between 1861 and 1964) 186

Figure 50: L’action Féminine, December, 1938, vol. 10, n. 12. 191

Figure 51: Archives CDMH, Dudelange. 192

Figure 52. Archives CDMH, Dudelange. 195

Figure 53 Detail of La pagina dei fratelli Italiani (The page of Italian Brothers) in the left-socialist satirical Der Arme Teufel (The Poor Devil). 197

Figure 54: Headlines of some of the main newspapers circulated within the Italian community at the beginning of the 20th Century. “La Patria”, Catholic, the organ of the Opera Bonomelli; “Avanti”, the daily newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, and also “L’Operaio Italiano”, of the professional unions of Germany; “Le Réveil”, anarchist; “l’Asino”, anticlerical; Regio Adetto, information bulletin on Italian emigration to Luxembourg and Germany. (Gallo 1992, 18) 199

Figure 55: Photo Archive de L’Etat Luxembourg. 201

Figure 56 Front and back of a worker’s request dated from February 16th, 1927, with the authorisation for ten months of work. Remuneration of 3.70 fr per hour, six days a week. Archives CDMH. 203

Figure 57: PassaParola Magazine, PixStori by Paola Cairo. Languages >> Cultural Identity >> Culture, community >> Communication >> Institutions, Organisations | Full video link (00:00:37) 218

Figure 58: Collage of informative leaflets from organisations, services and activities aimed at immigrants. 229

Figure 59: Overview all 37 cards of Histoires des Migrations – Luxembourg, photo by Anita Lucchesi 239

Figure 60: Detail of six cards of Histoires des Migrations – Luxembourg, photo by Anita Lucchesi 240

Figure 61: “I work. I starve. This is not heaven”, Image headline on the Contacto reportage by Paula Cravina de Sousa and Ricardo J. Rodrigues, on 12th March 2020. 243

Figure 62: In this photo, we see a collective kitchen in a home for Portuguese workers in Muhllenbach, Luxembourg, the 1980s. Somehow, the shared houses that appeared in the documentary Eldorado have still a lot in common with this ambient. Source: Archive CDMH 245

Figure 63: Example of post annotations and coding by Anita Lucchesi. 249

Figure 64: Word cloud elaborated with Voyant Tools, based on a text file filled with the keywords extracted from the coding of the posts. Total of 245 unique words. 250

Figure 65: Word cloud elaborated with Voyant Tools, based on a text file filled with the keywords extracted from the coding of the individual interviews. Total of 646 unique words. 250

Figure 66 To #memorecord from Instagram “Black Blackness” | Work >> Arrival, Departure >> Work, career >> Luxembourg City. To see other stories of the Memorecord Harvest go to https://memorecord.uni.lu/stories....................................................................252

Figure 67: To #memorecord from Facebook: A criança e os balões | Journeys >> Family & Network >> Marriage, Family >>Turning Point >> Events & Manifestations 253

Figure 68 To #memorecord from Facebook: “Mets la musique de Portugal!” | Journeys >> Family Background >>Childhood Experience >> Humor >> Portugal, Swiss, vocabulary 254

Figure 69. To #memorecord from Facebook: Souvenir from New York | Family >> Diasporic Connenctions >> Childhood Experience >> Family, Generations >> Vocabulary 266

Figure 70. To #memorecord from Facebook: European Voluntary Service – a network | Community >> Neighborhood, Community >> Activism >> Within groups >> Institutions, Organisations 268

Figure 74. To #memorecord from Facebook: Love for Cuba | Identity >> Journeys >> Music & Art >> Turning Point >> Cuba, London 275

Figure 72. To #memorecord from Facebook: “É estranho e familiar ao mesmo tempo.” | Education >> Community >> Childhood Experience >> Communication 276

List of Videos

Video 1: Rino Del Nin, Story: “Luxembourgish Italy”, Community >> Friendships >> Neighborhood >> Turning Point >> Places, Dudelange. Story link (00:04:08). | Full video link (00:47:50) 188

Video 2: Rino Del Nin, Story: “The antennas of Junglinster”, Work >> Making a living >> Work >> Courage >> Vocabulary. Story link (00:01;17). | Full video link (00:47:50) 196

Video 3 : PixStori from one track of the CD “Cabaret ‘De wëlle Wäin’”, featuring Rino Del Nin performing “La Montanara”, an Italian folk song from Trentino, with lyrics by Toni Ortelli (1904–2000) and harmony by Luigi Pigarelli (1875–1964). PixStori link 206

Video 4: Maurizio Cassetta, Segment 1: “Immigration & love” >> Family >> Relationships>> Marriage, Family >> Dimensions, relationships >> Italy Segment link (00:01:52) | Full video link (00:21:32) 208

Video 5: Maurizio Cassetta, Segment 2: “Unsatisfactory Educational System” >> Education >> Making a new life, fitting in, fitting out >> School, Education >> Discrimination >> Places Segment link (00:06:14) | Full video link (00:21:32) 209

Video 6. Antonio Valente. Story: How everything began in Luxembourg >> Journey >> Making a new life >> Marriage, family / Work, career >> Conflict Story link (00:08:23) | Full video link (00:29:08) 230

Video 7. Antonio Valente. Story: Activism and community (dis)engagement >> Interactions >> Neighborhood, Community >> Activism >> With Larger Society >> Institutions, Organizations Story link (00:17:31-0:19:19) | Full video link (00:29:08) 232

Video 8. Elisa Coimbra, SEGMENT 4: BY THE BOOK >> Languages >> Making a New Life >> Neighborhood >> Communication >> Work Segment link (00:28) | Full video (30:42) 241

Video 9: Detail of documentary “Eldorado” by Rui Abreu, Thierry Besseling and Loïc Tanso, 2016, Samsa Film. Link to the movie trailer 244

Video 10. #memorecord #nowplaying Saudade | Activation post on #music & #migration by Anita Lucchesi 274

Video 11. The Double Effort. PixStori recorded by Anita Lucchesi with Melissa Borges (on the left), in the context of the Memorecord project. | 02 March 2019 | Place of recording: LuxExpo The Box Kirchberg Luxembourg - Festival des migrations, des cultures et de la citoyenneté. 281

List of Graphs

Graph 1. Luxembourgers, Italians and foreigners in Luxembourg 205

Graph 2: Luxembourgers, Portuguese and foreigners in Luxembourg 223

Graph 3: Occupation of Italian immigrants by the length of stay in Luxembourg, year of reference 2001. 225

Graph 4: Occupation of Portuguese immigrants by the length of stay in Luxembourg, year of reference 2001. 225

Graph 5 : Questionnaire for multipliers “What are the main difficulties you encountered during 234

Introduction

This research addresses the digital interferences on the historical craft by taking a fully hands-on approach to critically assess how the digital component conditions the different phases of the historiographical operation. Bringing practice and theory hand-in-hand, the present thesis is developed upon an experimental study that conjugates digital history with public history methods, in a particular expression that is becoming increasingly relevant in the first decades of the 21st Century: digital public history. To tackle both methodological and theoretical implications of the digital component in historical research and public history practice the study builds and analyses a concrete case: the process of shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives, dealing most specifically with Italian and Portuguese migration memories in Luxembourg. By means of participatory design, working towards a shared authority between community members and the researcher, the Memorecord - Memory Harvest platform (memorecord.uni.lu) was created from scratch and fed by a digital crowdsourcing activated on social media (i.e. Facebook and Instagram) through the use of the hashtag of the project, #memorecord.

After collaboratively building the Memorecord platform, the crowdsourced memories are analysed within a broader contextualisation of the history of Italian and Portuguese immigration to Luxembourg, crossing the collection results with oral history interviews conducted in the framework of this project and other sources (i.e. secondary works on historiography of migration in Luxembourg, autobiographical works by other immigrants, government documents, historical demographic data and other socio-economic statistics). This was a deliberate choice because most of the historical initiatives of crowdsourcing so far have concentrated their efforts on the collection phase and I wanted to have the opportunity to complete a 360º experiment on historical research with digital methods. In dealing with born-digital material originated from the Luxembourgish social media landscape, this analysis also engages with the cultural dynamics of mediated memory practices, considering the (new) technologies of memory at play.

Ultimately, the doctoral thesis originated from this experimental study completes its research cycle being published in a digital scholarly platform1. Making available this sort of enhanced publication is part of a final effort to render the research results more accessible to the community who helped to shape and animate it. Shifting to the online platform allowed me to add inline media from the Memorecord collection within the chapters, favouring a different reading experience as evidence and argument are juxtaposed. Moreover, the platform also enables standalone resource collections that can be explored linearly or through a thematic navigation (i.e. tag menu).

In its full form – hands-on experiment, analysis of digital methods, interpretation of the memories crowdsourced and online publishing – this thesis could be considered a snapshot of how research conducted by means of the digital looks like. The whole thesis, is hence, an exercise of documenting the process of doing research conditioned by the digital component. This process is described and reflected in the limits of the topic and capacity of the case study chosen for the hands-on experiment. However, while many aspects may be specific to the research context, I argue that most of the meta-reflections on digital methods may resonate with interest to historians working elsewhere and on different topics and time cohorts. It is an invitation to reflect productively on the challenges brought by the digital turn and try to learn something valuable about this time of transition from the analogue to the digital: when dealing with the unknown, we have to follow our intuition, based on the canons of the historical discipline, but we also need to adopt an open posture towards the new, accept open questions and take the time to put our hands-on. While it is true that experiments can be time consuming and frustrating if results do not turn out as expected, it is also true that right now we have more to gain in the learning by doing, even if it means an objective failure at the end. Only then we will be able to think otherwise and, perhaps, be more successful next time. The discussion of the case study and the meta-reflections offered in this thesis may help to explain the value of experimentation as creative and critical gesture to pave the way for digital history scholarship. As I will argue, we might be witnessing the emergence of a new style of reasoning, based on the hybridisation of our old and new (yet to be acquired) skills and capacities to deal with the digital interferences in historical research. A possible way to this new style of reasoning, as I will demonstrate, is through hermeneutics of practice, a critical instance toward the whole historiographical operation, deeply rooted in experimental approach, ultimately reconciling the hack & yack dimensions paradoxically (still) split among most digital humanists and historians.

Through these hermeneutics of practice, I got global view of how the digital component is spread throughout the research development and interfering on it with its advantages and caveats. In this process, I identify and discuss a series of epistemological questions that are of primordial interest for my case study, but might be of relevance to other historians, with different research topics elsewhere. I purposely share the metaquestions that emerges along the experiment in an attempt to bring forward what usually remains silent in most methodological discussions. I do so in the intent to turn the internal gears of this digital public history experiment more accessible to colleagues within and outside the digital realms. Hopefully, it will increase the chances of this research to reach a broader historiographical conversation. So is raison d’être of this thesis.

Ideally, vis a vis the community contribution to build the Memorecord platform, I hope the analysis of the migration memories shall find echo in the historiography of migration in Luxembourg. If the interweaved approach of methods and narrative featured in the study case succeeds in raising questions about how migration is approached in Luxembourg or elsewhere, which type of sources are used, what are their provenance and why, I believe this thesis will be contributing to the insertion of digital public history in wider (analogue) academic debates. If the participatory design and the strategies used to generate empathy in the process of shaping Memorecord collaboratively earns attention from other historians involved in community projects, I consider the study case will have accomplished its goals beyond scaffolding my inquiry on the digital public history methods.

Thesis structure

The thesis was conceived as a journey through the realisation of this experiment and as such it is divided in four chapters, each of them laden with self-reflexivity and insights from the experimentation envisioned, but with different emphasis. To allow a thorough reflection on practices and better explore their dialogic relation with theoretical assumptions and the subjectivity of the researcher positioning, the ensemble of the chapters offer detailed description on decision making processes throughout the experiment and articulate methods and theory. Nevertheless, for readability and clarity of structure, each chapter was organised to convey different chunks of the research: 1. theoretical framework and researcher positioning; 2. detailed presentation of the case study, including a step by step description of all stages from conceptualisation to activation of the crowdsourcing campaign online; 3. analysis of digital methods, interpolated by valuable lessons and insights from the hands-on experiment on the possibility of the establishment of a new style of reasoning for digital history scholarship; 4. Interpretation of the crowdsourced memories, contextualised in perspective with literature about Italian and Portuguese immigration in Luxembourg and other sources gathered throughout the experiment. Beyond the situational Chapter 1, all the other chapters add up in the discussion of state of the art articulated with the methods and genres of sources at play. Since this thesis braids up theory and methods all the way through, it was instrumental to juxtapose the arguments with an informed literature review. Hereunder, a brief description of each chapter in more detail:

Chapter 1, Framework: Theory and Working Concepts gives important intel on how I am equipped to the journey pretended in this doctoral research. In this chapter, I introduce the context in which this research emerges – or from where I stand – describing by positioning as a PhD researcher at the University of Luxembourg from 2015-2020 and presenting the state of the art that precedes this research. In dialogue with Michel de Certeau, for whom “[a]ll historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production” I give special attention to the research environment of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) as the laboratory of historical uncertainty in which my experiment is embedded. Next, an overview of what means doing digital in the digital age is introduced, in a discussion that will be deepened, as the hands-on experiment develops.

Chapter 2, Shaping the Memorecord Digital Memory Platform is the roadmap of experiment. It discusses the importance of documenting the process of setting up and developing the case study in order to allow other researchers to reproduce, but also to be able to criticise this work. This chapter discusses why migration memories, and more specifically, those from Italian and Portuguese immigrants were selected as base for the case study and discusses the different phases I followed in my fieldwork to set up the platform: community sensitization, thinkering, going public. The step by step documentation draws special attention to the technical development of the platform as well and what serves as base to the reflection of the digital methods presented in Chapter 3. At the end, the chapter sums up the lessons learned from the experiment, emphasising the value of hands-on work and collaboration.

Chapter 3, Analysing Digital Methods – A Return to Hermeneutics is an intermezzo reflection. A moment in which I zoom in and out from the case study to offer a broader analysis of digital methods in historical research. The chapter is deep-seated in the experimental experience described in Chapter 2 and situates it in a broader experimental ethos. It bridges the questions emerged from the specificity of my case study with broader debates in digital humanities that have the digital component as a condition. It discusses heuristic triggers for digital history and empathetic triggers for public history. It reflects on the importance of these trigger elements for the practice of digital history scholarship and digital public history. Finally, the chapter sheds light on the work done with the Memorecord platform and makes a case for hermeneutics of practice, discussing its role in the possible emergence of a new style of reasoning. Ultimately, this chapter informs the reading of the following and last chapter.

Chapter 4, The historian’s kitchen, or how to cook your memories? Interpreting Memorecord’s Memory Harvest discusses the actual results of the case study, the memories in the broader context of history of immigration in Luxembourg with particular focus on Italian and Portuguese immigrants. The chapter regards the interpretation of the collected memories as a sort of experiment inside the experiment, playing with the metaphor of cooking. The first section of the chapter offers an overview of the framework engaged for the interpretation phase of the project: mediated memories, technologies of memory, a summary of the crowdsourced memories and a brief consideration on digital ethnography, i.e. the kitchen, with its tools and ingredients. Next an overview of what we have on the menu, i.e. historical contextualisation of the Italian and Portuguese immigration is presented, articulated with other sources gathered during the research, with highlight for the oral history interviews conducted during the community sensitisation activity, the atelier Racontez Votre Histoire de Vie. The last section focuses exclusively on the interpretations of the crowdsourced memories – the cooking – and brings insights on the particularities of working with digital-born material and their evidentiary value in the context of the Memorecord project.

C hapter 1: Framework: theory and working concepts

All historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production. It implies an area of elaboration that peculiar determinations circumscribe: a liberal profession, a position as an observer or a professor, a group of learned people, and so forth. It is therefore ruled by constraints, bound to privileges, and rooted in a particular situation. It is in terms of this place that its methods are established, its topography of interests can be specified, its dossiers and its interrogation of documents are organized.

Michel de Certau, The Writing of History, 1988

From where I stand: a space and a time

To introduce the context in which this research emerges, I would like to make a brief note about what I understand by the process of writing of history, and how important the circumstances in which this work is done are. Those circumstances shape the way a research is done. They may enable and/or limit every aspect of the work, independent of the historians’ will or awareness. From this point of view, one’s milieu is never neutral, in fact, it has strong agency on the researcher’s capabilities and choices. This perspective points to a social construction of knowledge in which history, as an institution of knowledge, takes part being a product of the present – it’s time of production – and not the past (Pelletier 2018, 04). Michel de Certau looms in the background of my discussion throughout the thesis, but I engage more frontally with his work in this opening section:

Before knowing what history says of a society, we have to analyse how history functions within it. The historiographical institution is inscribed within a complex that permits only one kind of production for it and prohibits others. Such is the double function of the place. It makes possible certain researches through the fact of common conjunctures and problematics. But it makes others impossible; it excludes from discourse, what is its basis at a given moment; it plays the role of a censor with respect to current – social, economic, political – postulates of analysis. This combination of permission and interdiction is doubtless the blind spot of historical research, and also the reason why it is incompatible with n’importe quoi, just anything. It is equally within this combination that work destined to modify it plays its role. (Certeau 1988, 68)

Social and historical context will determine resources available, and the choice of the methods and tools, the subjects and the audiences of the study, and even the style in which the research outcome is written. “Historiography (that is, ‘history’ and ‘writing’) bears within its own name the paradox – “almost an oxymoron”, writes Certeau, “of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse” (idem, xxvii). To French Philosopher Paul Ricœur, Certeau is a master of rigor, to whom the very research of the place production of history and the act of situating its writing is what amplifies the territory of history by acknowledging other ways to do history (Ricœur 2007, 215). In L’Écriture de l’Histoire (Editions Gallimard, 1975)2, Michel de Certeau explores the alliance between writing and history based on the relation that discourse keeps with the real, its perennial object. Certeau’s attention to the “social place” of “historiographical operation”, and the extent to which the real interferes in its “fabrication”, is very endeared to this thesis. His book dates back to the 1970’s, decade also marked by the appearance of Jacques LeGoff and Pierre Nora’s Faire de l’histoire: Nouveaux problèmes, nouvelles approches, nouveaux objets (Editions Gallimard, 1974), in which, among the “new problems”, there was already a piece by Certeau dealing with the historiographical operation, that later on reappeared as opening chapter in L’Écriture de l’Histoire.

Problematising the historiographical operation in itself was one of the reasons why the French philosopher Paul Ricœur elected Certeau as one of his maître de rigueur next to Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. In Ricœur’s appreciation, the three have earned such a title for having, each one in its own way, radicalised the demand for rigor by the discourse of professional historians, which made them rebellious to the model proposed at the time by the French Annales school (Ricœur 2007, 210). The somewhat inedit attention and problematization of the writing in itself, as a complex production process, shifted the core of the criticism from the documental and explication/comprehension phases to the historical representation – the inverted image of the practice, where, according to Certeau, the fabrication materialises itself.

Following his archaeology, in a backsliding of what had already been written, Foucault would try to find the rules in the discursive and non-discursive practices that lead to historiographical discourse as an event (Foucault 1986) – the “unspoken that allows and enables what was said” (Albuquerque Júnior 2013, 145)3. Beyond historiographical discourses, Elias summons up the critics to explore the regularity of social formation that served as “soil and humus” (Elias 1994) to the discourses and events narrated by historians. Amid the two, according to Ricœur, Certeau was the “insider outsider” (Ricœur 2007, 210).

Certeau sees the historical practice as a work, an operation that produces meaning about the past – the past as an Other and its subjects – and, at the same time, he calls attention to the fact that all historiographical discourses are preceded, enabled and fabricated from a specific social place. This place is the historian’s place, it is no neutral place, it implies the compliance of rules and embeds everything the historian does in a discipline, with codes and protocols. All these rules and protocols, that ultimately make the state of the discipline4, are dated and follow the cultural standards of a certain time.

Following Certeau’s reasoning in the epigraph to this chapter (1988, 58), the where I stand question is not a neutral but decisive aspect of this research. It is fundamental, therefore, to describe the research environment in which this study has been carried out: the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), an interdisciplinary research centre founded at the University of Luxembourg while this thesis was being developed. The influence of C²DH mindset and research infrastructure is nothing to be disregarded in the elaboration of the present research project. A further relevant reason for the imbricated relation between this research and the C²DH is the fact that in the early months of this PhD5, the professor for contemporary and digital history from the Institute of History at the University, main supervisor of this project, Andreas Fickers6, had applied and got appointed to become the director of the new centre to be.

It is undeniable that Fickers assuming the role of C²DH has had an impact in the shaping of the social place – as in Certeau’s formulation “socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production” – from which I developed this research. While studying the trading zones of digital history and analysing the centre, Max Kemman (2019, 84–95) describes Fickers as a driving force behind the developments of digital history at the university, and a historian that would play a role of a digital history broker. Kemman calls digital history brokers the individuals that in a trading zone exemplified “significant shifts in practices”. Brokers, according to Kemman:

conducted project management; coordinated practices from archival and library domains such as data collection, transformation, and description; learned about the potential and limitations of computational technologies and where to apply these; employed inter-languages to translate between the different collaborating domains; and finally transformed historical questions into infrastructural problems. (Kemman 2019, 200, author’s highlights)

The final aspect underlined by the author as one of the main shifts for historians is also the most relevant for our study. As infrastructural tensions remain an issue to many digital history projects like this one “digital history brokers might prove central in shaping the practices of future historians through infrastructure” (Kemman 2019, 201). The challenges I faced regarding the need for digital infrastructure will be commented later on Chapter 2, however it is worth noting from departure the part played by the director of C²DH, pushing digital history into the agenda of the university and consequently making it possible to negotiate the resources for both physical and digital infrastructure for the new centre, was determinant to the development of the digital memory platform built in my case study. If this thesis were to be developed in another research context, the lack of the infrastructure would for sure impact its progress in a different way.

To a certain extent, this research is on its own part of the infrastructuring efforts deployed by the group of digital history brokers at C²DH. If we agree with Kemman (2019) in dialogue with Star and Ruhleder (1996), infrastructure entails a tension between local and global spectrums, and it has a dual, paradoxical nature “it is both engine and barrier for change; both customizable and rigid; both inside and outside organizational practices. It is product and process” (1996, 111). This duality might be present for different contexts where infrastructure becomes a must, but it is also true when it comes to implementation of technologies to historical research, with the unspoken conflict between the digital practitioners and the larger community of practice7 that remains conservative to the canons of the historical discipline8.

In the transition we are in, from analogue to digital culture, what we have is, on the one hand, the need for customisation and flexibility – of methods, tools and subject – in local level, and, on the other hand, the need for standardisation and continuity of the emerging approaches in a large-scale. The shift of practices within the C²DH brokers, despite its intimate connection with local needs, can also result in a development of guidelines and exemplary experiences that could be appropriated on a global scale.

By acquiring interactional expertise, digital history brokers are able to develop local approaches to the methodological and epistemological tensions introduced by the interactions between computational practices and historical scholarship. Yet by implementing these approaches in education, and developing guidelines for legitimisation, brokers are at the forefront to integrate local approaches in the global community of practice. (Kemman 2019, 199)

What Kemman is showing, in other words, is that infrastructuring depends on the social-political practices of education and legitimisation. By creating room for experimentation with new methods, as well as teaching and training staff and students to gain autonomy in the handling of the new tools at stake, C²DH and all other digital history brokers actively engaged in Academia are working under and against the “scholarly” pressures of the disciplinary framework of history. This framework suggests that there is a “type of history that predominantly defines the field as to what ‘history really is’, but also because it is the type of history studied on A level and undergraduate courses” (Jenkins 2003, 25).

The education and legitimation doublet here is critical as it orbits around the most updated, and long disputed, definition of what professional historians are like and what they do when they do history. The efforts of digital history brokers to develop institutional mechanisms in this direction are particularly significant, and they do that, for instance, “integrating digital methods in university curricula, or encouraging their PhD candidates to employ digital methods” (Wenger 1998, 73). While at a global level there is no consensus about what should be the weight of digital methods in university curricula, at a local level C²DH became a key player in the negotiation for introducing digital and public history oriented courses to graduate and undergraduate students. These attitudes toward changes in curricula are at the real base of what professionals of a certain discipline believe is the fundamental set of skills an expert needs. When it comes to my personal experience at the University of Luxembourg, as researcher and lecturer, I stand with the brokers and believe that “every historian-to-be should be trained in digital public history” (Lucchesi and Legay 2019, 01).

The questions of what makes a historian is at the core of longstanding considerations in the philosophy of history and is pertinent to the discussion about practices that permeates this thesis. According to Keith Jenkins, whose work became important in the debate on history and historiography in the last turn of centuries, beyond their personhoods (values, positions, ideological views), professional historians have epistemological presuppositions (or ways of “gaining knowledge”), routines and procedures (methods), and they search for “traces of the past” before they finally get to the write up phase of their research (Jenkins 2003, 25). In the writing exercise the “epistemological, methodological and ideological factors again come into play, interconnecting with everyday practices” (Lucchesi and Legay 2019, 01). The whole process that enables a historian to reproduce the traces of the past in a new category – transforming past into history – is the job of a professional historian. Jenkins sees the whole process, analogous to Certeau’s historical operation, as subjected to a series of everyday pressures.

Less obvious than the big constraints stressed by Certeau as elementary of the social place, the pressures enlisted by Jenkins include different levels of constraints, sometimes taken for granted. Among those pressures there are family and friend relationships, with charges such as “Not another weekend working!”, “Can’t you give your work a rest?”; work-place pressures, among others, departmental heads, peers, institutional research policies, teaching commitments etc.; and pressures from the publishers with regard to several factors of his/her work outcome, as wordage, format, market, deadlines, literary styles, referees, re-writing and so on (Jenkins 2003, 27–28). These days, the interferences brought by the digital component are to be deeply considered alongside all the possibilities and limitations that each historian faces according to their personal and institutional circumstances.

During the process of shaping the Memorecord digital memory platform, I experienced issues brought up by these interferences first-hand. These interferences caused detours and failures alongside the project development which I will detail in Chapter 2. Despite the frustrations and delays imposed by the bumpy course of my experiment, in the settings of a hands-on exercise, I could productively engage with them. Indeed, reflecting about the creation of the platform (Chapter 3), I notice how identifying these error-prone elements was important for my analysis of the digital methods.

Experimenting, after all, entails taking risks. Failing, in this context, may be a fruitful event. It is dealing with the unknown, by being open to failure and having to improvise solutions or devise protocols that are not in place that we can, as I argue later on in this thesis, benefit from the heuristics inherent to the hands-on approach. I will argue in Chapter 3 that it is through a hermeneutics of practice that we can critically engage with these (new, digital) elements that wire impact in research and address it in a pragmatic way. The reference to pragmatism and heuristics here may suggest that there would be some general solution drawn from mine or other experiments with digital methods, but in many cases, there are no definite answers; instead, we may find more open questions. But the vagueness that comes along failing seems to have a corrupting effect in academia, as Shawn Graham discussed in his recent Failing Gloriously and Other Essays (2019). Sometimes it would seem like we are doing some sort of research witchcraft when we try the magic to open the black box of technology. What Graham tells about his getting stuck and debugging cycle resonates a lot to me:

I try to update my own tutorial. I ask questions on Twitter, on my blog. I email people. Sometimes I know them, sometimes I get to know them. I vent on social media. I draw strength from others who can commiserate. I sit down at the terminal and invoke the magical words that will cause things to happen. Things crash, break. I copy the cryptic error messages, use them as the basis of a new search.

It might look like messing around on the internet, but there’s a cycle of exploration, documentation, experimentation, consideration of results, documentation, exploration, documentation, experimentation . . . When it breaks: is it the tech that’s broken? Is it me, something I don’t understand, some kind of scaffolding I’m missing? Hey, it works—if I deliberately try to break it, when does it break? Where? Why? Under what conditions? Human remains are consistently identified by the neural network model provided by Google as “jellyfish.” Why is that? What if we throw out the identifications, grab the next layer down: is this information useful? What can I do with it? Write it down. Blog it. Turn it into an article. Share. Research witchcraft in action. (Graham 2019, 85, the emphasis is mine)

As a PhD candidate that has never been a computer expert, many times I felt a bit lost with questions that often translated into countless open tabs in my Internet browser. During the experiment, many times I found myself looking for answers to which I have not barely formulated the questions. At the end of the experimental journey, what I realised, is that despite or, more exactly because there are open questions, we need to pursue more experiments, document and share the anguish of the failures, document and share our step by step, in a process of turning explicit the implicit aspects of doing research in the digital age. This is what I believe, at the end of the day, may help our community of practice to achieve a better understanding of what we do and how we do. When it comes to digital scholarship, sharing the experimental struggles, instead of presenting everything “as a win” (Graham 2019, 04) and taking research process for granted, would be beneficial to discuss the bottlenecks of digital methods and collectively try to find ways of facing it. Insofar, it seems that academia is still looking at digital work for its results; in other words, evaluating its outputs, while a great deal of critical work in the engagement with the digital appears as marginalia.

Until the cycle described by Graham becomes familiar to our peers, we may keep on debating about the definition of digital history or digital public history while the arguments we make on/about/through/within the digital are not incorporated into historiographic conversation. In a recent white paper, the working group Arguing with Digital History, at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) have discussed this issue. They claim that “Recognizing arguments in forms of digital history including digital collections, datasets, and digital public history would build a bridge bringing historians to digital history.” (Arguing with Digital History working group 2017, 3) The authors note that apart from a few early examples, the cases that use digital technology not only for analysis but for presenting an argument have not become profuse. The example highlighted, which I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3, is “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” by Edward Ayers and William Thomas III, published in 2003 in the American Historical Review. The lack of more scholarship like that may indicate, to the authors of this white paper, “a widespread sense that digital history has over-promised and under-delivered in terms of its interpretative contribution back to the discipline.” (idem, 02).

By discussing a concrete study case in detail, bringing forward how I commenced my exploration, documenting it and sharing the minutiae of the experiment both with regard to the use of digital tools, as with respect to the social side of the experiment (i.e. the engagement with the community) I want to drag the process from the margins to the centre of digital scholarship. In doing so, I also stress how digital public history can benefit from the digital beyond its use as a simple publication medium. By addressing these issues based on a 360º experiment, calling on different phases of the historical research, this thesis may show the relevance of experimentation within digital and digital public history. This 360º outlook should also help me to demonstrate how arguments can be made on/about/through/within the digital in the various stages of research and not only in the (re)presentation phase. To Alan Galey and Stan Ruecker, for instance, “the creation of an experimental digital prototype [can] be understood as conveying an argument about designing interfaces” (2010, 405). In my research, hands-on experiment and argument are interlaced. Unlike traditional approaches to research topics, most of the (meta)research questions emerged in this thesis, as well as the theoretical assumptions presented throughout the chapters are deep-seated in the experiment. Hence it is different from purely descriptive, exploratory research, but also distinct from the grounded theory approach, which usually has the “generation of theory with explanatory power as a desired outcome” (Birks and Mills 2015, 17). While the formulation of hermeneutics of practice bears a theoretical hook, it originates not only from data generated, collected and/or coded by the researcher, like in standard grounded theory, it is rooted in the mental and bodily hands-on experience. Methodological insights and theory here come from a holistic approach to building rather than from data alone; building as a form of scholarship (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012). For that reason, in Chapter 2 I offer a reflective description of the process of building the platform and the problems encountered, because a simple presentation of methods would not be enough to prepare the reader to the theoretical debate that takes place in Chapter 3. Likewise, the discussion of data in Chapter 4 would not do justice to the value of experience to the analysis without referring to the practice (Chapter 2) and the theory (Chapter 4).

Despite the centrality of the experiment in this thesis, before its presentation it is necessary to introduce the environment from which it has emerged. The social place, as discussed by Certeau, is elemental to every research. When it comes to digital undertakings, it is even more imperative to highlight the locatedness of the projects given its dependence on infrastructures, but not only. Isabel Galina, from the Institute for Bibliographic Studies at the National University of Mexico, made an important point about it in her talk during the 2013 conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). Talking from a peripheric country amidst the predominant national traditions, especially north-centred, Anglo-Saxon ones, Galina discussed the challenges of building a Global digital humanities community, drawing attention to the barriers raised by languages and the unevenly distributed capacities. Speaking against a paternalistic approach from the model DH centres and arguing about the need of a horizontal, two-ways collaboration, Galina contends:

Methods that have worked effectively in one cultural setting may fail spectacularly in another (and vice versa) and certain reasoning of how things should work does not apply similarly to other frameworks. Models, surveys, truisms should be placed in context. (Galina 2013)

Bearing this question of location specificity in mind, let’s move to the next section.

Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, a laboratory of historical uncertainty

The holistic approach that inspires my methods is well aligned with the experimental ethos that characterises C²DH, where this research is institutionally embedded. The innovative predisposition of this research centre is definitely accounting for my identification with a “doing as thinking” or “building as a way of knowing” perspective (Watrall 2016). Those are guiding perspectives for this thesis that also take in consideration the “sensorial and pragmatic apparatus”, for resorting to Willard McCarthy’s argument about modelling, and this can lead to “a richer, better informed, more powerful heuristic than abstraction” (McCarty 2014a, 23–24). Hack and yack come together in a natural juxtaposition in C²DH, rather than a misleading opposition in thinking, as highlighted by Bethanie Nowviskie in discussing the origins of the “more hack, less yack” buzzing slogan among digital humanities practitioners (2014)9. The centre deliberately makes a plea for playful experimentation in historical research:

“Thinkering” – composed of the verbs “tinkering” and “thinking” – describes the action of playful experimentation with technological and digital tools for the interpretation and presentation of history. Finding new historical insights and innovative forms of narrative are at the centre of the C²DH’s activities. (C²DH website)10

Experimentation, in this context, is an invitation to bring historical research beyond, to innovate. And innovation inherently brings risks of failure, as just discussed, a kind of output that is not very usual in Sciences, where risks are mostly avoided as threats that could jeopardize a whole research or seen as a waste of time and resources. For those familiar to the field of history of technology, however, risks and uncertainties are legitimate subjects, which through a meta-reflection could also speak to the methods of research itself. Looking at her/his own methods of research, not necessarily thinking of its output in the market-centric terms of success and failure, a researcher of history of technology could think that risks are worth taking, understanding the intrinsic opportunity for reaching new findings, or, at least, new ways of doing. Fickers, beyond being the founder director of the C²DH is a tireless randonneur in the field of history of technology. He is among those who argue for the importance of taking risks. Since the beginning of his mandate, he made it clear that he wants to foster this perspective in the young University of Luxembourg. In the official launching event of the C²DH, Fickers contended:

The C²DH is the result of a process of political and institutional negotiations, and consists of a reflection on the tensions, challenges, opportunities and chances of historical practice, holding in a hybridity between scientific tradition and heuristic trial and error with the news technologies. (Fratti 2017), translated from French by myself)11

In this journey towards new heuristics potentialized by new technologies, C²DH is calling out “la raison critique historique et de la science pour produire de l’incertitude”, as Fickers argued in the same event. Next to this, the undaunted title of laboratoire de l’incertitude historique was attributed to the new centre in one of its inauguration coverage in the Luxembourger national press (Fratti 2017). The C²DH, therefore, seems to embody the idea of experimentation as Denkstil and Bildung, as discussed by Fickers himself in the German Technikgeschichte, following reflections he started together with Annie van den Oever a few years earlier (2015, 10). Thinkering, in this setting, is at a time, a methodological and a questioning approach. Drawing from the field of media archaeology, experimental media archaeology is inspired by one of the old acquaintances of public historians, the historical re-enactment, recognizing the historian’s role as co-constructor of the “epistemic object” (Fickers and van den Oever 2013; Rheinberger 2007). Another contact zone (Svensson 2016) among experimental media archaeology and the C²DH’s expertises that is core for my project, namely digital and public history, is the overture to other historical traces and elements that may not lay exclusively in the hegemony that written texts pursue in historiography. A “sensorial appropriation of the past” is called out to inform critical reflection about the “(hidden or non-verbalized) tacit knowledge” relevant to the study of media archaeology, in this case, the engagement with media technologies (Fickers and van den Oever 2013, 02).

Having stated the hands-on importance to historical research, so valued and supported in C²DH, in the next section I provide a few references at play for the digital work and reflections I carry about digital methods later on in this thesis. For this, we rewind a bit back in time to have an overview of how the digital component became a subject to humanities at large, as well as to history.

Doing history in a Digital Age

Must have been said in the humanities about the digital revolution of the past decades (Ayers 2002; Burton 2002). The so-called information age (Castells 2010) became subject of research in many disciplines. The digital advent came to be a matter for meta-reflection in the vast horizon of digital humanities. As the revolution unfolds, from 1980’s to nowadays, research is assuming increasingly complexity to what concern its digital component (Berry 2011, 12)12. History, as an information-based discipline, could not pass through it indifferently. Some years before the advent of the digital, technological changes were under the attention of historians concerned with the dynamics of the hype then defined as quantitative history (Chaunu 1964; Marczewski 1964; Furet 1971). However, it was the further development of digital technology and, remarkably, the growth and popularisation of web services that brought digital history as a distinctive element on the historians’ radar. Moreover, Internet and the digital crossed academic activities at various levels, even the more discrete ones, as noted by the Portuguese historian Daniel Alves:

[with Internet begins] the great digitization projects and online availability of sources, at the same time that new tools that would substantially change the relationship of researchers with the digital world were born or introduced in the academic environment. The word processor, e-mail, databases and systems of geographic information had a very significant increase in the number of users throughout the decade [1990]. (Alves 2016, 93, translated from Portuguese by myself)13

The emergence of digital media and its communication on the World Wide Web brought a substantial extent of the information relevant to historians “within the reach of a click” or almost14. With the digitization processes, all sorts of clues and evidence that help us to narrate facts and make arguments about what happened in the past became available online. Nowadays, digitisation with scanners, photo cameras, etc., is just a relatively small part of the sturdy digital media expansion, not less interesting for historians, which is leading society to a certain form of ubiquitous computing culture (Ekman et al. 2016, 30). Such expansion encompasses not only desktop computers, but mobile devices and their many applications, environmental monitoring systems, media art installations, surveillance technologies and many other pervasive technologies. These developments pretty much situate us in the third wave of information technology (idem, 30).

All these different forms of human-computer interaction seem to update the idea of information profusion that Roy Rosenzweig had foreseen in his early writings about the Clio’s wired (and wireless) fate. Talking about the age of abundance in the beginning of the 21st Century, Rosenzweig strongly referred to the affluence of digitally born material – those emerged on the web with no printed precedents. As technologies and scales evolve, an increasing number of scholars all over the humanities are using digital-born sources and data in their research (Salganik 2017). Beyond many ephemeral contents, like websites, blogs and other individual contents, this kind of material would also include traditional works like books, journals and films (Rosenzweig 2003). With this multiplicity of material, the Big Data age seems to bring new opportunities for polyphony and polychrony in research (Bowker 2008, 183–84), while introducing a big shift in the way “we think about research” and “profound changes at the levels of epistemology and ethics” (Boyd and Crawford 2012, 665).

For those specifically interested in contemporary history, many other forms of born-digital records would come into the scene – e-mails, electronic government documents, instant messages, and of course, social media channels, which have shortly become a trendy space for political communication (Himelboim et al. 2012; Liu 2017). Moreover, despite being less evident for regular users, the traces of Internet usage (i.e. computer cookies, websites analytics, cloud metrics, GPS locations, etc.) and all the metadata generated by the online traffic are also to be taken in consideration in the new information ecosystem where physical and digital spaces converge (Lacerda and Lima-Marques 2017, 85).

The novel expressions of the information architecture have given way to a more complex scenario that is challenging, but invigorating for research. Andrea Resmini describes the context as a post-digital world:

in which digital and physical blend easily, and the Internet is a piece of a larger mechanism where our activities and our use, consumption and production of information happens across multiple contexts, through multiple devices and, unstable, emergent choreographies. (Resmini 2014, v)

Within the digital history realms, the research situation drawn along these years of digital media development may still remain characterised, to a certain extent, by reluctant binarism among the more skepticals and the more enthusiasts. However, this more simplistic viewpoint seems to have been overcome in the recent years with the growing realisation of the cultural dimension of digital technology and its important role in mediating research (Berry 2011, 12). There are reasons to believe that a broader sensitisation about these dramatic changes are pushing towards a more reflexive moment with a multi-disciplinary framing from which all the humanities can hopefully benefit. Beyond the usual disciplines such as linguistics, library sciences and archivists, others are joining the debate to offer reflection on the current information spaces, adding further nuances to the social, cultural, economic and political textures around the new reality. Design thinking, cognitive science, anthropology, new media studies, ergonomics, human-computer interaction and other disciplines are taking their seats in the room (Lacerda and Lima-Marques 2014, 4).

Back to the specific métier d’historien, despite the disciplinary inertia, established routines and weight of institutions once pointed out by François Hartog (2010) as elements of resistance to intellectual revolutions, the historian’s workbench is changing. And this change is not only concerning practitioners of digital history. After long years of apparent isolation, a historiographical conversation is finally kicking off among digital and more traditional historians, the trigger being the argumentative practices of digital history (Arguing with Digital History working group 2017). Traditionally trained to handle primary sources in a very human-doable scale – by means of manual selection, close reading, cataloguing and interpretation subjected to typical printed era serendipity – historians of several domains are now entering into the realms of data. With it, computational analysis of data seems promising, but at the same time, it raises challenges of operationalisation that are very new to non-computer experts. Computational methods also foster different research designs, for instance, allowing the identification of research questions to happen in a more iterative way within the other stages of research, just like I explained above about what I experienced in the development of Memorecord. However, in Memorecord’s case, not only data, but the whole hands-on/tacit and social experience of the digital public history project would reciprocally shape the scope of the study. The different research phases overlap, and in some instances turn back upon themselves. The analysis phase, for example, often feeds back into the original research questions (Nguyen et al. 2019, 2). Moving from a workflow based on a number of documents to one based on data, historians are confronting themselves with an unprecedented amount of information, a perplexing “Himalaya of data” (Lovink and Riemens 2010).

In this context, new problems of methodological and theoretical nature arise. For instance, what could be considered a simple question of source criticism regarding analogue sources, can be a novel in the world of digital research and, yet, there are only a few history departments teaching information provenance in the digital age as part of historiography (Weller 2013). More than fifteen years later, we can reasonably agree with Rosenzweig’s view that the digitisation of the world as a broader process, was proposing, and still is, a “fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance” (2003, 739). For this, I situate the writing/building/reasoning process of this thesis in this transition. In this transitional moment, some conceptual questions and issues impacting on historical studies are gradually becoming of interest not only to the self-entitled digital historians, but also to the broader historical discipline. Even with some resistance, our community of practice is realising that this shift is concerning our very own practice, independent of the fact of being a more digital or a more analogue historian. According to Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães:

Historiography as a systematic investigation of the conditions of emergence of the different discourses about the past, presupposes as the first condition to recognize the historicity of the very act of writing History itself, recognizing it as inscribed in a time and place. (Guimarães 2003, 23–24)

Writing history in the dawn of Big Data requires a strong philosophical and theoretical reflection, which was not quite a trend in the early days of the digital turn on either sides of the Atlantic (Lucchesi 2014). Despite the epistemological urgency often praised, the actual debate has been, so far, very sporadic (Fickers 2013; 2016). Only recently, some “scholarly primitives” have been distinguished as elements capable of bridging digital history and the practices of the broader discipline, allowing a deeper and more complex shared reflection about what doing history nowadays, with the mediation of digital technology, should look like (Arguing with Digital History working group 2017, 3). My research is embedded in this context. Since the first project outline, following Melvin Kranzberg’s laws of technology, this project took a critical stance towards technology, considering it “neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” (1986). Along the insights from the hands-on experience, the philosophical and theoretical reflection I propose here is a response to a strong demand in the field of digital history I have identified in previous study15.

With the above described Digital Age situation being the atmosphere in which we are living while this research project was conceived, this thesis seems, symptomatically, to attend a certain “revisionist call of what human research is all about” (Snickars 2014, 2676). However, I do not choose to follow this revision as a sort of pledge for refoundation of the discipline, as I discuss in Chapter 3. I rather carried it out as a thorough rethinking of historian’s craft in the light of the interferences brought by the digital component. In this process I invite others to rethink the hermeneutical approach to history as an exercise of hermeneutics of practice. In this direction, I am seeking, as well argued by Gerben Zaasgma, a compromise for historical practice in our present time which is believed to be an effective and true form of hybridity (Zaagsma 2013). With this in mind, this thesis reflects on the requirements – the crucial context evoked and elicited by this hybridity – to work through digital methods and, finally, to interpret digital-born sources. More specifically, an underlying question that looms throughout this work is how the historical critical method we already applied to the analogue can be updated into digital scholarship.

Doing history in a digital age, therefore, entails a profound reconsideration of our relation with the sources, considering the new qualities of what can be a medium and what can be a source. The documental phase (Certeau 1988) of my research work is, hence, under scrutiny in this thesis, as a matter for metareflection. Collection, selection, exploration and interpretation will be subject of reflection in light of our own hands-on experience through the crowdsourcing experiment we set for the particular case study on Italian and Portuguese migration memories in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Chapter 2: Shaping the Memorecord Digital Memory Platform

Documenting the process

Sometimes the process is more important than the result, as once noted by the performative artist Marina Abramović. She eloquently recollects the deep impact of her first painting lesson here:

He [artist Filo Filipović] cut out a piece of canvas and put it on the floor. He opened a can of glue and threw the liquid on the canvas; he added a little bit of sand, some yellow pigment, some red pigment, and some black. Then he poured about half a litre of gasoline on it, lit a match, and everything exploded. “This is a sunset,” he told me. And then he left. (...) I waited until the charred mess had dried, and then very carefully pinned it to the wall. Then my family and I left for vacation. When I came back, the August sun had dried everything up. The color was gone and the sand had fallen off. There was nothing left but a pile of ashes and sand on the floor. The sunset didn’t exist anymore. (Abramović 2016, 27)16

The details of Filipović’s creative process depicted by the Serbian artist in her memoirs could not be seen in the final art. After a while, most of the artistic process had vanished, leaving behind nothing but a few traces. In this scenario, used materials and techniques could become irretrievable even to trained eyes. The same often happens to many digital scholarship projects; we get to experience their final products, but rarely learn from their manufacturing process.

In this chapter, I will focus on the process of building the case study of this thesis. This experimental study is the base of our theoretical reflections on the new conditions of historical research in the 21st Century. Given the ever-evolving digital technologies, and thus the evolution of digital practices, this chapter is dedicated to documenting the process of building Memorecord, instead of merely presenting its final outcome. The aim of this chapter is thus to enable readers to do an in-depth evaluation of this exercise of digital scholarship by offering a thorough description of Memorecord’s collaborative building process. I will give details about the workflow, decision-making processes, problems, solutions, and insights encountered along the project timeline. The development of Memorecord platform from scratch to the screen was a genuinely hands-on historiographical experiment. This experimentation helped to test the heuristic value of digital and public history approaches for academic purposes, which will be discussed from a more theoretical point a view in the following chapter.

The ultimate goal of this chapter is to offer insights on the process, allowing the retrieval (and appraisal) of the technical resources we have used and, equally as important, making the reasoning behind the choices I have made explicit. Such reflexivity is part of a “doing as thinking” (Drucker 2012, 87) process that marked this empirical exercise. It helps to inform other scholars that may be interested in doing a similar experiment or in assessing the project in its integrity17. This chapter can be considered a snapshot of our digital repertoire for the time we conducted this research (2015-2020), a recollection of gestures and choices as crucial as the Memorecord outcome itself for its further analysis. I hope that this chapter encourages other “digital history brokers” (Kemman 2019, 30) to do the same, as a contribution to the discipline of history documenting itself in the digital age.

The case study

Selecting memories of migration in Luxembourg as the main subject for the case study was strategic. Public history was a key component of the research project. Working on a topic of high relevance to the Grand Duchy society was a must. The subject of migration, furthermore, could create a public debate in the best interest of the migrant population. Public history, in this project, was not limited to the amplification of audiences. In the very making of the digital scholarship experiment, this approach was not only meant to reach out to other audiences, it was also meant to engage with them in a meaningful way (Mills 2013). The primary aim of the case study was to investigate Italian and Portuguese migrants in Luxembourg, more specifically their memories about their migration experience. I wanted to compare how these migrants remembered different aspects of their migration trajectory in the country – their arrival, processes of adaptation, day-to-day challenges, recurring feelings about their home country and Luxembourg. It would enable an analysis of concurrent migration narratives. I was interested in verifying whether the way each national group recounts their stories complies with what the national master narrative says about migration in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg18 (Seifert 2008). The Italians appeared first in the demographic movements’ timeline. The early flow of migrant arrivals dates back to the late 19th Century, many coming to Luxembourg to work, mainly in the mining industry. The Portuguese were the latest major foreign national group to arrive, many years later, after the country had suffered significant transformations in its social, economic and cultural fabric. Almost a century apart, when the Portuguese arrived, the once thriving mining industry had lost its prominence but remained acutely alive in people’s minds. When the first Portuguese arrived (1960 - 1970), Luxembourg was beginning to take its first steps on the path of becoming the notable financial sphere it represents in today’s Europe. However, the glow of the banking business has never overshadowed the symbolic capital of the mining enterprise in Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy was, and remains, the country of the Terre Rouges, or De Minett, as the southern iron-red soil is called.

In contemporary Luxembourg, more than 170 nationalities are living together in a harmonious way, as echoed in many official texts that corroborate the statement of Luxembourg “as an immigration success story” (Fetzer 2011). Based on previous research, as I began designing the case study for the present doctoral dissertation, I took a rather sceptical stance towards this predominantly positive discourse about migration in the country(Reuter et al. 2007). This case study investigates this overall positiveness and tries to explain how Italian and Portuguese migrants perceive this. The study may also help to understand the extent to which the migrants themselves contribute to the national rhetoric (Guimarães 2011). To do so, a mixed-method study (Creswell 2009) was set-up. In addition to an established qualitative approach (i.e. ethnography, oral history), digital public history methods were explored as a way to engage the migrants in the making of the project and gain insights from alternative data sources on migration. Beyond literature review, statistical data (i.e. national population and housing surveys) and administrative records (i.e. registers, border data collection systems, visas, residence and/or work permits) all informed the preparation of the fieldwork. Quantitative data also supported the analysis of the personal accounts collected, assisting in the critiques of the qualitative resources. The digital public history component of the study consisted of shaping a digital platform for harvesting memories through a crowdsourcing experiment. I was interested to know if using alternative methods of research to add new voices to the story of migration in Luxembourg would bring new findings to the table.

With this in mind, what were the expectations regarding this digital memory platform? To begin with, creating a space for real engagement and starting a conversation focusing not only on the project’s outcome – the memory harvest – but in the participatory design of it, making the migrant’s participation essential to the conception of the platform itself. The notion of shared authority (Frisch 1990) strongly marked the formulation of the project from the beginning. The experiment was planned to be an ongoing conversation with the project’s participants, working closely with them to allow continuous interactivity among us. The perspective of history from below (Thompson 1966) underlined my concerns on the social function of history and the call for civic engagement, so grasping the community spirit was vital in this sense. I imagined that collecting mediated memories (Dijck 2007) through a crowdsourcing experiment could be a way to bridge individual and collective memories and help me to see the contributions through a more popular lens, from a grass-roots perspective. At the same time, working on mediated memories broadened the analytical scope of the study by adding the digital component, so pivotal to the technical development of the platform, and acted as a forging element of the collection. The collaborative process of shaping this platform should allow researchers and communities to grasp the migration landscape from its multi-perspective, mirrored in this mosaic-like platform whose pieces are individual expressions from the collective, integrating diversity and inserting the once peripheral memories into the bigger picture (Frisch 2019).

The infographic below (Figure 1) gives an overview of the milestones experienced up to the final product for the Memorecord memory harvest. In the following sections, I will present each of the developing phases indicated hereunder. I will also report on the adaptations that became necessary to guarantee pursuit of the project’s original goals while trying to accommodate the different expectations and contributions of the community participants.

Figure 1. #Memorecord’s roadmap, by Anita Lucchesi, 2019.

Fieldwork

The fieldwork for the case study consisted in exploratory archival research and ongoing ethnographic observation that I carried throughout all the phases of the project. The first observations started informally with my situation as a newcomer, recently arrived from Brazil at the beginning of the PhD studies, in 2015. The sonic landscape has left a massive impression on me from the first time I commuted by train from Luxembourg City to Esch-sur-Alzette. The babble of languages and accents that one could hear on public transport around the country was remarkable. Later on, the noteworthy multilingualism would prove to be one of the many practical challenges to the project.

After preliminary inquiries at the National Archives and at the Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines (CDMH) in Dudelange, I readily understood that the CDMH was not only a mere source for documents. Over the years it has grown far beyond its intention as a place for rencontre and cultural exchange; now it has collected an extensive list of cultural activities and has become the home for a specialized library on migration. Thus, we decided to follow their initiatives more closely and explore its surroundings, the neighbourhood of Petite Italie. The vicinity’s toponymy reconnects Dudelange, the train station and the CDMH itself to the migration history in Luxembourg. Around its location, we could see a landscape of old buildings coloured by the smoke of the ancient blast furnaces, the rails of the trains, and in the distance, on the other side of the rails, some pavilions that remained from the busy working town it used to be.

For my first months in Luxembourg, Dudelange became our second workplace. The Sunday afternoon meetings - Le RDV de dimanche - and other artistic and cultural manifestations at CDMH were essential moments of observation during my first year in Luxembourg that helped me to tune-in my ethnographic apparatus. The community vocation of the CDMH was inviting, and within a few weeks of taking part in the co-organization of the Luso-Luxemburguês seminar19, I became a volunteer collaborator and grew to learn more about the centre’s routine. A development of my closer relationship with the CDMH was the creation of the memory workshop Racontez Votre de Vie, which I will describe in the next section, that had an important impact on the progress of our research and the creation of Memorecord itself.

It is important to consider here that the observations carried out during this experiment did not have in mind the production of a ethnographic text, but that of supporting a historical research that, in great extent, deals with one of the subjects of anthropology par excellence: the alterity. Historian Robert Darnton, who is known to be a disciple of the postmodern anthropologist Clifford Geertz, believes that historians can only benefit from the best access routes through which anthropology can facilitate the process of penetrating a strange culture. Before the unknow, historians are often confronted with a strange system of meaning they need to decipher if they want to understand the other. Jokes, proverbs, ceremonies and other cultural manifestations may be very significant to autochthones, but remain opaque to historians. There is exactly where anthropology comes handy to historians (Darnton 1986, 106). André Burguière has proposed an articulation between the disciplines through the term historical anthropology, which he presents as a sort of historian’s willingness to always look for connections or relationships before between objects of study in history. The entry on the subject in his Dictionary of Historical Sciences says:

Historical anthropology has no domain of its own. Whether it is the healing power of the kings of France, the rise of individualism among peasants in the 18th century or the diffusion of contraception, all the issues it addresses belong to other sectors of history. It is first and foremost an effort to link the evolution of an institution, a type of consumption, or a technique, with its social repercussions and the behaviour it engenders. It is, therefore, a method of totalization or, rather, of relationship (...) of the different levels of reality (Burguière 1993, 65, translated from Portuguese by myself)20

Burguière’s historical anthropology sounds like a quite open, and maybe too vague approach for enabling insights. However I found this intentional disciplinary interweaving between history and anthropology especially interesting to my research to the extent it displays, among historians, a greater interest to everyday life. Burguière, for instance, sees historical anthropology as a realisation of Marc Bloch’s agenda for history of mentalities (idem, 66). The approach is, indeed, not so fresh and draws on interdisciplinary efforts of scholars of various strains, among them Edward Palmer Thompson in his work on social history and Norbert Elias with his civilising process. Despite its vagueness, what interests me in the holistic character of Burguière’s description is that it may help us to “challenge our standard views of the present” (Frykman and Löfgren 1987, 02). For that, in the limits of my case study, as much as I am not aiming at an ethnographic text, I assume this holistic approach while trying to make sense of the Luxembourg migration landscape and the life of immigrant in the country.

In Chapter 4 I dive deeper in the analysis of the case study, and there I will bring forward the insights from the observations carried out through these years. However, to the present chapter it shall be important to highlight the privileged position I had, especially at the beginning of the research exploration phase, when I was myself a strange/foreigner in the Grand Duchy. Being new in Luxembourg allowed me the benefit of surprise. Not being familiarised with the country and the research topic at the beginning of this PhD had a positive effect of sharpening my intuition as I walked into the fieldwork right form the start. Further on in the project development, I was so immersed in the topic and acquainted with the cultural landscape that to extract some insights from my observations it was necessary a greater effort. It is in this sense that I found very useful going back to my early notes on how I felt about my initial observations. Somehow, it was the new unknow territory of social media that, during the analysis of the crowdsourced memories, that helped me to regain some vigor of that primary intuition, which was fundamental to the analytical bricolage I describe in Chapter 4. As well said elsewhere, “to unleash the criativity, only intuition is operative” (Kaufmann 2016, 55)21 . Or, in the phrasing of the French sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain, the later stage contact with the social media analysis helped me to “see something ‘new’ in the old by defamiliarizing” (2003, 155, translated from French by myself)22.

Community sensitization

Another fundamental step in preparation to build the Memorecord platform was the progressive rapprochement with the community. I describe as community sensitization a range of initiatives taken to democratise the building process of our digital memory platform. A large part of this sensitization happened organically as I got to know the community gatekeepers, contacted stakeholders and people started to pass the word around about our project. Yet a significant part of it resulted from the will to perform participatory design. In this section, I detail the steps taken to raise awareness about the project, share our goals publicly and invite people to take part in this enterprise, not only to feed the project with data but to assume an active role in its whole design. By “designing” I mean more than lines and shapes, or the technical creation of a tool. I think of design as a more comprehensive social process in the interplay of code, aesthetic and signification, discarding a merely utilitarian view of design (Masure 2017, 7–33). Recent research on participatory design points to more effective forms of engagement when legitimate access to the decision-making processes is granted (Hansen, Iversen, and Schouten 2019, 10), highlighting the social aspect. Experience in community projects underlines that contemplating the desired outcome leads to the empowerment of community members and may serve as a safeguard measure against paternalism (Braa 1996; Fox and Le Dantec 2014). These perspectives oriented my fieldwork.

The community sensitization initiated a reciprocal process between the research practices and actions in/with the public where one enables and complements the other. The actions to foster participation meant, at the same time, data collection and the cultivation of a relationship of trust around the project, seeking to create “some kind of empathy” (Caldas and Pihlainen 2019) among the researcher and potential participants. Neuroscientific theory suggests that “our brain is hard-wired for empathy as ‘a mechanism for action in the world’ and as a ‘mechanism through which we gather information to cooperate with others’” (Hassan 2019, 3). In a public history project, permeated by tensions surrounding authorship issues - in the relationship with the community, general public and academic peers - strategies for elicitation of empathy can be extremely helpful. While sensitizing the community, I tried to set a scaffolding environment (Sharma and Hannafin 2007; Fox and Le Dantec 2014) to encourage critical engagement, allowing for the personal dimension of history and, at the time, being transparent with the community about the social role of professional historians.

In this context, my self-positioning followed precursory social historians like Edward Palmer Thompson and Raphael Samuel in their plea for people’s history, both in terms of the perspective of a “history from below” (Thompson 1966) and in the likes of the British History Workshop movement which advocated for history-making to be a collective endeavour, a democratized, popular thing (Scott-Brown 2017). Backed by works once criticised for lack of academicism, I tried to reconcile the popular praxis with professional scholarship, drawing especially on Frisch’s contributions to the field of oral history and public history, on the existence of a shared or shareable authority (1990). Half a century after Thompson and Samuel’s initial inputs, alternative ways to see authorship still threaten some of those entitled to professional scholarly authority.

Thus, during the phase of community sensitization I attempted to address dilemmas posed by various dichotomies between academic and public – historical past and practical past, academic expertise and lived experience, that is, theory and practice – trying to find a respectful, non-patronizing stance to work together. This effort meant not simply reaching the public as audience or informants, but as co-authors. As argued by Frisch, “in the same sense that both interviewer and interviewee are the ‘authors’ of an oral historical document, public-historical presentation has the challenge of finding ways of sharing the ‘author-ity’ of interpretation with the public” (Frisch, 1990:226).

Collecting life stories through oral history

From March to December 2016, I coordinated, with the support of the University of Luxembourg and the CDMH, a series of memory workshop sessions entitled Racontez Votre Histoire de Vie (“Tell Your Life Story”). There were eight sessions in total throughout the year, always on a Saturday. We invited people to join us in the facilities of the CDMH in Dudelange to share their stories of migration in audiovisual recorded interviews. The Saturday sessions usually happened from 2 pm to 6 pm, with a few exceptions for participants who asked for different time slots, requests which we tried to accommodate as promptly as possible.

Figure 2. Invitation card for Racontez Votre Histoire...

One of the inspirations for this proposition to the CDMH came from the Brazilian example of collaborative shaping of the Museu da Pessoa23. The Person’s Museum started collecting memories of Jews during an art exhibition in São Paulo, in 198924. The recordings were made in a cabin where people could sit and talk freely about their life story to a microphone and camera set. Surprisingly, their harvest ended up collecting much more content than expected. The collection started during this exhibition, generated an archive on migrant Jews in Rio de Janeiro that was used a few years later, in 1991, by the Museu da Imagem e do Som (São Paulo section) to inaugurate a physical space meant to continue the experiment and make the archive accessible to the public. In 1997, when the Internet was becoming popular in Brazil, the coordinators and the director of the initiative realized that the outreach and visibility of those stories could be expanded if they went online.

The new website of the Museu da Pessoa was a way to open the microphone and the camera to everyone wishing to record his or her own story. The founder-director defined it as a ‘virtual network of life stories’ (Worcman, 2002), that began as a national project and since 2004 has taken on an international scope and become a reference in the interplay of oral history, museums and digital memories (Clarke 2009; Lucchesi 2014a). The website of the Museu da Pessoa displayed a gallery of memories from all over the country, with faces and voices of individuals telling their stories, creating their tags, and classifying these stories according to their judgement. The approach remained a great source of inspiration for setting up the Memorecord platform. The initiative for Racontez Votre Histoire de Vie consisted of one of the first steps towards the participatory design that I implemented in Memorecord.

However, in contract to the Museu da Pessoa, which offers a how-to guide with information on how and in which order participants should tell their story (Clarke 2009; Lucchesi 2014a), participants of this study were free to follow their preferred narrative style during the recordings, no strings attached. Either during the Racontez Votre Histoire… or later, in what became the #memorecord harvest, no particular requirements were made in this sense. I deliberately chose not to offer story scripts. The intention was to respect the participants’ freedom to shape their own narrative. I wanted to them feel free to choose what they wanted to talk about in their open-mic time, performing what is known as an unstructured interactive interview, or open-ended/narrative interviews (Corbin and Morse 2003, 339). This way of conducting interviews is common to both oral history and life story. The main difference between the two approaches is usually emphasis and scope. Oral histories, as shown here, focus mostly on a specific aspect of a person’s life (e.g. migration) often related to the community as a whole or a historical event. When oral interviews focus on the entire life of a person, they are called life stories or life histories(Atkinson 2002, 125). Oral historians consider life story materials as a powerful source for enhancing local history (Allen and Montell 1981).

In this case study, the emphasis on migration was made clear throughout the different project communication. Participants of Racontez Votre Histoire… were requested to approach their migration trajectory in their narrative. The immigration event in the participants’ life was the focus of my “grand tour question”. In this type of question, participants take a central role; they “are asked to tell their story as they see it, feel it, experience it. As such, participants determine where to begin the narrative, what topics to include or exclude, the order in which topics are introduced, and the amount of detail” (Corbin and Morse 2003, 339). In this interview mode, the researcher can follow up the responses by asking clarifications or making interventions when necessary to keep the narrative moving forward. I generally used the two sentences format suggested by the oral historian Charles Morrissey (1987), “You are here because you heard we are collecting stories of persons with a migration background in Luxembourg. Could you tell me about you and your family background?”. I also borrowed some techniques from ethnographic studies to ask expanding questions and give interviewees more time to think, in variations of “Tell me as much as you can, in great detail.” (Spradley 1979, 86). This type of qualitative research interview aims to grasp the participant’s world, “to unfold the meaning of their experiences, to uncover their lived world prior to scientific explanations” (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015, 03) respecting their engagement in the meaning-making process.

For Racontez Votre Histoire… we made an open call to all nationalities, inviting people to join us at CDMH and tell their story. Different languages were permitted, or at least those that we were familiar with - at the time, English, French, Italian and Portuguese. With the help of a CDMH intern, we were able to add Luxembourgish as an option for the later generations. Those languages were, later on, replicated in the digital memory platform. Running this workshop in 2016 was insightful to the actual development of the platform. Beyond language, I could identify other key needs of the project, such as outreach strategy, collaboration aspects, and long-term sustainability. For instance, for the dissemination of the workshop, I worked with other volunteers at CDMH to draft a flyer and a poster and to create the text. Then, we collaborated with a communication agency for the design and, later on, its distribution25. We also disseminated the flyers and posters online through local websites and social media.

The first lesson I learned, from the range of organizational tasks involved in the preparation and maintenance of this workshop, was that time was a precious resource in collaborative settings, something that I did not always manage it to the best of my ability. Often, negotiations and tiny adjustments were needed and I had to adapt to the collaborators’ schedules. In addition, this experience helped me to realize that opening a call for collaborative crowdsourcing on memories of migration in Luxembourg while, at the same time, restricting it to the specific cohort of two nationalities was paradoxical to a certain extent. Particularly regarding the subject of migration, we feared that inviting people to take part in a crowdsourcing project, but then restricting it just to Italian or Portuguese people could send the wrong message. National and transnational paradigms of investigation are instrumental to research but going public with a national outreach campaign for a crowdsourcing project framing only two national groups could sound excludent and discriminatory to the larger public. Furthermore, having chosen transnationalism as our analytical framework to understand migration, (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992) I understand that there is no such a thing as “The Italian” or “The Portuguese” community. Considering the plurality of contexts these people came from and their present lived heterogeneity, it is almost impossible to establish a unit among the national groups (Schiltz 2003). Hence our decision to keep a broader scope, towards all nationalities both in Racontez Votre Histoire… and later in Memorecord26. On one hand, it brought challenges (i.e being time consuming, requiring more languages and introducing more cultural translation issues) but, on the other hand, it was potentially enlarging the project database. The collection, afterwards, could then be filtered down to specific national groups for analytical purposes if and when required.

Racontez Votre Histoire… then remained an important section of our fieldwork, and a kind of pilot project that helped me to clarify how and to whom I wanted to listen. At the end of 2016, by the time I was closing the activities at CDMH, the number of participants were not as high as expected (16). The problem, however, was not time availability. Despite being there only one Saturday per month, I would still have idle hours, which means the community did not use all the time available. First, I questioned whether it was a lack of publicity, but considering that the CDMH is one of the most well-connected networks to reach the migrant communities in Luxembourg, a weak diffusion was a quickly discounted hypothesis. This situation raised several new questions: Would we have reached more interested people if we were visiting their homes instead of recording the interviews at CDMH? Were people unwilling to share their story in that specific kind of format? Would the remote form of participation – such as the foreseen online crowdsourcing – be a real change, by letting people take part at their own time and convenience? I imagined that moving to online crowdsourcing could lead us to a greater participation, as “the crowd” promises large and diverse samples, easier and faster data collection (Borgo et al. 2017, 98). In practice, however, after experimenting with it, I realized that many effective potentials of this method, as well its pitfalls and obtaining a seamless increase in the participation proved to be questionable.

Getting feedback on the use of the mobile app PixStori

In parallel to the traditional long form of oral history interview, I also tested a shorter form of storytelling. This rather prompt form of oral history was made possible by the use of the phone application PixStori27. The application was developed by Talking Pictures LLC of which the historian Michael Frisch is one of the co-founders. The app enables the digital union of voice recording and still photographs. To create a “talking picture” the user starts by adding a picture (a new one or one selected from the phone gallery), then she/he records audio and adds a caption to her or his story. The concept is simple, and the generated material can be easily shared. Because we took part in the development phase of the application, we were able to identify an opportunity to stimulate participants to take part in the memory harvest. Pixstori also offers excellent opportunities for image and sound elicitation if used in an analogue interview setting. Hence the will to experiment with the app and explore different ways to work with oral history, merging image and sound, trying out another way to tell, record and disseminate oral histories.

Figure 3. How to Make a PixStori, by Talking Pictures LLC.

For the public history purposes, the proximity and contact facility with the migrants that an application such as PixStori could offer was invaluable. I was mainly seeking first-hand accounts. Beyond oral history interviews, another way to access these accounts was through the so-called egodocuments. An egodocument is a subject-centered source “in which the researcher is faced with the ‘I’ (…)” (Dekker 2002, 14). According to Jacques Presser, who coined the term – autobiographies, memoirs, diaries and letters – are the privileged forms of egodocuments, but we may consider non-textual forms too, such as photos, or modern versions of diary entries, for instance, a blog post. Presser was particularly interested in the way these documents could give access to the “Self” of a narrator. For him, “those [were] documents in which an ego deliberately or accidentally discloses or hides itself” (Presser apud Dekker 2002,14). Also, historians believe that reading egodocuments normally make the general public feel “closer to the past”, even if “that remains an illusion to the eyes of most historians, it is an important function of egodocuments” (Dekker 2002, 37). Bearing in mind all the characteristics of egodocuments and, at the same time, the mobile application features mentioned above, I considered the PixStories created autonomously by users to be a type of digital mediated egodocument28.

Despite the controversial character of the illusion provoked by egodocuments, for getting closer to the past, such a capacity can be positively explored as an attribute for public history; it favors the work under the empathy sentiment. Besides, for PixStori being “easy to use” it could make participation more straightforward. At least, so was the expectation. The app then takes a double role in our experiment: one on the documentation realm, aiding the co-creation of sources; and another on the social, relational part of the project, favouring the identification with the project while fostering a feeling of empathy that may have a catalyst effect on engagement. Thus, the app could be a tool to ease participation, acting as an icebreaker, because it is simple and does not require complicated academic procedures. At the same time, it could encourage a feedback loop wherein other peoples’ stories could act as triggers for new participants. Hence, the use of PixStori to feed the digital platform could allow me to test the generated pixtories as egodocuments, as well as to explore their likely capacity to produce an empathetic effect. It consisted of an experiment on how to promote true engagement in a public history project, a holistic experiment aiming not solely to test the tool usability and criticise its interface, but also to assess its subjective implications on participants, in terms of emotions and perceptions towards the project (e.g. motivation and willingness to participate, confidence and feelings about the telling and sharing oneself story).

Bearing in mind the features mentioned above, I added the use of PixStori to the set of scaffolding strategies to support participants (Sharma and Hannafin 2007; Fox and Le Dantec 2014). Inviting people to take part in an academic research on the history of migration could seem too far or abstract for some. But focusing on their individual experience, offering suitable means for it – as an app that can be used privately – was a manner to back away from the abstraction and begin building a sense of community around the project. Simply put, in theory, introducing the app into the crowdsourcing process should ease participants’ engagement at the same time as it could facilitate the creation of records, being beneficial to the memory harvesting as a whole. At least, this was the expectation. Soon, as the experiment proceeded, obstacles would arise, questioning some of these assumptions and making adjustments inevitable.

I understand the pixstories to be shared in our crowdsourcing as digital mediated egodocuments. More specifically, they can be considered a type born-digital audio-visual egodocument29. Unlike the analogically written and spontaneous forms of egodocuments – such as letters and diaries – the audio-visual formats expected here were to be mainly generated by the participants at my request, although with almost no further interferences. They would bring together sound and image evidence in a single record; ready-to-use “Unit/Story” (Lambert and Frisch 2013, 140). They would be mediated through digital technology, and such mediations are non-neutral processes that imply a “digital folding of reality” (Berry 2011, 01), and to this follows a spiral of re-mediations. In remediations, the “inseparability of mediation and reality” is a fact (Bolter and Grusin 2000b, 55). Plus, as I asked people to share their memories through this app, it also implies a mediation of memory that is equally non-neutral, for which analysis we shall consider the “mutual shaping of memory and media” (Dijck 2007, 21); and finally, despite the reduced agency of the researcher in the process, they cannot be considered fully unintentional type of source as they are generated on call.

What particularly inspired me to use PixStori, was the possibility to dive into the participants’ world, with chances to virtually access parts of their personal archives through the mediation of their mobile devices. This could mean catching a glimpse of the very colors of their neighborhood, their home or places they use or used to go, treasured objects and so on. The tool could be seen as a catalyst to some grounded-theory related method, such as the “go-along method”, that allows the researcher to enter the world of the interviewee partners, follow their steps, see, feel and taste, what the others experience (Kusenbach 2003; 2018; Evans and Jones 2011). However, by carrying PixStori in their pocket, the presence and interference of the researcher would be less evident in this going-along process and, perhaps, could awaken new kinds of exchange. On the one hand, in not being present at the time of the relatable interview context, the researcher loses much of the rich experience of the face-to-face exchange with the interviewee. On the other hand, in this sort of remote go-along method, much can be gained in terms of sharing meanings and emotions by, perhaps, having access to a private space-time that otherwise could never be glimpsed by the researcher. All this would depend, of course, on what would trigger their attention and what they would decide to capture with the app - objects, pictures, documents, places, persons, or even a meta-record (e.g. if they happen to create a pixstori based on an old photo). At one time, the app could enable comfortable distances and proximities between researcher and participants, mirroring the blurry line between public and private spheres in the digital age. In this context, PixStori could not only be a tool to enable crowdsourcing of user-generated content, but part of a mechanism of discovery, with potential to capture unexpected forms of data, affording nonstandard sources and surprising elements a place in the collection. After all, “part of the appeal of crowdsourced User Generated Content is finding something unexpected and new” (Lukyanenko et al. 2019, A10).

Figure 4. Pixstori recorded by Paulo Lobo, Portuguese migrant.

In order to assess the actual usability of the app and its value to the project, I contacted some individuals encountered during the fieldwork and invited them to take part in a pilot test of crowdsourcing with PixStori. They were asked to share their memories directly with me by using the app on their iPhone or iPad. At this time, there was no web platform in place. I was still collecting impressions to start the first design attempts. As a response, I received feedback that was quite concerning about the future use of the application along with a web platform. The general comments revealed participants did not find it so easy to share their stories and send the files. The individuals testing the app did not complain about the software itself, after managing to submit their material, the overall impression was great. The problem was before the actual sharing. The testers would repeatedly write me to ask what they should do after having recorded the PixStori, even if we had explained how they could proceed beforehand; according to the possibilities given by the app interface, they could share the link to their PixStori by e-mail or text message, or send the whole file by email. I realised that for some, using the full app functions was not so clear. No matter how simple the app could be, there were many details to pay attention to and the how-to was not resonating as intuitively as I had thought. As they were not familiar with the app, there was a natural strangeness that I found quite problematic to include in the harvesting. Adding an element that would require too much effort could be intimidating and jeopardize the collection.

In addition to the risk of disengagement, a further problematic concern was accessibility. At the end of this first trial, PixStori was still only available for iOS, meaning just for those who had iPhones and iPads. This became the most significant limitation of the app. By the time I began this research, there was a promise that the application would soon become available to Apple’s rival mobile operating system, Android. However, despite Talking Pictures having signaled again in the previous months that they would quickly announce changes, the moment to start designing the platform arrived and the app was still not available to other mobile platforms.

During the test phase, I provisionally sidestepped this limitation by borrowing equipment (iPads) from the Digital History Lab to lend them to participants who did not have access to a mobile device running iOS. The idea was allowing them to use u the iPads at their convenience and returning it to us after a relatively short period. The workflow per se did not present a problem, yet, the test-run encountered another issue. One of the first participants, a first generation immigrant from Portugal, would try to use PixStori on the borrowed iPad, but faced some technical issues that made it complicated to stick to it. She was able to make the whole recording (over 15 minutes, she said), but for some puzzling reasons, her audio would not be saved. I contacted the support of the app regarding this issue, but they could not explain it either. One possible reason we rapidly discarded could have been the lack of storage in the device, as the iPad in question was only being used for this purpose and had enough capacity for the task. Running a few more tries later on, together with the lady’s daughter, we realized that the app was working fine and the issue with her recording remained unclear.

In conclusion, it became imperative to reassess the utilization of PixStori and its centrality in the harvesting machine. I would still make room for pixstories in the crowdsourcing, but the app would have to play a different, less pivotal role in the experiment. Finally, a last but significant reason why a detour from PixStori proved to be necessary was the lack of terms of use within the app, which could pose serious integrity implications.

Gathering early impressions on the project idea

A third step in the participatory design activities consisted in inviting the community to share their view on the initial concept of the project including; our first ideas for communication (i.e. call to action, languages, dissemination), presentation (i.e. layout, frontend of the digital memory platform) and crowdsourcing mechanism (i.e. protocols, environment, tools). Simply put, in this phase, the community should engage in the process of shaping the digital memory platform in a collective production, where potential participants could indicate what their ideal platform would look like. The objective was delineating basic design principles together in order to start building the platform in a way that the result would be appealing to the target audience and ensure engagement. To do so, I utilized two types of research-participant interaction: a sample of one-to-one conversations within a selected feedback group, and a focus group.

The one-to-one conversations took place with individuals I met throughout our fieldwork activities (e.g. during ethnographic observations at the Festival des Migrations, in the context of Racontez Votre Histoire… or during the pilot test of the mobile application PixStori). The focus group consisted of a sample of recently arrived individuals of different nationalities, including some with refugee status. I had access to the group through the context of a workshop I gave as a volunteer lecturer at the a.s.b.l Digital Inclusion30. The workshop was about the use of Internet tools for getting around the country and was dedicated mainly to people who had just arrived. The exchange about the project, as well as the request for feedback, had been previously discussed and agreed by the organization managers. I included the just arrived in order to get an opinion from a part of the community that is implicated in the migration landscape, but that is also classed as a sensitive group – refugees and asylum seekers31. While the subjects selected for the one-to-one pool were already familiar with me, the focus group only got to know me on the occasion of the workshop and feedback round, excluding any ties with other institutions, such as the CDMH.

A departing assumption for the construction of our platform, suggested by crowdsourcing studies in both business and academic worlds, states that the process must be as simple and straightforward as possible to encourage participation (Majchrzak and Malhotra 2019, 257; Ridge 2014, 118). Considering that the Memorecord did not consist of crowdsourcing impersonal tasks, but a truly subjective type of input (i.e. individual memories), I wanted to make the most of it by accommodating the community expectations and by making people comfortable. Thus, by following a bottom-up approach in building of the platform, we tried to nourish an empathetic environment that would let participants feel at ease about sharing their stories. However, the individuals’ expectations could not always be taken into account in an equally simple and straightforward manner, given the existence of technical & time constraints. Many times, my ability to implement certain solutions were limited, requiring dialogue and negotiation to find a compromise.

For the collective assessment, I drafted a first version of the platform to be kept private as a testing environment, in which I could work with the participants of our feedback and focus groups. The initial proposal was a simple portal for uploading multimedia content, very much inspired by digital and public history initiatives like the well known 9/11 Archive (US) or the Museu da Pessoa (Brazil). This format was fashionable in the golden hour of the Web 1.0, and it is worth noting yet another two highlights by the RRCHNM – the Bracero History Archive (US/Mexico)32, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (US)33. However, by the time I began this PhD research, those websites were no longer cutting-edge – nothing to discredit the projects, but a representative example of obsolescence, whose effects have become increasingly acute in the digital realm (Tischleder and Wasserman 2015, 06).

Figure 5. Contribute tab for The September 11 Digital Archive, developed based on Omeka (http://911digitalarchive.org/contribution)

All of those projects were still running on the Web 1.0 “read-only” logic, in which users mainly search for information and read it online, in contrast to its successor “read-write” paradigm, in which users can contribute content and interact with other web users. In other words, in the Web 2.0 phase, we see the emergence of social media dialogue and virtual communities based on user-generated content (Shivalingaiah and Naik 2008). However, the Web 2.0 did not require a deep modification in the technical specifications of the Web 1.0, the main difference is on design and use of web pages. The most radical changes comes with the Semantic Web (Web 3.0).

At the beginning of the development phase, as much as I was interested in testing the social participation enabled by the Web 2.0 in our digital memory platform, I was still mirroring the project in the examples mentioned above, which predominantly followed the read-only logic. Naively, I thought that developing a modern layout, adding sharing buttons and a comment section to the web page would be enough to activate participation. It was only through the listening to the feedback that I understood that a one-shot contribution made possible through participation forms (where users could fill up some text fields and upload documents) was not enough for them to feel part of something special. After showing the first draft version, I realised that I needed to find a whole new model if I really was to build a community around the project.

Figure 6. The first attempt of developing the platform on WordPress. Full screenshot of the homepage

For the feedback rounds, I started using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)34 as in the example above (Figure 6), mainly because this was the CMS I was most familiar with, but it was also one of the most used systems among historians. In addition, we planned on adding PixStori to broaden-up the crowdsourcing and allow the creation of digital egodocuments (see below, Figure 7).

Figure 7. The first attempt at developing the platform on WordPress. Full screenshot of the “Tell your story” section, including information on how to use PixStori.

The subjects with whom I had a one to one exchange were positive overall and offered a mild criticism on the platform’s initial idea. A recurrent concern pointed out was language, which we readily understood as the first testing sketch had been done only in English. A remarkable comment came from one of the oldest subjects, who told us that the web page was pretty simple, meaning it as a compliment, and telling us that he was familiar with the format as he was a blogger himself. On one hand, his comment was reassuring as I was looking for something simple and straightforward. On the other hand, using a popular CMS like WordPress, which uses ordinary blog templates could risk giving the perception of the project as just another blog or magazine. In addition, on the one-to-one feedback round, a few participants expressed concerns regarding the use of PixStori. The app, despite what it promises, - in contrast to the ideal platform- was not so straightforward.

The focus group presented slightly more complex critical elements than I found amid the individuals who had somehow been aware of the project before they were explicitly asked to give their opinion. The existence of a previous relationship, among us and/or with a common knowledge entity in Luxembourg (such as the CDMH itself or some other organization in the migrant’s associative world) may have inhibited more critical feedback. Having navigated for a few minutes in the WordPress web page, one of the young ladies in the room said that she did not know if she would feel motivated to upload her story there. In her opinion, that seemed much more like an “empty box” than a collective project. She continued saying something along the lines of “I would like to share my story with others, but I think it would be easier if I would see other people sharing too”. She thought it was somehow “cold” or “institutional”.

More than the language or technical issues raised, this statement hit the essence of the project’s concept. Much of my perception of the relationship between academia and community comes from lessons shared among oral historians that also influenced the sharing authority process in public history settings. The co-creation of historical sources must seek a balance between the historian’s responsibility to preserve history and the subject’s sensitivity (K’Meyer and Crothers 2007). In the interviewing process, for instance, particularly in the unstructured interactive types, the control given to participants can “allow for the management of many of the so-called risks associated with doing interviews” (Corbin and Morse 2003, 339). A recurring premise in oral history theory is that interviewers and interviewees should become partners; the more comfortable and at their ease the interviewees are, the more forthcoming they will be in their answers (Ritchie 2015, 73–74). Transposing this model of partnership from the oral history tradition to my public history terrain, I would need to overcome the “empty box” intimidating feeling to respect to the fellow community partners.

The early impressions I gathered in this brief, but meaningful exercise of participatory design made me rethink many aspects of the project’s execution and re-orient the steps ahead. During this period of feedback rounds prior to the activation of the platform, I asked the subjects involved about their views on concept, language, design, layout, etc. Their opinions were extremely helpful to the better assessment of these basic elements of the platform and, ultimately, conditioned our case study. As can be seen in the Memorecord’s road map (Figure 1) all this happened in parallel with the tests of the PixStori application and the coordination of the Racontez Votre Histoire… Those activities worked in a complementary way, each informing and illuminating the other. At the end of this period, going beyond mere sensitizing potential participants to the project, I found myself more perceptive to the community needs and expectations.

Thinkering

Once I understood how we, in the collective, would like the digital memory platform to be, it was time to start the hands-on work and try to translate the various expectations into a digital artifact. The process described in this section is a result of our playful experimentation with the technological and digital tools we had to manipulate to get the platform running. The building process detailed here shows how, in this case study, digital technology is a tool and a methodology at the same time (Svensson 2016, section 3). As a self-reflexive practice, it also shows that it is possible to work on the platform as a concept and framing (idem), incorporating a theoretical perspective to its materiality that is critically lacking in platform studies (Leorke 2012, 267). In this way, I see my experiment as modelling (McCarty 2014, 35–36). Modelling, in the field of Humanities Computing, is a “process whose ending is constructed rather than given” (idem). The open-ended nature of the experiment yields critical thinking in what could be identified as a building form of scholarship (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, 83). Johanna Drucker, in other words, tells us about “making things, as a thinking practice” (Drucker 2009, 31). This view implies a reinterpretation of humanities as a “generative enterprise” in which “students and faculty alike are making things as they study and perform research, generating not just texts (in the form of analysis commentary, narration, critique), but also images, interactions, cross-media corpora, software, and platform” (Burdick et al. 2012, 10).

It is in this context of “doing as thinking”, in a syncretization of theory and method (Drucker 2012, 87), that the shaping of the Memorecord platform joins the generative humanities. To achieve it, despite acquiring new personal skills on computing and digital methods, it was also necessary to cooperate with specialists from other disciplines (IT experts, design professionals, communication staff and other colleagues). Indeed, scholarly work in digital humanities is intrinsically collaborative and transdisciplinary (Burdick et al. 2012). Digital public history takes this collaborative nature even further. Without cooperation of other professionals, the technical limitations and black boxes encountered on the way could have frozen the development of the platform and prevented the crowdsourcing. Throughout this section, I will clarify the collaborative dimension of the project and how this is situated in the process of building in what Max Kemman has called the trading zones of digital history (2019). In these trading zones, computational experts (the digital) and historians (the history) interact and negotiate upon their practices35.

From scratch to screen - trying different tools, interfaces and outputs

When looking at the screenshot of the very first design attempts, we can see, in the first instance, that the layout was very simple, resembling any other common WordPress template we could find on the Internet. After the feedback rounds, we understood that WordPress-like website was manifesting the idea of “just another blog on the web”. Reflecting upon the earlier impressions on the project, it would need to be something more substantial and much more appealing to fulfil our engagement expectations. Potential participants should be pleased to add their story to an exclusive and original project, which would make them feel proud of their participation, and more likely to share it with other people.

One of the core aspects for mobilizing participants to engage people in crowdsourcing is social connectivity (Dimock 2013; Carletti et al. 2013; Causer and Terras 2014). Hence, the platform CMS would need to be updated to something that would allow the content shared to be seen by the main contributor, but also by other users and, ideally, people should have the possibility to interact. The new participation attributes of Web 2.0 had become a requirement as it enables crowd interaction and, consequently, enhances the awareness level and crowdsourcing degree of distribution (Yaldiz 2014). Static systems meanwhile can make spontaneous engagement harder, which requires more significant efforts from interested subjects to find the content. In a network-like web page, for instance, a new entry can spark interest among other users, potentially initiating interactions and likely attracting new crowdsourcees.

I was hence determined to find a more dynamic alternative to the initial concept using WordPress. On one hand, my lack of experience with other CMS was blinding me to alternative options in customization and freedom to define each section of a website, methods of navigation, colors, etc. On the other hand, not knowing what I could do with other tools led me to look for support from colleagues in the computational domain and this simple need for technical consultation resulted in several informal chats and a few long meetings that changed the fate of the project. Our informal consultations grew organically due to the physical proximity to colleagues (our offices were all on the same floor of the building). My interlocutors were forthcoming and suggested a few creative solutions to overcome the lack of interactivity and foster participation. Soon enough, the informal discussions became regular meetings and the casual chats at coffee breaks gave way to a systematic collaboration that became momentous to the project36.

The central insight was not inventing a high-tech platform, but it was to create a solution that efficiently combined tools and existing services, playing with remediation and media convergence. Remediation, as formulated by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000a), points out the aesthetic and narrative implications of new media (websites, desktop interfaces, video games) in the digital media’s appropriation of traditional media Henry Jenkins (2006; Jenkins and Deuze 2008, 7) describes convergence as an intense flow of media content (story, image, sound, brand and relationships) across a broader spectrum of media platform, while shaped by decisions of different media industries (i.e. a corporation) and media audiences (i.e. a teenager) in a convergence of cultures of production and consumption. Jenkins also argues about the emergence of a “collective intelligence” and room for a “bottom-up participatory culture” (2006) in the context of this convergence culture, a very significant aspect to the spirit of a crowdsourcing community project.

The expected result of such a remixing process, of old and new digital media technology - blending Web 1.0 & Web 2.0 fashions - would be a sort of gadget platform that we could customize and adjust accordingly. To better meet to our needs for customization, I moved to a locally hosted server at Uni.lu (University website) and started developing our flexible platform from scratch. The new ideas for the platform were discussed mainly with Lars Wieneke37, head of Digital Research Infrastructure at C²DH, and Danielle Guido38, the center’s lead designer. Wieneke drew attention to the fact that the platform needed actions inherent to social network environment (i.e. commenting, sharing, tagging, zooming in and out). Further on, discussing solutions with Guido, we agreed on developing the platform gear in a way that would work paired with social network websites that we could integrate into the crowdsourcing mechanism.

The content that I could expect from social media would also be different than what we would have hoped for if working only from the PixStori app. It could still be seen as a source for digital egodocuments, however, it would present key differences in terms of its circulation and reception, not to mention the fact that it was widening the array of media content I would be able to receive - texts, pictures, videos, videos and text combined and so on. More interestingly, I could keep the possibility of adding pixstories to Facebook and Instagram itself, as the app also allows users to share their talking pictures directly on these social media. In addition, when adding content to a personal profile on a social media, people would not only be sharing their messages to the project’s audience but making it public in their timeline and reaching to their community of followers and friends. Another convenience was the popularity of Facebook and Instagram in Luxembourg (see Figure 8) and the fact that its respective mobile applications were already familiar to a greater audience than PixStori. A last and very pertinent motivation for choosing Facebook and Instagram is their availability on the two leading mobile operating systems, Android and iOS.

Figure 8. Social media usage in Luxembourg 2017, by platform. Source: TNS Ilres (MyPanel Échantillon). Survey period: March 2017. Number of respondents: 503. Age group: 16 years and older.

Nevertheless, it was necessary to build a unique platform as a place of convergence beyond third-party services (Facebook and Instagram). It was essential to guarantee full control to the new platform that would work as a hub for all the memories we would harvest. Hence, despite social media being fundamental in our crowdsourcing strategy, I reserved the rights to update and moderate the platform to ourselves separately. The diagram below (Figure 9) represents the first sketch of the crowdsourcing mechanism, including social media as a means to reach and connect with the community. In this design, the pivotal role of the researcher is highlighted right in the interface between community and platform.

Figure 9. First sketch of Memorecord crowdsourcing mechanism, including social media.

Following the formulation of the crowdsourcing mechanism, together with Guido, we invited Emmanuelle Hingray, designer of the University’s faculty FLSHASE, to brainstorm layout ideas that would reflect the concept we had in mind. In order to develop a website from scratch, I needed to learn how to communicate our needs to collaborators in the most effective way, taking into consideration that our project was not the sole one and also not a priority. After having developed a few ideas on paper together with the designers, I worked alone in the creation of an annotated site map. To do so, we used an online site map builder called Write Map39, where the interface allowed us to create the content structure and add text in the same window, giving a more comprehensive view of the map. The site map helped me to brief the designers in terms of content (i.e. objective, type of media, page length) and navigation (i.e. information hierarchy, internal and external links, desired features). We can see here the very first draft of the site map for the platform under development:

Figure 10. Draft of site map created by myself with annotation on content and features for the section “The Project”.

The platform needed a front-end showing the posts from Facebook and Instagram, following the infinite scrolling style, common to both social media. Around it, through simple menu navigation, all the project information (how-to and why to participate; who was behind the project; privacy note etc.) would be available. Based on the annotated site map and a few visual elements (videos and photos), Guido created a first mock-up of the future platform homepage (Figure 11). In parallel, Hingray worked on the development of project visual identity (i.e. logo, fonts, colours) that would be tested in the effective layout once all contents and sections were confirmed.

Figure 11. First draft of the in-house developed version of the digital memory platform, by Daniele Guido.

Assessing the best way for managing the crowdsourcing

Once we identified the main actors, environments and actions involved, it was possible to outline the crowdsourcing mechanism – or the Memorecord Harvest Machine – in greater detail. The flowchart below (Figure 12) represents how the data travels along with the crowdsourcing, from the inception stage of the harvest on social media until the Memorecord platform.

Figure 12. A visual outline of the Memorecord Harvest Machine

The numbers on the top of the figure indicate each stage of the crowdsourcing process, summarized in five interconnected steps described in the below workflow.

Memorecord Harvest Machine – Workflow
Step	Task	Description	Actors / Environments
1	Seeding	The activation of the crowdsourcing, which takes place once the call for participation is made publicly accessible on the Memorecord Platform (the website front-end, represented in the chart by the square figure) and shared on the social media channels of the project, inviting potential participants (internet users) to join the harvest by sharing a public post tagged with #memorecord.	researcher; internet users / platform; social media
2	Harvesting	The mechanism used to obtain data through an automated web scraping process that gathers all new posts from social media tagged with #memorecord in a single worksheet. Zapier, the web service automation tool responsible for the web scraping, is integrated with Google Sheets, where Facebook and Instagram have separated tabs. Every time a new post is shared with the project hashtag (#memorecord), this event triggers the tool to create a new row in the correspondent sheet where the respective URLs for the posts are stored along with their metadata (e.g. geolocation when available, date, time, post id, story/description etc.). This material is our raw data.	web service automation (Zapier) / platform back-end (Google Sheets)
3	Data curation	Reviewing and selection of the material collected for publication. This selection entails close reading of all posts and a double-checking protocol for looking at original posts which content could seem deviant to the project call. After determining whether the posts harvested belong to the crowdsourcing, the researcher prepares them for publication. Sorted posts go into separate worksheets in the backend of the platform. In essence, one used for further interpretation, including new columns for annotation; and another one prepared for publication, including a single extra column with the URL for the image thumbnails to be displayed in the platform once the posts are embedded.	researcher / Google Sheets
4	Publication	Researcher manually runs the publication script from her Terminal. The script generates (or updates) a web page composed by a sequence of iframes embedding the posts in the Memorecord platform. All documentation and scripts of the Memorecord platform are available in the GitHub open repository.	Researcher / Terminal; Github
5	Feedback	Once the platform is updated, the news is shared with the participants who submitted the posts using their chosen same social media channel. A message of acknowledgement is shared with a link to the project platform. The action intends to reinforce the communication with the community and trigger new participations, be it by the same participant or by other users on hers/his social media who may discover the project through this new interaction.

The process of establishing this basic workflow encompassed the creation of simple protocols for primary tasks around the crowdsourcing activity, involving automation of the harvest, archival of data and metadata in the backend, moderation, and update of the website. The set-up of the crowdsourcing, thus, demanded some thinkering (Huhtamo, 2010) to test, assess, and choose which tool or platform to implement. The choices made along the way were informed and conditioned by a variety of circumstances weighed in terms of available resources to deal with methodological, technical and administrative issues. Thus, in addition to the source criticism we historians are familiar with, running this project required tool and interface criticism too, meaning at least some familiarity with code skills and algorithmic thinking to evaluate our computer means against their intended usability. Multimodal literacies or multiliteracies (Selber 2004, 25; McPherson 2011, 35) were needed to criticize the methods and understand the different digital components in the project40.

In this context, collaboration proved to be a critical element. The need to work with tools or techniques that I did not master a priori would require more time than expected in this stage of the project, and I had to seek help. On one hand, hinging on collaboration always offered a risk to increase the timing pressure due to the dependence on another person’s availability. On the other hand, there were worthwhile delays, because even if I could share technical tasks with experts, in order to gain the necessary multiliteracy mentioned above, I needed to follow the process closely, learning the how-to with support of experts. We learned by doing that time is the price of collaboration.

There were many occasions in which I was confronted with black boxes that I needed extra time to explore – with or without help. As a consequence, I found myself conflicted with the different timings and constraints of the daily routine of digitally mediated work. The black-boxing of consumer electronics (software or hardware) alone is not a negative thing. It is inherent to the development of newer technologies that are simply used and not fully understood in their inner workings (Selber 2004, 25; McPherson 2011, 35). Researchers, however – as argued by Ted Underwood – cannot afford the mysterious authority entailed by technology black-boxing when the tools or environments we work with/on can shape our ways of thinking and outcomes; we should, instead, crack them open to understanding their inner workings (Underwood 2014).

For the automation of the harvest, for instance, the software chosen to execute the task of web scraping of the content from the social media channels was an online tool named Zapier41, but there were many possibilities to contemplate. In fact, as data becomes a commodity earning the hype “Data is the new oil”42, there is an abundant range of web services to automate manual workflows. Most of the commercial options are developed for non-coders and offer pre-built task templates (i.e. Octoparse or Pursehub). Along with the web scraping tools, most of the social media channels offer paid APIs (Application Program Interface)43 to users, academia, and organizations. Likewise, many digital repositories provide APIs or some bulk download mechanism for obtaining data in various formats (numeric, textual, images).

My choice for Zapier was supported by one of the tech experts in our collaboration. Guido had previously worked with Zapier in another initiative and could advise me based on his experience that this one could be a suitable – efficient and easy to use – tool for Memorecord. Zapier can integrate web applications and share data among them automatically with tailored workflows called “zaps” that do not require coding skills. Zaps are like “personal recipes” for if-then processes (i.e. if a new tagged media is shared, then create a new row in Google Sheets). Different tasks can be automated (e.g. a specific one for Facebook and another for Instagram) and run in parallel, helping us through part of the routine work44.

As for the trigger element, key to the activation of the web scraping, we chose to work with a hashtag, a popular kind of metadata tag in a form of a keyword45, with the name of the project: #memorecord46. I believed that using this hashtag would make it easier for people to identify with and follow the project due to the prominent presence of hashtags on social media and beyond (Scott 2018) . The use of hashtags, in fact, dates back to 2007, when after a suggestion made by the Twitter user Chris Messina47, other people started using the symbol on the microblogging platform. The hashtag in front of words was a way to track contents, but it rapidly evolved as a communicative tool, and its use began to be replicated in other web platforms and even in spoken form. Hashtags, at the end of the day, creates the possibility of a conversation to take place among people who would never meet otherwise, we can read it is a type of shared language code. Less than a decade later, specialists would see a range of linguistic (Zappavigna 2015) and pragmatic (Scott 2015) functions for hashtags beyond the primary categorization and searchability. In the academic community of practice, thanks to hashtags, microblogging during conferences and other events have enabled the creation of real-time, non-verbal room for parallel conversations without interrupting the presenters, in a sort of backchannel communication, as observed by Ross et al. (2011) in the case of Digital Humanities conferences. As Twitter became embedded in the daily life of its users, it has gone beyond being a simple backchannel communication. With its global popularization, Twitter and services alike become a sort of “virtual loungeroom” (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns 2013), in more or less sophisticated transmedia context (Jenkins 2006) in which a range of media channels and platforms meet, like when users anticipate/follow-on television shows or engage with news coverage of global events, as during the FIFA World Cups or Olympic Games (Rampazzo Gambarato et al. 2017). An example of how hashtags are used beyond the social media and online realms in Luxembourg is the visual identity of the Grand Duchy’s campaign for the free public transportation announced for 01st March 2020:

Figure 13. Visuals available on the official website mobilitegratuite.lu, alongside the hashtags quoted in the press kit material – #mobilitegratuite, #cestungrandjour and #freemobility

For Memorecord, I have added a clear message on how to participate on the project homepage, highlighting the use to the hashtag #memorecord, as a straightforward way to join the project harvest:

Figure 14. Detail cropped from Memorecord’s home page, slide “Memorecord is a simple hashtag” on the dynamic carousel available at memorecord.uni.lu

Following this process of co-creation of sources, the user-generated content scraped with Zapier was used to create the database that would work as the back-end of the project website. The tailored workflows run with Zapier allow for customization of all the fields of metadata needed from the social networks and automatically list them for every new post entry in a new row on the integrated Google Sheet. Separate tabs were created for Instagram and Facebook with metadata divided in columns accordingly, respecting the different type of data and formats in which the social networks handle their data to third parties48.

Figure 15. Detail of the Google Sheets with the data harvested by Zapier to Memorecord.

Having the material collected, I could assess the relevance of each post to the project, moderate it, if necessary (excluding posts not aimed or not pertinent/proper to Memorecord) and publish them on the project website. For this process, on this back-end, I worked with three different spreadsheets: the source one, with all the material collected; and two edited copies – one intermediary for moderation and annotation; and a last one curated for publication, with a further column containing the link to the post thumbnail to appear on the website embedding.

Going public

Reaching this stage of the work, we can see how in a digital public history setting scholars that are accustomed to a rather lonely research work – amid sources, pieces of writings and long reflections – are propelled into a new breed of work in their routine, that of a jack-of-all-trades. Unavoidably converted into a multitask operative, swapping between desktop work of different crafts, the historian in charge of such a project is more likely to become a hybrid team player, based on a lot of cross-disciplinary negotiation and behavioral shifts, a truly trading zone experience (Kemman 2019, 12) .

In fairness, I must say that until I saw the Memorecord website functioning for the first time, I did not have the real big picture in my mind. Due to many black boxes on the way, the need for help to crack them and the lack of experience in conducting such a hands-on project, I later realised that during the development of the platform the final product was somehow alienated. Only when the website went online and was about to be publicly launched, I understood the full cycle. I could never have been entirely sure of my choices and performance before, without all the tests and exchanges. Hence, the final artwork I introduce at the end of this section came as quite unexpected and positively surprising to me. Despite the uncertainties and lack of skills to carry out all the work alone, everything went came together in the end. At the bottom of the roadmap I have presented in this chapter, we will see how the Memorecord platform was wrapped up for its official kickoff.

Developing outreach strategy

Once the crowdsourcing mechanism was designed, it was time for the activation of the project online. This process would involve a few extra administrative and creative tasks, such as getting ethics approval from the University of Luxembourg Ethics Review Panel (ERP) and developing a plan to promote the project online and offline. While requests for ethics approval most frequently occur in studies involving qualitative methods, consisting in a more standardized process including templates and guidelines49, the wide reach and divulgation of a public history project such as this is somewhat unusual among professional historians. However, as much as they can, historians sometimes delegate the task of promotion to the department’s communication office; in the case of Memorecord, I needed to ensure that the textual and visual aids to the project communication would not sell it as a blockbuster initiative, aimed at any and all publics. It was essential to guarantee a warm invitation for participation.

In the following paragraphs, I summarize my collaboration with the professionals best suited to develop the project visuals, in this case, Emmanuelle Hingray, already mentioned above. Together, we developed communication pieces to spread the message to the target public of the crowdsourcing. The crowdsourcing was aimed at people of all nationalities interested in the subject of migration in Luxembourg, both migrants or descendants and Luxembourgers, willing to share memories about the phenomenon of migration in the Grand Duchy.

The first step was to devise the project brand. For this we began brainstorming to find a simple and suggestive title for the project. Resorting to the oral history tradition of work with memories and recordings, we had a long brainstorming session about the possible titles. One soon emerged as a right candidate from a list of more than 20 names – short, significant, phonetically appealing to the many languages in the Luxembourg Babel and offering good scope for its visual representation: Memocord. In this form, it would carry the prefix Memo- from memory, at the same time that a memo that would remind a note to self, like a post-it for a reminder. Simultaneously, having the suffix –cord, it would refer to the heart, as in its Latin origins, and the act of creating a record, registering something to posterity. The designer was quite enthusiastic about Memocord, and soon she started developing a few ideas for the logotype.

Figure 16. Development of the project logo in collaboration with Emmanuelle Hingray

However, to get the approval of the University Central Communications Department, it was necessary for the brand to first go through their consultant lawyers. The lawyers check the existence of possible ethics, legal or commercial conflicts before giving their clearance for the name/brand use. During this procedure, I learned that because Memocord had a namesake product registered – a brand of recorder and dictation devices from the 1970’s – it would pose legal obstacles for us, even if it was for a non-profit, research initiative. Neither the designer nor I knew this could be a problem. We had actually checked all the names considered before submitting it to the Communications. However, we naively thought that the coincidence was a further motivation to emulate the ancestral device on a new journey linked to registration and memory.

Figure 17. Memocord’s advertisement in the American Bar Association Journal, Chicago, 1974, p. 1430.

To avoid legal hassles, we looked for an alternative that would stick to the meaning of the very first idea – combining memory, recording, notes/memo. This is the short story behind the name/brand that became true: Memorecord.

Figure 18. Memorecord official logo developed by Emmanuelle Hingray

The setback with the name of the project pushed the finalization of the visual identity a bit further, but the bumpiest parts of the road had been overcome. The only thing, again, was depending on the designers’ availability to rework things. While Hingray was finishing the visuals, I worked to finalize the content for the launch of the website, such as translations and proofreading. As the crowdsourcing was open for all the nationalities, not only to the Italian and Portuguese national groups, I decided the five languages should be English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Luxembourgish. The choice to add Luxembourgish language on the website was political and also a way to make a statement about welcoming Luxembourger participants into the collection.

Following the website completion and preparation of the apposite social media profiles on Instagram and Facebook, I reunited again with the designer to create advertisement materials to support the project outreach campaign. We prepared bilingual (FR/EN) flyers and posters for distribution in strategic places; while a few e-flyers (non-printed format) were created in the five languages of the project for later posts on the project channels.

Figure 19. English version of the Memorecord e-flyer

Beyond flyers and posters, Hingray and I created some other gadgets from the project that could be distributed in the launch event and other offline opportunities. We prepared templates for buttons, stickers and a project stamp. While this material was sent for production, I did some e-mail communication using the e-flyers to announce the upcoming launch of the website to all the community members I have been in touch throughout the fieldwork, related associations and stakeholders. During this correspondence, fortunate synchronicity brought together the website launch and the exhibition Memória Episodika, by the luso-descendant artist Edmond Oliveira. Memória Episodika was an artistic presentation of Oliveira’s life in media collages that mixed fragments of memories from different moments of the artist biography. The synergy between our projects resulted in a great exchange, and led to a Memorecord workshop (offline) being held at the exhibition closure, on the 20th May 2018, at the Espace H2O, in Differdange, in the southern part of the country. Because we had activated the website and the social media accounts a few days before this event, the workshop in Differdange became Memorecord’s first offline public event and thereby the official project launch 50.

Figure 20. Animated invitation to the exhibition Memória Episodika, by Edmond Oliveira.

In order to devise the outreach strategy, I had great exchanges and was supported by the personnel at C²DH Communications office. It was especially helpful to count on the know-how of Isabelle Voegeli, who gave me many suggestions on how to spread the word about the project and was, many times, the intermediary contact with the press interlocutors. Likewise, it was a privilege to count on Noëlle Schon who, beyond taking great photographs at events and presentations that helped me to illustrate Memorecord’s posts, assisted me in the publication of Memorecord news on the C²DH website.

Following the exchanges with the communication experts, for the distribution of flyers and posters around the country, I have mapped some hotspots as associations, public libraries, some shops and cafés. Based on my fieldwork experience, I did a greater distribution in areas and neighborhoods I understood to have substantial migrant circulation. At the University campus, as well as during some academic or general events related to migration, I also distributed flyers and hung posters when possible. In adittion, quick interview/tutorial video was posted on social media to boost participation51. The material was also distributed to the headquarters of some cultural organizations and public halls of general interest (e.g. various Maison de la Jeunesse, seniors clubs, communal buildings etc.), including the network and mailing lists of the CDMH, other migrants and at the CDMH facility as well.

Figure 21. Hotspots for distribution of flyers and posters. Detail: Gare and Bonnevoie, Luxembourg City.

Figure 22. Memorecord poster hanging at the entrance of the Comité de liaison des associations d’étrangers (CLAE). Gasperich, Luxembourg Ville, January 2019.

The harvest begins

As the project dissemination began, the first posts tagged with the Memorecord hashtag (#memorecord) started to appear on social networks. The tagged posts were then scraped by Zapier and gathered in our Google Sheets back-end as described above. After completing the due moderation, the confirmed posts were published on the website as inline frames (iframes)52 under the rubric read stories53. Instead of downloading and uploading the full contents of the posts to display them on the Memorecord front-end, the complete post’s media remained on its original social network environment. To their publication as iframes, we only used the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) specified in the Google Sheets tables. This would allow Memorecord visitors to see the stories media as a grid gallery with a preview of image and text. Clicking on a story would render a scrollable pop-up window with the date of publication, the media thumbnail (photo or video) and any accompanying text, hashtags or emojis54, but would not disclose the name (or user id) of the author or commentators on the Memorecord website. To access the full-size image or full-length video, comments and other reactions, visitors would click on the iframes to see the entire content on Facebook or Instagram. Even if we were only working with fully public posts, the use of iframes would preserve participants profiles (picture and username) accessible only from within the social media that originated the post. In this way, any update made in the access policies and privacy setting of Facebook or Instagram after a post was shared would be maintained55.

Figure 23. Detail of a post from Facebook figuring on the Memorecord website.

Conclusions

In this chapter, I described the motivations and the step by step process followed to build this study case on memories of migration in Luxembourg as an empirical exercise on the digital and public history methods. After explaining the importance of the fieldwork and the community sensitization activities to the participatory design of the project, I have described the technical and creative work that followed, highlighting the crucial role of expert collaboration at this stage. Now, the time has come to present the result of this joint endeavor, what we have hitherto imagined as a collectively shaped digital memory platform.

A walk through the #Memorecord platform

Henceforth we will briefly describe the content, fundamental elements and features of each section of the Memorecord website, beginning from an overview of its home page.

Figure 24. The Memorecord homepage, as in https://memorecord.uni.lu/

What we see above is the Memorecord landing page (home rubric), already showing the first line of the harvested stories, with a sneak peek into the story gallery (read stories rubric). On the home page, the designers and I decided to add some dynamic elements that could give a less static look to the website and also introduce very briefly what Memorecord is about. Hence the presence of an animated image in the background and a dynamic carousel displaying short introductory sentences in a loop, changing from “Memorecord is aimed at collecting memories of migration in Luxembourg” to “Memorecord is a simple hashtag” to “Memorecord is a digital memory shoebox”. We also included a video with an introduction (made by me) with a welcome message that includes subtitles of all languages of the website - Portuguese, Italian, French, Luxembourgish and English56. Beyond that, the website footer provides the external links to the project social networks and GitHub repository that hosts the project code. Additionally, the footer includes the project affiliation (logo and link) to C²DH, as well as the acknowledgement to the FNR support.

On the first rubric of the main menu of navigation, under the project, I give the project outline and its academic background, with links to research institutions involved (C²DH and Uni.lu), as well as to a further reference to the FNR and the link to original research proposal submitted to them. Through different formatting resources (i.e. font size, use of bold, title and subtitle), a greater emphasis is placed on the shorter lay presentation at the expense of more scholastic paragraphs. Content is organized in a way that the on the landing screen (without scrolling down) visitors can read:

Memorecord is a digital public history project. It combines community participation and academic research to offer a new perspective on the history of migration in Luxembourg. The project makes use of new communication technologies to approach history in a collaborative way.

This crowdsourcing experiment relies on community participation t? Your memories and personal accounts can help us to understand more about the historical aspects of migration in Luxembourg.

On read stories, right after the project presentation on the main menu, visitors can explore the Memorecord harvest – all the stories collected in the crowdsourcing exercise go to this section of the website. As mentioned above, stories are displayed in a grid of previews, and by clicking on them, a pop-up scrollable window appears showing the complete text. It just requires one to see the post on the original environment where it came from (Instagram or Facebook).

Figure 25. String with stories previews from the Memorecord read stories section, as in https://memorecord.uni.lu/stories/

If we keep navigating the top menu to the right, the last item is the world map, where visitors can check the geo-located posts, zooming in and out to explore the map and check the stories by clicking on the story circles in the map.

Figure 26. View of the world map section, with the preview of a story on Memorecord website, as in https://memorecord.uni.lu/map/

In the submenu, we find more specific information about the project, for instance, the take part section, that explains in more detail how the crowdsourcing functions and why participation matters. Under the same rubric, potential participants are encouraged to participate in the crowdsourcing using offline means by sending a letter to the project curator (myself). The next item in the submenu is the memory harvest, where we list the events in which Memorecord took part. Next in the sub-menu is the ask the historian rubric that brings the researcher profile and offers possibility to email the researcher with one click. The last item on the right edge of the submenu is the privacy note, where visitors can read about the privacy settings of the project and understand how the posts’ data is treated.

An error-prone process

The absence of comprehensive how-to guides for digital public history initiatives makes the development of a project such as Memorecord an error-prone process. Which way to go here, what was the best move there, what tool could do the best and flawless job? Throughout the project, there was no definite answer to these questions but, through collaboration and experimentation, it was possible to critically evaluate the best feasible solution. However, until the very final development phase of the platform, I felt as though I was trying everything with no certainty as to which choices were the most suitable. There was always a risk to be taken. Everything would require a fair investment of time to be completed and if decisions were proven weak or unsuitable later on, it would be at the expense of the smooth running of the process. However, the lack of standard protocols to follow and familiar structures to hold, what one can do is follow her/his best judgment to make reasonable choices and progress, drawing the road map on the way.

In my case, the C²DH environment was a facilitator. The physical proximity I had with the experts I needed to work with made it possible to seek prompt face-to-face chats and easier to arrange proper meetings. This helped to speed up resolutions of more complex issues than if I was to coordinate all over virtual communication. Nevertheless, emails and Slack57 messages were fundamental to start conversations, follow up, and sort out less complicated issues (i.e. doubts about how to execute certain things on the command line, which software to use for specific tasks, fonts and palette colors for ad media and so on). My everyday load became permeated by boundary work, with significant amounts of self-learning, new vocabulary acquired in relation with other disciplines. I also notice a certain incrementation of digital gestures in my repertoire of practices. I ended up naturalising a series of new elements into my routine. Only a little later, starting the reflections for writing of the dissertation and looking back at my (mostly digital) annotations of completed tasks, readings and standing to do’s, I realised how utterly different my daily work was from what I used to do before going fully hands-on in my digital practice58.

Finally, to succeed in completing the error-prone process, I had to fail many times. There were failures of different types and scales, like a big one in the initial conceptualization of the platform CSM (e.g. WordPress did not fulfil potential participants expectations), which posed a considerable detour in rethinking the model and make room for deeper collaboration. There were minor administrative or managerial setbacks (e.g. legal standoff over the Memocord name; or having to wait in a line for the Central Communications review of the website when they have important changes occurring in their office, and everything takes much longer) which still affected the whole workflow and put some things on hold. Even worse, I experienced more technical and punctual issues, like the different unexpected bugs I encountered on the way (e.g. image thumbnail is not showing correctly on the iframe page, what to do?; Date formats are broken on the Google Sheet, hence broken on the website front end, how to solve?).

As much as I have not found a breakthrough solution to anticipate and sidestep the errors, I made my way through the jungle. It might not be the safest, or the fastest, but it gets there. Beyond the fantastic help of colleagues in the collaborations I mentioned in this chapter, my not so magical solution was educating myself on the troubleshooting. For the most complex issues, I would still refer to the experts, but after a while, in the heat of the project development, if I had to wait for their next available slot to discuss all the problems that would appear, not always solely technical, the project would never be done. But then again, there is no such a thing as a manual to become a troubleshooting digital historian or public history practitioner. It requires patience and time, as always, to parse the web for solutions, and actually, searching similar problems usually is the best way to find some answers. Most of the time, for simple technical issues, it is easy to find a clear solution in one place (i.e. expert community forums), however searching for solutions to complex issues might return more pulverized results, leading to a collage of the hints gathered from different sources, as in a MacGyver of do-it-yourself solutions, saving the day with a Swiss Army knife, a duct tape and some matches59.

From my experience in Memorecord, the major obstacle between me, as a non-expert, and the solution was language, independent of problem scale. Without understanding the language, I would spend hours reading questions and responses posted on forums like the Stack Overflow (an open community for developers)60, but I still would not understand everything I needed to do (Where exactly should I paste that piece of code? What is a stylesheet? Where do I find my Javascript library? Do I have one? What does a same-origin-policy stand for?). I was lucky I could drop an SOS line to one of my colleagues at any time, and then, after understanding what I should look for (or where), I would begin to find responses on my own. Hence, language is not only at the core of collaborations, as noted by Kemman and his perception of the emergence of a specific inter-language in the digital history trading zones(Kemman 2019, 154). It is also critical in the digital mediated individual labour of digital historians. Language is the primary tool to crack the technological black boxes. Once one is able to comprehend a new vocabulary, she/he has greater readiness to grasp the solutions for the trivial problems alone. These new skills are more likely to grow as the historian gets used to crossing the disciplinary boundaries and navigating other communities of practice, being able to recognize their idiomatic concepts.

To conclude, I consider it important to stress that along the way, (beyond the challenges I tried to approach in the previous sections), in the day-to-day affairs there was large amount of troubleshooting of different calibers that have now become invisible work. Although I cannot run through the myriad of tiny questions that populated my days, I needed to indicate how I addressed many of the small daily matters without having to reach my ever so busy escort of experts. For most practical dilemmas and problem-solving maneuvers, I benefited immensely from best practices and experiences shared throughout the web – from more generic ones, such as written/ video tutorials and lots of grey literature, to specific criteria and tips for public or digital history projects61. On top of this, I included a lot of internet searches for technological terms, tutorials and blog posts as supportive reading to handle the novelties and try to grasp the peculiar languages. In short, in building this study case, I combined old and new skills, in terms of; archival research, fieldwork, managerial tasks, data curation, administration of social media channels, some kinks in design, public relations and much improvisation, with every single aspect soaked in a generous dose of unpredictability. Ultimately, the unknown turned out to be a propellant for creative solutions, making the digital bricolage, as coined by Frédéric Clavert (2018), the new normal.

Chapter 3: An alysing Digital Methods – A Return to Hermeneutics

At the beginning of our century, the French Historian François Hartog published a seminal work to reflect on the conditions of producing history in the current time in his Regimes d’Historicité (2003), Hartog points out a profound alteration in the way contemporary society perceives the passage of time. Since Hartog’s publication, several studies have claimed that the electronic culture, increasingly ubiquitous, is accountable for the potentisation of the accelerated experience of time that characterises today’s presentism. To Hartog, acceleration is only one of the symptoms of this specific regime of historicity, the increasing attention to historical heritage and related public policies, as well the growing fascination towards the past in the mainstream media are equally meaningful markers of this temporal experience. The transition from the print to the digital age seems to be the momentous shift in which Hartog’s reflections are circumscribed. As early as 2004, Italian historian Dario Ragazzini wrote:

It follows that daily activity - high or low, exceptional or ordinary - leaves information traces, which will be the documents and sources of the future history of our present. As the historiography of an alphabetical culture is different from that of an oral culture, so the historiography of a digital culture will – and already is – different from that of a literal culture. (Ragazzini 2004, vii, translated from Italian by myself)62

As Ragazzini argues, the culture of our time is different and so will be the historical craft. Digital technology – as it has been greatly demonstrated in the advancing realms of digital and public history – enables a vast range of possibilities to interrogate and (re)present the past to our peers and publics. While up to now, new forms of delivering historical knowledge in digital formats have been prominent in digital history and public history research, so far there have been few empirical investigations into the methodological and interpretative dimensions of historical research in the digital age. In this chapter, I discuss, based on insights from the Memorecord case study, how the digital component (Berry 2011, 12) is conditioning historical research in its full capacity.

While the previous chapter had a stronger descriptive emphasis for introducing the Memorecord case study, the present discussion will adopt an analytical pitch, interspersed with some practical suggestions on how we could embrace the challenges of the new conditions of producing historical research in the digital age. To address these challenges, I will reflect upon them as part of this new conditioning inflicted by the digital component and will offer an assessment of what I am designating digital interferences, a series of ontological implications brought by the digital novelties that create interferences on methods and interpretation of history. The intricate relation between the different phases of the historiographical operation – documental, explication, representation – as proposed by Michel de Certeau (1988), may have become commonplace. However, for the discussion proposed in this chapter, the nexus among these different phases is far from trivial. To understand the proportion to which the digital interferences can create disturbances, enabling and disabling heuristic tools for historiography, we need to think about the said operation as a whole system, in which the different phases are all interconnected and bound by interdependencies.

Bearing in mind the internal interdependencies of the historiographical operation, however, is not enough to merely understand how the digital component can shape the historical profession. It is necessary to anchor the micro system of a particular operation into the macro societal cultural environment in which the involved subjects of the given research live. So, even referring to an isolated case study like the one of Memorecord, knowing that it provides a rather specific intel on its context and experience, in this chapter I will purposefully keep a dialogue with broader debates – such as the one on temporality tackled by Hartog, or the transition to the digital culture indicated by Ragazzini – that are fundamental to understand the embeddedness of this case study in this specific time and culture pervaded by the digital component.

To offer a deep reflection on methods and interpretation we need both the clear-cut focus of said approach and the bigger picture in which this could be developed – the historian’s individual resources and positioning, institutional background, available infrastructure & expertise, and, finally, the glocal context of it (Noiret and Cauvin 2017, 26)63. Beyond highlighting the innovation proposed by an experiment with the digital and presenting the outcomes of a project, as I just discussed in the previous chapter, it is fundamental to look at the process on its own, often a non-linear progress, considering its successes and failures. The very epistemological notions of historical discipline might be at stake, and we will only be able to look at it within historicity if we pay attention to innovations, of course, but also to the established tradition’s readiness to welcome the new practices and ways of thinking. The friction between old and new organising principles of scientific historical thinking before and after the digital turn, as I will argue, is at the core of digital scholarship (lack of) acceptance.

In this manner, the analysis proposed in this chapter should help to bring forward the dialectical tacking between tradition and innovation in digital history’s historiography, which I discuss under the notion of hybridisation. As the process of hybridisation unfolds, I propose to reflect on digital history and digital public history approaches, beyond the hype and reiterating debates about new challenges and definitions of computational techniques, but as systems that include new forms of narratives, methods and interpretation that are subjected to digital interferences.

Both digital history and digital public history, I argue, need strong footholds within the vast tradition of critical reflection and understanding, for which, I suggest a return to hermeneutics and more specifically digital hermeneutics as hermeneutics of practice - a theory of practices that allows us to critically reflect on the theoretical and artisanal challenges of our digital work and devise practical solutions to face them. In the following sections, I will constantly zoom in and out from the empirical exercise of building Memorecord, in an attempt to bridge the points of reflection offered by my hands-on experiment with the far-reaching discussion on digital public history, historiography and what we do as historians today.

The experimental ethos

To build an understanding of digital hermeneutics as a hermeneutics of practice in the digital history realm, we need to consider the experimental ethos that pervades Digital Humanities as a whole and sprinkles across digital history too. Typically central to the hard sciences, the eagerness for experimentation seems to have also been spread amidst digital practitioners across different disciplines in the humanities and social science domains. The emergence of an experimental approach trend may be related, in its core, to the newness of the digital and the uncertainties it brings. The need to find out what is possible, how to do it, the perks and flaws of a precise tool or environment, all lead to the need for testing and trying things out, using different solutions, just as I did in Memorecord’s crowdsourcing, as discussed in Chapter 1. The unknown, hence, seems to call for a return to trial and error which gradually introduce a laboratory ethos (Lane 2016, 2) to those in the humanities that join the digital adventure.

While it is true that a learning by doing or “doing as thinking” (Drucker 2012, 87) mode became somewhat necessary in the making and training of the (new) digital practitioners, before moving reflection on the economy of hands-on work with the digital, we should not lose sight that the use of terms like laboratory and data, or other borrowings from the sciences that concurs for a “scientification of humanities”, as argued by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger (Pawlicka 2017, 527), is inscribed in a broader context of “crisis of the humanities” in which a “practice turn” was proposed as a response to the contingencies in the broader field of humanities and social sciences (527-528).

In 2010, Martha C. Nussbaum had already signalled a silent crisis in the humanities. In her book Not for Profit – Democracy needs the Humanities, speaking mostly about the American context, Nussbaum identifies the core of the problem being the shift from an education for a civic and empathetic formation to a model which is rather economically driven and expects students to be productive instead of becoming competent democratic citizens. For the philosopher, this situation could have an impact of enormous proportions at a global level, endangering the very future of democracy (Nussbaum 2010, 19–20). Other authors see the recent attacks to the humanities rather as a crisis of the sense of the humanities in itself, in need for rediscussing and redefining its object (García 2017). Without drifting too deeply into the history and philosophy of science, one could follow Rosi Braidotti in her arguments that the neoliberal social climate is accountable for the overall downgrade of Humanistic studies (Braidotti 2013, 11).

To offer further consideration on this crisis might be a rather long digression for this introductory section, however, it is important to bear in mind a few nuances in the crisis debate. I understand the dynamics of this crisis to be intrinsically related to the ideology of do it (Peran 2016) and the SmartPolitics of neoliberalism in its digital age expression (Han 2017, 36). There is a broader discussion with big words on “Capitalism of…”, “Society of…”, “Polítics of…” to describe the world in which we now live as discussed in Chapter 1, but for now it is necessary to simply signal that the ethics debates I engage with in this thesis are rooted in the critique of the capitalism of transparency, the habits, rhetorics and modes of control it engenders64.

Having said that, let’s consider that there is some elasticity in the discussion about the possible causes of the crisis in the humanities, some with more apocalyptic perceptions than others. To avoid the risk of taking a Manichaean analysis of this situation for the humanities at large, there are at least two in-depth manifestos that dialogue with the recent struggles of higher education worldwide: Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times by Sidonie A. Smith (2015) and the Arts and Humanities in Progress: A Manifesto of Numanities, by Dario Martinelli (2016). Both address the neoliberal values influencing the research agenda and the commercialisation of research activities: Those texts are self-critical and try to avert the shortest way of “blaming the system” (Martinelli 2016, 01). Smith sets an optimistic mantra in the beginning of her manifesto, stating that “ ‘the times are good enough’ to make significant changes in how future humanists are educated” (2015, 01) and refers to profound shifts in the ecology of higher education that:

relate to the evolving concept of university; the epistemic infrastructure, the new media and modes of scholarly production and communication; the trend toward the ‘open’. the reorientation of learning environments; and the emergent profile of a possible posthuman humanities scholar (Smith 2015, 01–02)

Martinelli’s manifesto also displays a rather encouraging tone:

In fact, while ‘crisis’ is the term that many scholars refer to, when they analyse the current condition of the humanities, one should also keep in mind that the word should be taken not only in its negative connotation but in a more comprehensive, etymological sense (that is, Greek krisis, which rather means ‘selection, judgement, turning point.). In other words, a crisis is a precondition for evolution (Martinelli 2016, 12)

From the point of view of a rather hybrid scholar, Blaine Greteman also indicates constructive points of reflexion on the opportunities of the crisis, ironically grounding the current “crisis” in a broader six-hundred-year history. In his stinging opinion text, It’s the End of the Humanities as We Know It. And I Feel Fine he provokes: “Like a consumptive protagonist in a Victorian novel the humanities have been dying for a long, long time” (Greteman 2014). Greteman, himself a scholar who is witnessing the transition to digital that we are experiencing, also sees the need for adaptation to the new difficult times and claims it as a natural development of the humanities. He alludes to the historicity of dramatic discourses about the crisis of the humanities and recalls a text that appeared on The New Republic in the 1970’s: “ ‘English,’ wrote poet, professor, and editor Reed Whittemore, ‘is going down the drain.’” Gretemen continues:

In fact, the humanities have been going down that drain since at least 1621, when Robert Burton blamed their decline for the rampant disease of melancholia attacking scholars of his generation (...) Lately, the prime culprits in this deathbed scene are either out-of-touch traditionalists, who refuse to adapt to a changing world and “instruct students in contemporary media platforms,” or digital humanists chasing new trends and succumbing to “the language of salesmanship” instead of defending the tradition.

I am probably doubly culpable: I published a scholarly tome at the world’s oldest press, and I currently lead a team that is data mining over 487,000 book records and building a website reconstructing and visualising the social networks of Shakespeare, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and their peers. I really do wear tweed, but I also tweet at my pijama-wearing students when I’m not harping on them to turn off their damn phones and bring their books to class. Mea culpa. (Greteman 2014)

Greteman is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa and head of digital projects like Linked Reading: A New Scalable Model for the Digital Humanities65, that “involves elements of close, distant, and scalable reading, but it adds a new dimension: that of linked reading, or the creation of new interpretive possibilities by the joining of humanistic datasets” and Shakeosphere – Mapping early modern social networks66, that “gathers metadata about authors, publishers, booksellers, and printers for nearly half a million texts printed from 1473 to 1800”.

Not by chance, one of Greteman’s projects, Linked Reading, is part of the Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry, a “multi-year experiment with a variety of collaborative practices in the humanities” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2015-2018)67. The Digital Bridges overview pages reads:

Through our experiments in collaboration, we seek not only to respond to the market’s demands for technical know-how and team-building, but also to sustain the best of the humanities—reflection, interpretation, historical context, culturally diverse explorations of multiple points of view, and the pursuit of understanding the world in all its diversity. (Digital Bridges, About us, Overview, emphasis added by myself)

This kind of response to the “market’s demands” – or to the crisis in the humanities – can eloquently illustrate Matthew Kirschenbaum Gold’s notion that “digital humanities as/is a tactical term” (Gold 2012, 415) without questioning the intellectual integrity of the various projects, laboratories and initiatives that continue arising with similar scopes and goals – movement in which I can also situate the funding and development of Memorecord, although, in this case leaning towards of digital history. Turning back to Braidotti’s view of the crisis mentioned above, Gold’s reflexion about the (digital) humanities, could be seen as a way out of the pressure of the neoliberal politics that connects the university to the marketplace:

To assert that digital humanities is a “tactical” coinage is not simply to indulge in neopragmatic relativism. Rather, it is to insist on the reality of circumstances in which it is unabashedly deployed to get things done – “things” that might include getting a faculty line or funding a staff position, establishing a curriculum, revamping a lab, or launching a centr. At a moment when the academy in general and the humanities, in particular, are the objects of massive and wrenching changes, digital humanities emerges as a rare vector for jujitsu, simultaneously serving to position the humanities at the very forefront of certain value-laden agendas – entrepreneurship, openness and public engagement, future-oriented thinking, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, big data, industry tie-ins, and distance or distributed education – while at the same time allowing for various forms of intrainstitutional mobility as new courses are approved, new colleagues are hired, new resources are allotted, and old resources are reallocated. (Gold 2012, 415–16)

The reference to the Japanese martial art jujitsu in this context is expressive. In a free translation from the Japanese jūjutsu, Jū means “softness”, “mildness”, “flexibility” and jutsu, “art”, “technique”. This specific kind of fight is known to use lever strike, twist and pressure techniques to take down and dominate an opponent. In action, opponents use the whole body as a combat tool and also intend to benefit from the opponent’s body too, using their energy and body, through projections, immobilisation and so on. Through this combat analogy, considering digital humanities tactical in the larger context of the crisis does not imply any cynicism with regard to the ethics of those in the field, it rather tells us about their craftiness to balance their efforts to adapt to the new times with the proper resistance and flexibility. To do so, on the one hand, scholars of various generations engage with the digital, rethinking approaches, curricula, producing new artefacts and accepting new objects/materials as work matter for humanistic studies. On the other hand, they might also need to adapt and comply with the exigency of the DH funders that expect impact, high interdisciplinarity, high levels of engagement and market-consciousness (Opel and Simeone 2019). To a greater extent, more funders have “performance-based expectations that are best addressed by an entrepreneurial approach” (Thorp and Goldstein 2010, 10). All of this pushes for a more technical and entrepreneurial discourse and Dawn Opel and Michael Simeone have noted, “[i]nevitably, the paradigm of funding shapes the kind of work that is done and the tools and methods that are used.” (Opel and Simeone 2019).

What I want to highlight by bringing forward the above-mentioned aspects of the aforementioned crisis in the humanities is the non-neutrality of the responses to those pressures in research as a whole. There is, indeed, a real interest for new methods and tools that is increased by the digital, but we must keep in mind that the universities struggle for funding, especially in the humanities, and when coupled with the discoverability enthusiasm and, just as technology does, it enables and disables certain types of research. In this context, the commitment and/or opportunity to try something new may happen in different scales, with minor or larger interferences in the daily routine of the researchers involved, impacting workflows and agendas in different ways across departments and research groups, increasingly represented in the digital humanities by labs and project teams, both geographically and institutionally centred and dispersed, host small or large-scaled projects (Lane 2016). A common aspect, in general, is the underlying need for experimenting and learning from the unusual, be it in trying out another way of writing, thinking through, communicating, presenting results and/or even designing a research project since its primary motivations and questions.

Memorecord, for instance, subscribes to the group of projects that, by means of experimentation in digital public history methods, experienced the interferences and conditionings of the digital in its whole development. As described in Chapter 2, the project design was collaborative by means of participatory-design and the whole shape of the Memorecord platform was influenced by the involvement of the community in the thinking through the process. Not only the technical creation of the platform, which concerned more directly the community of interest but the very conceptualisation of the project in terms of who my audience was, which languages to use, which tools will do a better job, using or not using social media, how to promote the crowdsourcing and so on.

Hands-on work & Thinkering

In 1988, Gregory R. Crane, Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Digital Library68, advocated for the emergence of a “new research that does not look like old research” which leads to the situation in which “we desperately – desperately – need experimentation as we explore and seek to understand a radically new space” (as quoted in Lane 2016, 01). Perseus was a pioneering experiment on what became one of the most remarkable digital library projects. Dedicated to classical Greek and more recent Roman writings, Perseus is worth mentioning here for its breadth, having lived through excitement of the digital advent and the bumps of the recent crisis in the humanities. It was conceived of as early as 1985, with development initiated in 1986 through a “Director’s Grant” from the Annenberg Foundation, a capacity-building funding that enabled the technical details of the software and hardware configuration to be further explored. Back then, according to Richard L. Lane, the funding proposal was seen to be technologically ahead of its time, ahead of the development of the microcomputer itself (Lane 2016, 36). Revisiting the story of this long-term project in his book Big Humanities: digital humanities/digital laboratories, Lane analyses the origin of the project and shows how some characteristics of digital humanities today were already constitutive of the project at the time, like the scaled-up nature of projects, in terms of goals, time and team, or the interdisciplinary and collaborative dimension of the team-work69. The constant updates of the project add up to unmissable ingredients for digital humanities projects, that can continually evolve and display variations in a much easier way than non-digital research in the Big Humanities published in the form of printed volumes, within which the publication can also mean the conclusion of research – mostly carried out less collaboratively and more individually – and, consequently, of funding. Having a project as a basic unit is one of the outstanding digital aspects of digital humanities (Burdick et al. 2012), and it comes in all shapes and sizes, nevertheless, keeping in its core some characteristics from Perseus that I just mentioned, but not all of them:

Projects are both nouns and verbs: A project is a kind of scholarship that requires design, management, negotiation, and collaboration. It is also scholarship that projects, in the sense of futurity, as something which is not yet. Projects are often pursued in teams, with collaborators bringing complementary skill-sets and interests to conceptualise the research questions being investigated and design possible trajectories for them to be answered. Hence, projects are projective, involving iterative processes and many dimensions of coordination, experimentation, and production. (Burdick et al. 2012, 124)

Not all the projects, however, have to be like Perseus to belong in the digital humanities. Their profile may vary from case to case, taking into account a range of variants that will depend on the specifics of each project’s fabrication(e.g. origin and duration of funding, infrastructure and expertise available). Although in a general evaluation, it can be said that the great majority of digital projects are born amid a “culture of project” (note 63) and tied to opportunities, but also pressures of funding schemes.

Research has shown that the digital humanities engage with information technology and the digital in a variety of forms. The trend for practice we will see, is prominent. Under the big tent of digital humanities Patrik Svensson identifies five paradigmatic modes of engagement which are elucidatory for our discussion on digital (public) history too: [1] the digital as a tool; [2] as an object of study; [3] as an exploratory laboratory; [4] as an expressive medium; and [5] as an activist venue (Svensson 2016; 2010). In the case of Perseus, which we could consider is in the pre-history of my hands-on work, with Memorecord, the fourth mode is outstanding, given its intrinsic library function. However, in the years to come, while implementing new features, one could say that the other modes also ended up overlapping at a certain point, as the experimentation kept introducing new possibilities. In Memorecord, as I tried to show in the previous chapter, beyond and despite collaboration, my personal engagement with the digital component was decisive to the performance of the project. All five of Svensson’s modes of engagement were set in motion. The least prominent aspect would be the activist venue, but the public history overture and the implementation of a participatory design played a role in this mode of engagement as well. If I were to identify the point of convergence in the building of Memorecord, it would be from the grant application until the phase where the project finally went public was experimentation.

Experimentation has been is the key engine of the evolving field of digital humanities and what, in fact, discloses the real alternatives; new ways of scholarship that became a tactical currency in the 21st Century, deeply valuable to escape the humanities crisis and indispensable in dealing with the novelties brought by the digital component and its ubiquity (e.g. online conversation, born-digital material, big data, machine learning etc.). While some authors reflecting along the same lines put emphasis on the “exploratory laboratory” in digital humanities (Svensson 2010) or in labs as “new spaces of humanistic inquiry” (Lane 2016, 1), I prefer to prioritise reflection on the notion and value of experimentation in the discipline of history. Experimentation might have laboratories as its place par excellence, but it may also find space elsewhere. In the following pages, I will focus on the action of experimenting as a founding gesture for an updated theory of practices for the discipline of history, that I want to phrase in terms of hermeneutics of practice, borrowing from digital humanities sources as well as philosophy and history of science.

Diving into the value of hands-on work and the thinkering process in the emergence of a certain theory of practice invites us to turn the way we think we do historical research in the digital age upside down. For this, I will discuss how modes of engagement with the digital have been laden with technical and practical aspects, while, traditionally, historians begin their inquiry from a research question, a rather abstract mental apparatus, charged, in its own right, by theoretical assumptions. Through thinkering, I will argue, we can equate this apparent imbalance in favour of historical-critical thinking, proposing an active self-reflective posture on the various interferences of the digital in our research endeavour. I believe this fine-tune of thinking and doing in a creative and critical way may help us to improve digital scholarship and claim its rigour. Identifying the interferences of the digital in the historiographical operation and finding a way to bring our reflection and critical posture forward in an intelligible way for all the peers, inclusive of those not into digital, might be a way to defend what we do in digital history as simply history. History that can be done not only in the form of a textual discourse, as it has long been the case, but with a different style – a style of reasoning, or of scientific thinking and doing, or simply put as a way of finding out’ (Hacking 1992; 1983; 1994; 2004; 2012) that includes other signs and gestures. And for which there is, I argue, an updated methodology that takes into account the digital interferences in its ontology and epistemology.

Philosopher of Science, Ian Hacking, develops the idea of styles of (scientific) reasoning or scientific thinking and doing ever since an encounter with the historian of science, Alistair C. Crombie, in a conference in Pisa, in 1978, where Crombie delivered a talk on the Philosophical Assumptions and Shifting Interpretations of Galileo (Crombie 1980). Since then, Hacking has been reflecting on what he has most recently defined as simply as the “project of styles” (Hacking 2012). Years after the conference, he kept building upon the meticulous three-volume work of that what Crombie himself, called a “comparative historical anthropology of thought”, the Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts (Crombie 1994). Hacking turned Crombie’s template of six distinct styles of scientific thinking into a philosophical tool to devise a genre of ways of finding things out, a genre that has its own personality and time, and that may, likewise, disappear with time. Hacking argues that each style of reasoning:

introduces a number of novel types of entities [objects; evidence; sentences, new ways of being a candidate for truth or falsehood; laws, or at any rate modalities; and possibilities] (…) Take objects. Every style of reasoning is associated with an ontological debate about a new type of object. (…) Each style of reasoning has its own existence debate (2004, 189)

Hacking claims, furthermore, that every style of reasoning will become a standard of objectivity for getting us to the truth of a sentence. To the philosopher, the sentences introduced by styles of reasoning are:

things that were quite literally never said before. That is hardly unusual. That is what lively people have been doing since the beginning of the human race. What’s different about styles is that they introduce new ways of being a candidate for truth or for falsehood. (…) they introduce new kinds of “positivity,” ways to have a positive truth value, to be up for grabs as true or false.

By getting us to the truth of a sentence, styles of reasoning may become standards of objectivity and, in this way, they can be seen as “in a certain sense ‘self-authenticating’” (2004, 191). Altogether, the conditions that Hacking describes as essential to the emergence of styles of reasoning, seem to me, very relatable to what we face currently in digital history. One of the first signs is the existential debate, but it is possible to draw other parallels. I think about the novelties introduced by the digital component that are of interest to historians, for example, objects like the digital-born materials. And I can also imagine digital visualisation being consider as an evidence. In seeking objectivity in the process of dealing with these novelties, for instance, it is not difficult to imagine that digital source criticism could become a recurring sentence. Finally, Hacking summarises that each style will “introduce novelties of most or all of the listed types, and should do so in an open-textured, ongoing, and creative way” (idem, 190)

I would like to propose that digital history is a potential new style of reasoning, among other styles within history. I mean potentially because, so far, it seems that the new sentences have not yet being effectively become standards of objectivity. This might be, to a certain extent, a natural expression of what I presume is the inception moment of this style of reasoning in which practices are not yet shared and stabilised evenly within the interested communities of practice. Following Hacking’s philosophy of technology that studies “the ways in which the styles of reasoning provide stable knowledge and become not the uncoverers of objective truth but rather the standards of objectivity.” (idem, 198). In his later work, Hacking emphasised also styles of thinking and doing, but I will keep from now on the label “style of reasoning”, which seems to me closer to the necessary conjugation we see in thinkering (to tinker and to think) and to what we try to do when making a science that is not exact, like history – we try to be reasonable. Further on, I will develop what I mean by the possibility of us seeing the emergence of a specific style of reasoning in history – the style of reasoning of or about or in or within digital and digital public history – and why I believe it can help us to reach wider peer appraisal for digital history scholarship and obtain some stability to the techniques we are using within this specific style of reasoning.

Figure 27. Internet meme image on an old trick to enhance the signal of analogue TV.

The notion of interference might be familiar in the household of those among us who are fans of radio and TV. In one of its definitions, by the Cambridge Dictionary, interference is noise: “On the radio, television, or telephone, interference is noise, lines, etc., that prevent a clear sound or picture from being received.”70 If we want to get things clear again, we either need to eliminate the cause of interference or wait for it to pass, (e.g. if there was a massive storm interrupting the signal and we wait for it to stop) or there could be a mysterious physical reason for the interference (e.g. pigeons resting in the wrong place) and we need to find it out or, last case, look for another frequency, change the channel. Another solution could also be in getting a greater equipment, changing antennas or improving its capacity with some do-it-yourself solution. Anyhow, when the cause of the noise is persistent and we cannot eliminate it, we need to take some action to sort it out, if a new frequency does not solve it, perhaps we need to improving the receiver apparatus. Apart from the most explicit natural, meteorological reasons, causes of interference are often not immediately apparent. In a domestic context, when something like that happens, we go through a few things, trying out a few tricks to discover whether tinkering here or there could make the noise go away.

Since, in the context of digital history, historians cannot simply eliminate the digital itself, which is the main component causing interferences in research practices, my argument is that we should find ways to deal with the noises. As in the situation we just imagined, it has to be through some trial and error process71. Trial and error has led us to think about the context of an experiment, which involves observation, reasoning and action. In this thesis, while addressing digital interferences in a general way, I refer to details in the Memorecord experiment to illuminate my observations about the noises and allow myself to risk a few suggestions of actions to deal with the interferences when we decide to work with the digital but cannot, of course, eliminate their disturbances. The old trick of the steel wool on the antenna, was a simple exercise of thinkering – a gesture, a mental attitude and reflection that can help us to find solutions, to think otherwise. I believe that, in the context of digital research, we will, more and more, need to live our experiments through thinkering to be able to seize the interferences of the digital in our work. Thinkering, as a heuristic trigger gesture, shall help us to mitigate the noises in our research. But in this case, noise and interference should not have a negative connotation, they should instead, be taken as indicators, symptoms that something is outside the norm; the norm, in this case, being the traditional conventions for historiographic critique and source criticism. Noise, in this case, could become the new normal soundscape for researchers working with the digital. To avoid overwhelming prognostics, one could think about ways to incorporate disturbances in a creative way in their research practices.

Digital as a tool and a methodology, hence with a sensible emphasis on the utilitarian aspect of it, has been a primary principle for organising early humanities computing. Modelling, however, has gained relevance in the broader debates in the digital humanities community as it has grown and more researchers were appropriating tools and computing capacity, intervening and manipulating, modelling (McCarty 2007; 2014). Some authors argue that discussing the centrality of tool paradigm over modelling thinking might not be as fruitful as discussing the need to integrate the hack and yack perspectives (e.g. making and saying, theory and method) in a critical way72. However, despite the recent plea for more holistic approaches in the lines of “building as a way of knowing” (Watrall 2016; Drucker 2009, 31), the divide between builders and theorisers is yet to be reduced (Spiro 2012; Pannapacker 2012; 2013; Cecire 2012). In this context, more and more, the different modes of engagement with the digital are becoming blurred, but not quite so integrated yet. The most fortuitous approach, and here I follow Svensson’s perspective, lies in conjugating rather than splitting practical work and critical thinking:

Where they come together [these modes], we will likely find some of the most interesting future work. Separating critical studies of the digital from the building and development of technological structures is particularly unfortunate. The digital humanities have the potential to bring together data, tools, expressions, and research questions, in the process making significant contributions. (Svensson 2016)

Reaching the conjunction of practice and theory, assembling tools, data and environments in the analytical prism seems to be on the research agenda of the third wave of digital humanities, as argued by David Berry (2011, 04). To do so, a multimodal literacy and criticism needs to be in place. Beyond what I already considered above on the gesture of thinkering, I also agree with Willard McCarty (2014) on the heuristic potential of modelling as a guesswork resource for building and thinking. In terms of technical skills, however, I do not think along the deterministic technical view that historians need to become computer experts, capable of developing a software piece by themselves, experimenting in collaborative settings like trading zones could dispense the need for such a high training and specialisation expectation73. Historians should still be historians, but to work digitally we need locate “a hermeneutics at the boundary between mechanism and theory” (Ramsay 2011, X).

Figure 28. The article by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “La fin des érudits”, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 May 1968.

Tarah McPherson suggests digital humanities should have “at least a passing familiarity with code languages, operating systems, algorithmic thinking, and systems design”. She goes on proposing a combination of “database literacies, algorithmic literacies, computational literacies, interface literacies”. (McPherson 2011, 35). McPherson is among the most militant voices in this critical turn, and also argues that we do not need to become computer experts, but it is necessary to acquire the capabilities to use the digital affordances and to criticise, properly, the digitally mediated work; I reckon, to do it thoroughly, at the same time, a self-reflexive approach is a must. In this direction, I very much like Berry’s quest for a super-critical-thinking “that is generative of ideas, modes of thought, theories and new practices” (Berry 2011, 08).

On paper, these ideas do not seem so complicated, and literature may not be as abundant as the previous phases of digital humanities, but it certainly provides terrific insights. However, to ensure a truly far-reaching critical turn beyond the practice one, aiming at a glocal perspective, we need more than ideas and qualified people – assuming something different would mean that many great scholars around the world are not producing digital scholarship good enough simply because they are, somehow, of lesser intelligence. That is not measurable, but for sure, we can logically enough discard such a generalisation of dumbness. I suppose, on another perspective, that the most challenging ingredient here is a specific context to allow this turning point; a special context that could permit the most favourable circumstances to be met for ensuring critical work under the interferences and conditionings of the digital.

In other words, a crucial context in which an emerging style of reasoning could mature and blossom; reasoning that, as I contend here, is intrinsically anchored in the pedagogies of building and doing – hence, hands-on work and thinkering. We will, of course, need people (and to train more people) and ideas, but, we will need them to be organised in a certain environment, in a certain way, endowed with certain resources and, last but not least, tuned in to a certain mindset. Here again, I think about Certeau’s cautionary call about the “double function of the place” (Certeau 1988, 68). Of course, the greater and fairest circumstances depend on funding as well, which can be as uncontrollable as the team mindset or tomorrow’s weather, however, if we know in which direction we want to go, we can aim for the fairer and look out for directional guidance.

Figure 29. : Illustration. Wooden Fingerposts, Source: Saxonia monumentis viarum illustrata 1726, by Carl Christian Schramm. Wikimedia Commons.

Harmoniously combined, and actively shared within the involved communities of practice (Wenger 2000; Klein 2014) the above mentioned – ever-evolving – technical skills and engaged critical thinking – that, in its turn, characterises historical thinking – could develop into being a powerful practical-analytical virtual apparatus for historical research in the digital age74. I believe that the application of such practical-analytical ways of making digital history already exists, although, still seldom and scattered in the digital history scholarship realm. In his study about the trading zones of digital history, Max Kemman, for instance, identified some digital history brokers among the historians who, at a micro level collaboration “chose to engage intensively with computational experts” and “who exemplified significant shifts in practices” (Kemman 2019, 30)75. From Kemman’s studies, we can read digital history brokers as great team players within the project framework:

Brokers conducted project management; coordinated practices from archival and library domains such as data collection, transformation, and description; learned about the potential and limitations of computational technologies and where to apply these; employed inter-languages to translate between the different collaborating domains; and finally transformed historical questions into infrastructural problems. (Kemman 2019, 30)

To bridge the gap between thinking and doing and dissolve the apparent opposition between hack and yack it seems necessary to create circumstances that allow emerging practices to be significantly shared among historians in the ranks of digital history; such is the crucial context in which an emerging style of reasoning could, perhaps, emerge and authenticate itself.

Arguing with Kemman, this is a job for brokers, to unite the two-sided trading zone of digital history – the computer experts (the digital) and the historians (the history). Kemman divides the interactions between the digital and the history in three levels. On the macro level of engagement with computer experts, Kemman suggests that “historians” would refer to “the entire discipline as a global community of practice” (2019, 200). On this level, infrastructural tensions were not (yet) solved and “rather than transforming historical scholarship, the challenge is to provide infrastructures in a way that fits existing practices”. Historians in this level of interaction, hence, are arguably not the most likely to apply the practical-analytical way of making digital history; they rather stick to the current practices where this gap persists. On the meso level, “historians” referred to “all historians engaged in trading zones of digital history” and “the effect of interactions was dependent on individual decisions and incentives.” (idem). On this level, however, due to individual subjectivities – i.e. attitude towards risk taking, preference to maintenance of disciplinary practice – after learning new practices, historians remained aligned with traditional practices, “changing practices were regularly not in the direction of computational practices, but to incentives of politics or funding.” (idem). And, finally, on the micro level, “historians” would choose to “engage intensively with computer experts”, hence, this seems to be the most suitable level of interaction for the emergence of digital history brokers and significant shifts in practices.

Kemman was my first office mate at C²DH, and in his study, he saw the potential of digital history brokering in an environment like C²DH. However, the readiness to brokerage would not just “happen” homogeneously through projects and teams, it would still depend a lot on individual choices and subjectivity. Hereunder, drawing on Kemman’s conclusion of digital history brokering as infrastructuring I will attempt to illustrate what I believe, could be the crucial context for the emergence of a shared collection of practices that could help to fill the gap between hack and yack and support the advance or democratisation of digital history scholarship in a more sustainable way – through, perhaps, the establishment of a new style of reasoning – rather than through the detachment of isles of innovation and brokering. C²DH could be judged by some as this sort of isle. However, I believe that C²DH’s brokering emerged from the great interactions between old and new practices that found a home there because the centre brings together a critical mass with an overture and encouragement to experimentation and hybridity.

Moreover, C²DH’s management team was determined to make room for and support the playful, creative and critical association of old (analogical, offline) and new digital skills for historical research. Beyond counting on the support of the Digital History Lab, team trainings, a series of lectures, workshops and even special prizes were created to inform and incentivise the hands-on and thinkering approach76. With the label of laboratory of historical uncertainty, C²DH entered the map of digital and digital public history not as an isle of innovation, but as an agora at the very crossroads of tradition and innovation, analogical and digital, old and past practices. We could think of such crossroads as the incorporation of the hermeneutics of in-betweenness (Ramsay 2011; Fickers 2021). These crossroads inspired me to propose, hereunder, an exercise of imagination to reach the crucial context in which a new style of reasoning could emerge. The metaphor of crossroads, in this case, comes with the encounter of (at least) two main roads that we shall read as vectors to achieve the most favourable circumstances for what we aim as a crucial context77.

A crossroads for digital history scholarship: heuristic triggers

Figure 30. Illustration, “Encruzilhadas” (Crossroads). Photo collage of sixteen different types and designs of crossroads around the world. By Barbara Menezes

By summoning the metaphor of crossroads and the idea of a crucial context here, I do not mean we can reach a guaranteed solution. I aim, pragmatically, at an ideal scenario. It is very unlikely that my imagined crossroads for digital history would be feasible everywhere because there is a wide range of uncontrollable issues that do not depend solely on the researcher. Moreover, we have not yet seen a model that could be considered a “success formula”. The heterogeneity of practices, institutions and project designs is so vast and positive for research that it makes it hard and maybe counterproductive to sketch a “roadmap to success”. In every country and local context, realities bring different possibilities and constraints. In Brazil, for instance, there is no currently institutional environment with some kind of organisation (i.e. study group, lab, centre) dedicated specifically to digital history. As Dilton Maynard recently noted, in Brazil, most of the experimentation is happening in the context of teaching activities, hence, in his view, classrooms of basic education could be considered the true laboratory of digital history in Brazil (Maynard 2019). What I propose is not a manifesto or code of values, but an exercise for us to think about what pragmatic conditions could favour digital history scholarship to flourish. In short, I handle these crossroads rather as heuristic triggers than universalising solutions or values. Hereunder, a few prompts:

Openness:
Openness can be presented in manifold ways, but I emphasise two, which I believe, can help to further promote this openness First, it is fundamental to share details about research processes, and this should become more recurrent and systematic. Results, even when accompanied by eventual codes and datasets are not enough without the due contextualisation. In the same way metadata is important to seize any digital material, a critical thick description of the project development context(s) is paramount to the understanding and appraisal of digital scholarship. Understanding the researcher’s positioning and subjectivity, being aware of some of her/his idiosyncrasies and having a record of some important decision-making processes along the way might seem unnecessary to research methods that are rather established and have one or more stable frameworks to refer to, but in such a shaky ground like digital history, the more [contextualisation] the merrier; hence, in Chapter 2, my plea for a movement of documenting the process. Secondly, the background of this ideal context needs to be one of open science, not only in terms of access and circulation of knowledge but also in terms of mindset and the abouts when/where/who in the production of knowledge. And from here we shall turn to public history, and the role of historians in the public space. What does it mean to be out and about? Much has been discussed among public historians, but I believe that a fair starting point for this answer is about the willingness to be open and public – scholars at this crossroads can no longer remain isolated in the Ivory Tower, they must be alert – looking at the fast traffic around them, the bypassers, the ordinary life. In this metaphor, they need to pay more attention to the surroundings beyond their personal worldviews and institutional values, not only what they can see from the top of their very own towers, but to seek other perspectives and alternative paths.
Collaboration:
Improving existing and enabling further trading zones in digital history78 where historians can, more and more, learn from computing experts, designers, data scientists or other communities of practice about the aspects of their digital work that go beyond the strictly historiographical expertise (e.g. technical/computational aspects, like how to install a Content Management System or how to pre-process a corpus for text-modelling, but also more sociological and cultural features that many historians’ may not be quite acquainted with, I am thinking even about communication and marketing – like Search Engine Optimisation strategy – or even project management). As I tried to demonstrate in the description of Memorecord, collaboration was crucial to the accomplishment of the platform and enabled me to grasp many elements that seemed way too far from my previous research experience, that was not done in public, nor in a collaborative environment and had no room for hands-on working. For instance, I could learn from a colleague how to run script to update the website gallery, but I could not write the script from scratch. There are, thus, some parts of the work that can be shared and others that will be mostly carried by the experts, however, by working closely together, fewer parts of this work will be at risk of becoming alien to the researcher. Collaboration should foster iterative work and provide safety nets for experimentation. In such an environment, the porosities between disciplinary boundaries can widen and favour either development of more boundary objects or better conditions for interaction expertise. Finally, imagining the multiple digital artefacts originated from digital work as boundary objects could actually be fortuitous to scaffold the heterogeneous work setting and mitigate the conflicts that might arise from the diversity of viewpoints and power relations within the trading zones.
Infrastructuring:
Create infrastructures that enable and maintain the collaborative digital work on an everyday basis. This means that infrastructures should be considered as essential to the very existence of digital scholarship and, therefore, meditated and put in place beforehand, but with flexibility and agility to be constantly improved in an ongoing process, able to adapt to the everyday needs, according to the state of the art as the research unfolds. This should consider the inherent updatism of digital culture and try to keep pace with the inexorable trap of obsolescence around the corner. This is no antidote for mutation or discontinuance of technology but should help to mitigate the pitfalls of obsolescence, at least at short-term projects level. But we can always look up to the greater situation, it does not mean we need to solve all the problems on the horizon of preservation, for instance. Hoewever, we can seek for better practices, especially in respect to issues that have been in the margins of digital projects, but pose an imminent threat to their maintenance, like obsolescence. Yet, infrastructures need to be taken into consideration beyond their technological aspects, looking into their appropriation in communities of practice and how this affects the embedding of practices. To put it another way, infrastructuring deals with the technological feasibility and social readiness that ultimately allows scholars to engage meaningfully with the digital. For example, in the natural sciences, no Principal Investigator would hand the keys of an empty lab to her/his team and expect they could actually work and achieve meaningful results before equipping it with the necessary tools and supplies. But, equally illogical – although it happens more often than researchers would like – would be letting the team motivation and skills, as well as the tools of this lab, to be overwhelmed by the fast development of techniques in a certain domain, risking to become so outdated that the lab could detach itself from the moving field. That is a rather dramatic view, but realistically, in the digital humanities domain, the ever-evolving nature of the field and the lack of infrastructuring, bringing together the mental and technical readiness, can be the cause for projects to fall apart. Of course, this again is a variant of the context that depends immensely on funding and mindsets but could be tempered by a strong and coherent strategy to ensure infrastructuring.
Training & Evaluation:
To a certain extent, training and evaluation for and of digital scholarship is infrastructuring to the crucial context we aim for. The great many novelties arising with the digital turn introduce needs for new skills that we can think in the lines of multimodal literacies, and this is yet to be sufficiently covered in traditional training. Not only we need to plan the systematic introduction of new teaching contents in all levels of higher education, but we should update the evaluation criteria to take into account the multiplicity of formats and different engagements of scholarship with the digital. Here again, we can turn o the public history component in digital public history projects as well. The possibilities of new forms of research and storytelling brought by the digital and ease of engagement with the various publics and audiences of history are still left out of curricula in most of the cases. On the one hand, while public history as a practice has been around even before its labelling in the 1970’s, the many specific aspects of this practice remain still relegated to the margins of specialisation. On the other hand, for obvious reasons, the newness of digital work has never been addressed, neither in contexts of specialisations, until very recently. The last three decades still have to be processed and digested into new models and topics for teaching and their respective evaluation criteria need to be standardised and macroscaled79. And, ultimately, if we wish that the new digital scholarship we are producing gets thoroughly credited (i.e. aiming at digital work being indeed considered in its full capacity for academic tenure) the changes need to happen at regular training, since Bachelor levels, including Masters and professional Master programs, as well as in Doctoral Schools, when in place, and other forms of internal trainings for faculty members. This could help to endure standardisation of methods and the formation of a critical mass practicing. Reflecting on it, this training is not a magic formula, but it could be seen as a pragmatic way to enhance the friction between more pre-digital traditions and the novelties at stake. Hopefully, this could be a program for the hybridisation of historical training and studies80. For the recognition of digital scholarship the long gaze at a possible new style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history would be worthless if after attempting to grasp the sense of all the aforementioned changes in practice and ways of thinking, the assessment of the processes and results of research should submit to old evaluation instruments.

My attempt with the above suggestions for the crucial context is less of a pamphleteer and prescriptive discourse, though it sounds a bit like this, than an exercise of imagination in favour of establishing what we do when we do digital and digital public history as a commonly shared form of scholarship. Hereupon, I prefer to deal with challenges entailed by the digital under the rubric of the interferences and conditioning they spawn, trying to propose a diagnostic (i.e. interferences as symptoms, what are the conditioning elements?) and a way out in a more pragmatic stance. Addressing challenges from this perspective, I believe, does not mean simply becoming aware of what the challenges are, and promoting theoretical debates about them, but also speculating on possible compromises between what would be the ideal solutions and the more realistic, practical alternatives to devise an action plan. This is a first level of what I want to develop as the hermeneutics of practice. Under the overarching hypothesis that we could be witnessing the emergence of a particular style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history, what can we do to prevent digital history scholarship from falling apart due to the blurring on methods that only those inside our micro level of interaction are able to understand and, for many, not so entirely?

On hybridisation

Figure 31. Hercules at the Crossroads, Annibale Carracci, 1596 (oil on canvas). Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Click to view on Google Arts & Culture.

The contribution of Gerben Zaagsma to the debate I have been drawing on so far is incommensurable, as announced in Chapter 1. In 2013, Zaagsma introduced the notion of hybridity within the discipline of history itself. While in digital humanities the idea of hybridity seemed to be somewhat related to interactional work, cross-disciplinary, cross-boundary, in his text On Digital History, Zaagsma argues about a hybridity that could take place inside the historical community of practice itself. Pragmatically, he points out the need for bringing together and equalising our old and new sets of practices, reviewing his own:

The current challenge facing the discipline of history is not in creating ever bigger sets of data and developing new tools, important as these are. The real challenge is to be consciously hybrid and to integrate ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ approaches in a new practice of doing history (I realise that the concept of hybridity might underscore the dichotomy I have argued against earlier, but it seems to me a necessary sensitising concept to accompany the conscious mental transition that I deem so important). (Zaagsma 2013, 17)

Hybridity, here, is a projection of a scholarly persona whose curriculum would be a mix of skills and competencies to face the challenges of the everyday practice of digital work but also capable of dealing with rather long-term issues, scaled up to norms and standards beyond oneself, entangled not only with the tradition of a discipline, but the whole array of humanistic studies and cultural heritage in the digital age. Under the spectrum of daily digital work, hence, there are yet other forms of hybridity than the one imagined by Zaagsma. The conjugation of established offline/analogue methods and the new online/digital ever-evolving practices, with its tools and methods, also inspired the projection of an offspring of two distinct professions, the most obvious and explored being the figure of a programming humanist. However, zooming out from the frugal activities, there are needed competences, connected to the digital, but yet, not dependent only on programming skills. McPherson targets these other holistic profiles and suggests the need for an awareness that before being technical, is an ontological preoccupation:

We need new hybrid practices: artist theorists; programming humanists; activist scholars; theoretical archivists; critical race coders. We have to shake ourselves out of our small field-based boxes, taking seriously the possibility that our own knowledge practices are “normalised,” “modular,” and “black-boxed” in much the same way as the code we might study in our work. (McPherson 2011, 35)

Hybridity, hence, is also a meeting place of different traditions that we could see as another crossroads. Within the discipline of history, however, hybrid work does not seem to have a long or successful past. Under the interdisciplinary awareness postulated by the Annales, in their search for a new approach to study history, other disciplines would remain relegated rather to the role of an accessory science, from which we would drag some practices, than to a real potential hybrid crosser. However, the hermeticism of historical methods were denounced. In 1929, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the founding fathers of the journal and movement, wrote about it in their first editorial: “But the walls are so high that they often block the view” (Bloch and Febvre 1929)81. They appealed for a more encompassing humanistic outlook for writing a history that should be problem-oriented, rather than story-oriented. “The new historians, – on Peter Burke’s reading – would be consciously interdisciplinary, drawing ideas and methods from geography, psychology, sociology, social anthropology, linguistics, and so on.” (Burke 2001).

Alan Liu chiefly remembers that digital history emerges in a discipline that already has a past with numerical methods, precisely, the quantitative side of Annales school and cliometrics (Liu 2013, 412). This is the pre-history of hybridity for us. However, it was not due (only) to it. Arguably the hermeticism and provincialism of what was back then the new quantitative methods of New Economic History ended up with a resounding rejection and embarrassing distinctions, such as the one between “economic historians” and “competent economists”. Controversial debates on the perks and pitfalls of cliometrics continue to this day. Despite the hype, digital history also gets its refusal, in 2012, a panel on the #DHLU symposium82, Thomas Nygren described digital history as a bastard, “it is not true history”, because it is just about the acquisition of learnable techniques83. Could digital history be subject to a similar ostracism as that of cliometrics at the end of the past century? What do we see in ten, twenty, thirty years from here? Which are the new ways of digital humanities with the ever-growing – I am sorry for the pleonasm – ubiquity of computing technology (Ekman et al. 2016; Carter and Nielsen 2017)? Will we make history with Artificial Intelligence robots (Nicodemo and Cardoso 2019)? Is there a risk for the trading zones of digital history to be deserted by the lack of recognition of our scholarship? But in such a case, would historians keep doing scattered research and lacking a common language to discuss digital methods in its ontological, epistemological and ethical dimension? The serious open question is not if we will do research about and by means of the digital, but how.

In the opposite direction of a fatalist scenario about the end of history or the end of digital history and any variation of these formulas that seek to empty the very meaning of history, the metaphor of crossroads is warmly welcome here, despite the use and abuse of it elsewhere. Crossroads embodies the concepts of division but also encounter, and it might be common sense, but it also evokes the ideas of decision making and moral quandaries, as well as turning points – I am at a crossroads, what should I do? Between A and B, which way should we go? Or, yet, if it is difficult to choose, we could stay, hang on a little longer, expecting that an eventual fortuitous encounter could help to solve our dilemmas. I believe historiography is still facing a dilemma of whether to fully accept or reject the digital. The tensions between tradition and innovation are still strong in digital history debates. I would argue that instead of altogether rejecting one or another, we could profit from the metaphor of crossroads to open a chantier right in the middle of it where we could work out alternative ways to go on when none of the existing ways seem very attractive. Experimentation is the building site of alternative ways of thinking in the middle of our crossroads. And hands-on work is the necessary experience to elicit these new ways of thinking, without rolling-up the sleeves, there is no thinkering, only detached thinking and as I try to stress throughout this thesis, doing and thinking need to walk hand in hand. Only through thinkering, will it be possible to augment our senses in order to detect the digital interferences that conditionate our digital work.

Crossroads, moreover, serve as a constant reminder of the intersectionality of our work. The term, was coined more than thirty years ago by Kimberlé Crenshaw, in the field of critical race theory. It was originally mobilised as a key to understand and explain the oppression of Black women, “[b]ecause the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (Crenshaw 1989, 140). For its theoretical vigour, Intersectionality, has been adopted as analytical tool, critical inquiry and praxis (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016) tackle the critical articulations of the categories race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in dialogue with long-standing, but ever urgent debates on human rights and most recently the policy of equality. Sociologists Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge contend that as an analytical tool, intersectionality helps us to understand the complexity of the intertwined power relations among these identity categories and, as critical inquiry and praxis. Intersectionality is an important stance to interpret how groups, individuals and institutions are playing a role in the arena of identity debates and how it may foster praxis. Intersectionality, furthermore, is a promising academic and political concept for public history (Graves and Dubrow 2019).

Figure 32. Intersectionality. Flowchart of the Declaration of the Occupation of NYC, Rachel Schragis. Go to zoom.it for the zoom view of the chart84

One of the flagrant challenges brought by the digital component to the research in the humanities, and hence historical research too, is the “the fraught relationship between digital humanities and diversity” (Risam 2015) or, putting it in another way, “the meaning problem”, as Liu called it (Liu 2013). The problem or challenge inferred here could be shortly explained by the obliteration of cultural critique by significant but almost tautological debates on the definition of what is or is not digital humanities (especially in terms of methods) and who is inside or outside (especially in terms of technical skills), as expounded by Katharine Bode and Paul Longley Arthur in their sharp introduction to the 2014’s volume Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. The volume advocates for pushing the field ahead “overwhelming definitional debates” in order to “show, rather than describe, what digital humanities is, what it can do, the contribution it makes to humanities research, and the role it can play in the future: its research, theories, and methods” (2014, 03).

Working in the trading zone of Digital History

Crossroads are nothing but a materialisation of trading zones. What I suggested above as crucial context for the development of digital scholarship is a pragmatic stance towards the desirable advancement Arthur and Bode argued for. It is not necessarily to move past the digital- (-humanities, -history) identity self-interrogation, but to incorporate the possibility to think hermeneutically along with it, in a fashion that could be shared within its community of practice and beyond. Once we could stop the simply redundant definitional debates, we could go back to hermeneutics. This would mean paying more attention to interpreting processes, in a meta-level, or interpreting objects or subjects with the goal of offering a historiographic critique. In this context, we could keep creating digital artefacts, but interpreting and historicising its own building by means of experimentation, and we could claim it as a form of scholarship too, the historiography of digital history. We could also study other (digital) objects and subjects using digital methods, and claim this is scholarship too, the practice of digital history. Herewith, the self-reflective posture could still carry open questions in terms of who we are, where we go, and that is no sin. However, to move forward and contend outwards that what we do is still history, it is fundamental to pursue, as well, a reflection on the ontological and epistemological implications of the digital interferences and conditioning in our contemporary production of history. Otherwise, we could be damned to a superficial criticism that could lead digital history to a similar fate of that of cliometrics – one of technical obliteration of our humanistic inquiry and the consequent detachment of the rest of the discipline.

In the opposite direction, incorporating an updated set of skills, both in terms of technical and mental apparatus and sharing it more thoroughly beyond our micro level interactions, breaking through any risks of hermeticism, what we do could come into being the emergence of a style of reasoning, in line with Hacking. Making this style intelligible to not so close peers, would need to go through a process of self-authentication (Hacking 2004, 191) that includes the definitional debates but also the affirmation of the new objects and new ways to grant standards of objectivity iteratively. Digital hermeneutics, as described by Fickers, seems to be the way to reach a certain standard of objectivity. Fickers describes digital hermeneutics as follows:

A set of skills and competences that allow historians to critically reflect on the various interventions of digital research infrastructures, tools, database and dissemination platforms in the process of thinking, doing, and narrating history. (Fickers 2021)85

It is essential to consider that in history, that standards of objectivity may not be so objective as a checklist to assert truth or falsehood, it is instead a responsible approximation to the truth, taking into account that all interpretations are subjectivist. Nevertheless, we can consider digital hermeneutics as a step towards this approximation if it succeeds in revealing and assessing all the biases and interferences the digital imposes to research. As Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit contends, “the most pronounced subjectivity is the condition for the highest degree of objectivity” (2005, 103). Hence, we can think about digital hermeneutics as an exercise of digital biases detecting, of scanning our digital work, in its full capacity, to identify and reflect on its interferences. There may have no formula to follow, but the constant awareness about the digital interferences could prompt a holistic habit of flagging the encountered biases.

Furthermore, we should consider that the digital interferences are not punctual, but intersectional, within other expertise in the trading zone, and transversal/iterative regarding the different layers of the digital work. In other words, for historians to be accountable for a responsible approximation of the truth in the digital age, they need to “know how the tools and the algorithm behind them work to avoid falling into traps that can lead to serious distortions in historical research” (Oberbichler 2020b). In a practical example, historians should not assume that machines have the same reading skills than a human being. Sarah Oberbichler has a very instructive example to illustrate this problem with respect to text-mining tools working with a collection that they might simply interpret as a bag of texts:

Imagine texts are like medical pills. They have an active ingredient (core meaning or even several core meanings) which takes up a tiny part while the inactive ingredients cover three-fourths of it. If we have a handful of different pills without knowing what they should be taken for, they are not very helpful for us. As humans, we would try to identify the active ingredient of the pill (by using context knowledge) in order to group the pills with similar effects (not similar ingredients). To understand that similar ingredients are not the same than similar effects is one step towards effective digital source/tool criticism. Unsupervised, text mining tools would very likely sort pills in a different way than humans if all that they have is a list of the ingredients. They would group those who have the most similar combinations of ingredients, and it is likely that this results not in a classification of pills with similar effects. (Oberbichler 2020a)

The holistic exercise in this context, thus, is always to have in mind the detail and the big picture of a project and consider the mutual shaping of context, content and technology, as well as the historians’ tampering over it all. The advantage of trading zones, in this case, is the possibility to seek help with experts when even after reading technical texts you could still not make sense of it due to language barriers or black-boxes that become harder to break when you have not accumulated the basic range of tacit knowledge86. In my case, during the conceptualisation and creation of Memorecord, I found that face to face conversation and quick chats around the laptop, in a sort of quick, punctual talk and show tutorials, proved to be more effective than online communication with my collaborators. To me, the local trading zone is a further advantage because, in some cases, due to computational capacity and permissions – i.e. if a developer tool is missing in your machine it could create chains of dependencies that prevent a specific task to be seamlessly concluded by another app or package manager; or yet, if you do not have granted remote access to a specific server, it will make distant collaboration tricky. Since outside collaborators could not obtain access to certain environments by themselves, getting in touch personally made things far easier than working through text and screenshots. Many times, at the beginning of Memorecord’s development and tests, I asked my computer expert colleagues for help to update or install tools in my laptop. Since I worked more closely with Daniele Guido, as described in Chapter 2, sometimes I could go to his office and watch what he was doing simultaneously on the screen. Other times, I could try a few things by myself on my laptop with him offering some guidance by my side. After a few rounds of this mentorship, I was so glad to hear him say that I did not depend on him anymore. However, it was not totally true, I did depend on his occasional advice, though I had just acquired enough tacit knowledge to keep going until a next level bug would stop me.

Digital hermeneutics should, hence, help historians to note that a specific feature of a tool or a particularity of data could bring about noises elsewhere in the interpretation of a given situation. I tried to demonstrate these intersectional characteristics of the digital bias in Chapter 2 when discussing how each choice on the process of building Memorecord made a difference. But also, how, after selecting specific tools, I had to continuously adapt the project around certain conditions of it, entailed by the tool’s logic. During Memorecord’s community sensitisation phase, I learned that my initial idea of using a WordPress-like portal to host the harvested memories was not appreciated by participants. I then took the decision to work with social media networks, but the retrieving of posts and metadata from Instagram and Facebook obliged me to create two different web scraping tasks that resulted in the extraction of a diverse range of metadata for each source channel (Facebook and Instagram), meaning two sub-collections with not fully corresponding metadata. Moreover, while Instagram allowed the direct scraping of posts from users’ profiles, Facebook only allowed the scraping of posts shared by pages, not by individuals, forcing me to add an intermediate manual task where I would share individual’s posts on Memorecord’s Facebook page before the automated scraping could take place. It did not have a tremendous impact in the analysis because the metadata available, after all, is still similar and despite the non-coincident terminology it was still possible to make sense of it in a close reading experience. This interference, however, entailed more manual, time-consuming work and generated some inconsistency in the metadata. Since Memorecord did not result in a huge amount of data, it did not bring further problems to the analysis, but if I depended on distant reading to process the data collected, I would have needed to manipulate the metadata names to mingle both subcollections artificially.

A common anxiety among historians in regard to projects like Memorecord or other initiatives, for instance tools for data analysis with heavier computational power running behind (i.e. Mallet package for topic modelling), is the fogginess around the many technological black boxes and the uncertainties it brings about. Some may criticise that we cannot trust digital media because we cannot fully assess algorithmic bias, for instance, but this should not stop us from thinking about it. Otherwise, we might be risking losing a significant parcel of cultural heritage material and human traces in electronic forms that are most valuable to the study of the history of our present time. Let us imagine how critical this picture could get in fifty years from now. With a new style, we could reach a compromise in terms of protocols and standardised practices, less to enforce a rigid step-by-step guide for historiographic critique in the digital age, but to pinpoint a few reference signs to aid the navigation through the fogginess. Hence, creating a habit of flagging the interferences we encounter in our digital work and critically reflect about them would favour a situation in which historians could, more efficiently, share a corresponding analytical-technical apparatus that, ultimately, could become a common ground for digital work.

Digital hermeneutics, thus, could be held as a common practice among digital historians, but with clear enough shared standards that allow historians, from within and outside the digital history trading zones, to fully assess the work of their peers despite the fogginess. Having reached a collective basis, which I want to think in terms of the popularisation of a particular style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history, I believe, it could lead to more engaged historiographic critique and less detached tautological discussion on methods and definition. In other words, this could allow us to conduct historical research despite the uncertainties.

This movement could ground digital history back in its primary terrain, that of thinking historically about societal and cultural inquiries, where historical thinking is “to attribute a constitutive meaning to the temporal distance between today and yesterday”. (Landwehr 2012, 09). In this sense, reasoning about digital history means we could reflect, in a more accessible way to the wider community of practice within the discipline of history, about the historicity the digital component carries, be it as an electronic gadget, a piece of software or as a sample of data. Interrogating the new digital technologies of memory considering its historical development, hence, could be an object of digital history. Likewise, if historians are interpreting specific memories of a historical event or phenomenon using digital methods, this could be considered part of a specific reasoning of digital history about those memories. In both scenarios, the digital may still entail some fogginess, because it feels alien to us since we cannot fully control it. However, if we can be fully aware of the digital interferences in our research, this should not prevent us from working with/on it, after all, why would the past be considered less alien to us when we try to assess it by analogue means? Perhaps, the only difference here is the historicity of digital methods itself and the fact the historians are much more accustomed to conducting research analogically, but this does not make the instruments of that method of lesser subjectivity than those of digital methods. They are just different subjectivities.

Digital component as a condition

Insofar, the above-mentioned imbalance between doing and thinking in the digital humanities realms – including digital history – has been a hindrance to the sharing of a desirable practical-analytical apparatus. To some extent, we could attribute the struggle of digital history scholarship to establish itself as a valid genre of scholarship due to the discredit it gets among historians that, somehow, still distrust digital methods without giving it a chance or those who still struggle to understand it, despite having engaged with it already, be it as an audience or an author. Hence, the debate for defining digital history goes on, while digital history still lacks a standardised inventory of practices and, consequently, a coherent shared critique base of these practices. My point is that although there are still some pessimistic attitudes about technology as a whole, the persisting sceptical outlook from colleagues is not always wired by cynicism, but partially rooted in the lack of a common ground that could be seamlessly shared and help to organise and stabilise the knowledge we produce through digital history. It is all relatable, in some way, to the “disciplinary inertia”, as suggested by Hartog (2010), and the resistance to adapt to new times. In the case of digital history, beyond the generic uncertainties brought by the digital turn to many disciplines, there is a further concern with the absence of clear protocols for the digital source criticism, which happens to be in progress, but has not been thoroughly discussed on the literature of digital history, with some rare exceptions (Föhr 2017; Fickers 2020).

Summing up, beyond the unfruitful forms of criticism though, constructive criticism implies that digital history lacks rigour/objectivity and that it is vague about source criticism. I want to suggest, as a way to overcome this problem, the establishment of this missing common base that – informed by my experience on Memorecord at the specific environment of C²DH – it could be met through playful experimentation; hence a package of hands-on work plus continuous thinkering, or simply put, through experiments of digital hermeneutics, that, ultimately, I argue, is eliciting a new style of reasoning.

To take into account the historicity carried by my very own assumptions, it is worth noting that I am arguing about the emergence of a style of reasoning after we have seen over two decades of digital scholarship experiments, both in the broader digital humanities and in history. Moreover, I could only come up with this suggestion after I have experienced hands-on digital work while in my case study. Hacking’s “styles project” (Hacking 2012) suggests that new styles emerge at a specific time in history and it determines what is rational or irrational, they “have specific beginnings and trajectories developments” (2004, 162). Without my experience at C²DH these last years, I could, perhaps, still be stuck with definitional debates that, ultimately, prevent us from sharing digital history elsewhere87. However, building a project of my own allowed me a first-hand assessment of the present condition imposed by the digital – the inexistence of common ground and, yet, the need to conduct research.

Having done much thinkering about it, I argue that the lack of documentation, description and reflection on how certain processes are conducted or certain products are achieved prevents the community from fully assessing and understanding how (digital) humanists [scholars behind most digital projects] know what they know; and this is a fundamental epistemological issue. Historian of science Lorraine Daston raised this problem a while ago, not bounded to the digital though:

The philosophical literature on epistemology and the historical literature on scientific practices, especially in English, is overwhelmingly slanted towards the natural sciences. That is the source of both problems and examples, and, insofar as even the social sciences figure in such analyses, they appear as pale imitations of the natural sciences. Except for some older work on hermeneutics (mostly translated from other languages and traditions) and one study of the history of footnotes (by Anthony Grafton), there is almost nothing on the epistemology and practices of humanists. Historians of science have written about how biologists learned to see under the microscope, how botanists learned to characterise plants in succinct Latin, how physicists learned to abstract from messy phenomena to mathematical models. But how do art historians learn to see, historians learn to read, philosophers to argue? What is the history of the art-historical slide collection, the initiation into archival research, the graduate seminar? Insofar as any epistemological question about the knowledge of humanists has been posed, it has centred on the objects of that knowledge (for example, Dilthey’s all-too-well-known opposition of the ideographic and nomothetic). But what about an epistemology based upon the practices of humanists, on what they do? (Daston 2004, 363)

The inquiry that I emphasised at the end of this quote could easily be updated to include the practices of digital humanities and, more specifically, digital historians. This thesis will, hopefully, offer some scope for imagination in the attempt to answer this question. Purposefully, a whole chapter (2) was dedicated to a thorough description of the process of building my study case, Memorecord. Although I have spent long passages discussing the creation of the website and the crowdsourcing mechanism, the digital outcome (of which the frontend is visible at the url https://memorecord.uni.lu/) is not of greater importance than the process of community sensitisation or going public strategies.

Indeed, all the steps followed to set up the Memorecord’s memory harvest concurred to make the whole case meaningful, and all were informed by my relationship with potential participants in the fieldwork. The participatory design of Memorecord had an effect, as I tried to demonstrate, in the selection of the (non-neutral, political) technologies I chose, finally shaping the digital platform in a collaborative fashion. From my individual stance, another ongoing process was the constant negotiation of my aprioristically mental expectations, and what, in practice, was possible. An important component of my experiment that I imply but did not discuss enough in Chapter 2 was frustration. Successful people would say that “frustration is the mother of invention”. In my first true experiment, however, frustration was the mother of concerns and anxieties of not fulfilling the project proposal in the time foreseen for it and, above all, not being able to evaluate if what I was doing was correct88. Frustration was fed by tensions and gaps between my theoretical assumptions and what I was really able to achieve with my limited hands-on capacities when I set out to this project. Capacities that, I believe, became considerably elastic if I was to include the available digital research infrastructure at C²DH.

I firmly believe that if more researchers were documenting and sharing impressions about their projects’ processes, we would have more intel on how we know what we know and hence, on the epistemology and practices of the digital humanists and historians. Every experiment is a different experiment, but I think that having access to other testimonials and hints about what can go wrong might be useful to other experimenters that mostly rely on highly hypothetical and, unavoidably, limited risk assessments due to the very nature of experiments, where unpredictability is at home. If unpredictability and uncertainties are inherent to experiments, what is the hassle? Why the anxieties about what could go wrong? How to tell what is wrong, after all? A short but justifiable answer could be that although our practices and mental equipment are being updated with the interferences of the digital component, we are still bound to quite static models of (what even is) scholarship and the following evaluation standards seldom adapt to the new scenario. A longer explanation of the evaluation issue can be found in the heated debates about the need for updating the codes for the evaluation of digital scholarship (n.19).

Furthermore, a side effect of the somehow lesser legitimacy given to doing into the canons of scholarship, populated by scholastics’ value judgment of thinking over doing, is the fact that Memorecord alone is (still) not considered a valid form of scholarship. Ramsay and Rockwell tackled this problem in the first edition of Debates in Digital Humanities (2012), making an argument for an “epistemology of building” that could mitigate this problem. The first section of their text is, indeed, dedicated to the “anxieties of the digital work”, to which I could relate myself.

My situation, however, is less delicate than those scholars that Ramsay and Rockwell had in mind, “whom have advanced degrees in some area of humanistic study—who have turned to building, hacking, and coding as part of their normal research activity.” (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, 75). Memorecord is my first real “digital work” in an academic setting, and I am a young historian that is not mainly building, but the experience made me walk in these fellows’ shoes for a while, and I can then imagine that frustration and anxiety, in their case, is substantially scaled-up. It is enough to imagine longer projects than a PhD like mine, in which the building dimension is so demanding that little time is left for more conventional publishing.

Publishing is, still, the imperative of scholarship – an outstanding scholar, to gain tenure and achieve the pinnacle of a full professorship needs to publish and do so in the right places. But the professionals Ramsay and Rockwell had in mind were far from writing articles and monographs in their daily routine. Rather than a blank page of .docx or another text editor file format in front of them, their work was “all about XML, XSLT, GIS, R, CSS, and C” (2012, 76). Those were “scholarly editors, literary critics, librarians, academic computing staff, historians, archaeologists, and classicists” (idem) working on the practical front building digital libraries like Perseus or any other demanding digital work (e.g. deep encoding, text mining, creation of 3-D models, and even whole software development). The unfitting relation of practice to the traditional model of scholarship as we know, is not an exclusivity of digital humanities. The high intellectualism of scholarship, also pierced by prejudice and class, is also felt among law bar practitioners and academics. Stephen J. Werber is fairly eloquent in his critical commentary on “scholarship being [simply] a written record of applied intellect” (Werber 1992, 210). Coming from the bar – Werber was engaged in government and private law practice for six years before joining the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law – he was outraged with the implicit hierarchisation when he joined academia:

It is fairly clear that attorneys, law professors, and judges all respect those peers who are recognised as possessing intellect or who can be described as scholars. Benjamin Cardozo, Roger Traynor, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, Lon Fuller, and Brainerd Currie all come to mind as scholars of the bench and/or academic community. Finding a scholar among members of the practicing bar is more difficult, at least in terms of a name that would have instantaneous national recognition among academicians. One could argue that practicing attorneys are not scholars. This argument, however, is overly simplistic and frightfully wrong. Scholarship is simply the product of the intellect presented in a way which permits that intellect to be evaluated by others who can then apply it to needs. The typical mode of scholarly production is written, although scholarship can also be found in oral communication. (Werber 1992., 210, emphasis added by the author)

The lawyer’s account is a useful parallel for us to reflect on what we do as digital humanists and digital historians and the question why a digital object or a piece of code created by digital work should not be considered as good for a scholarship as a written publication. Or, following Ramsay and Rockwell provocations “A book with a bibliography is surely scholarship. Is a tool for keeping track of bibliographic data (like Zotero) scholarship?” Good rhetorics. Could we agree that Zotero is an example of “product of the intellect [a tool] presented in a way which permits that intellect to be evaluated [a functioning and intelligible interface] by others who can then apply it to needs [how many users Zotero gets worldwide? Or, better question: how many scholarly works are using Zotero nowadays]?” as argued by Werber?89

The defenders of the epistemology of building continue:

[a] literary critical article that is full of graphs, maps, and trees is also scholarship (if, perhaps, a little unusual). Is a software framework for generating quantitative data about literary corpora scholarship? A conference presentation about the way maps mediate a society’s sense of space is unambiguously an act of scholarship. Is making a map an unambiguous act of scholarship? (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, 76)

While some may still think of digital work as a lesser form of scholarship, it keeps happening – the growth of grants and establishments of centres and labs is enough to say that no one has jumped ship for the lack of credit. Collegiality, afterwards, as remarked by Spiro, is a strong value within digital humanities community (Spiro 2012). Yet, the anxiety remains about the abyss between what we do and how this is received and discussed in the community. The label of scholarship is less critical for the credit than for the culture it elicits: peer-review processes, community support, academic events dedicated to software development, and so on, just to name a few elements among many others that would help projects like mine, or other experiments, to benefit and learn even more from the community. Insofar, hackathons for humanities remain on the margins of big academic events and the lack of proper interfaces for peer-review of digital works are still puzzling for publishers and event organisers, even among specialised journals and conferences.

Historical imagination and technical skills

When looking back to what was promised in the early years of digital innovation in academia, historian Edward L. Ayers finds it disappointing, but not surprising, that the monographic culture had undergone so little pressure and almost did not change. Ayers has been working with digital history since the field’s inception in the United States, in the early 1990’s. With William G. Thomas III, Ayers founded The Valley of the Shadow90 in 1993, a pioneering digital history project. The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. In the Valley’s digital archive, users can explore original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, from Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War.

Figure 33. The Valley of the Shadow homepage

Figure 34. The Eve of War section, Reference Center page view

The project challenged the very format of historical monograph and the linearity of narrative itself, mostly using hypertext, rendering a “juxtaposition and connection of the unexpected” (Ayers 1999). In the late 1990’s, hypertext was really in the hype among those trying out their first electronic ways of writing history. In 1998, David J. Stanley, reviewing the works of his namesake David J. Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing and George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1997) was perhaps one of the first to make a clear reference to the use of hypertext in “experiments in writing” – a Robert A. Rosenstones’s phrase – as a form of (capitalised) Digital Historiography:

The computer—specifically hypertext—makes such experimentation possible. Hypertext refers to the digital connection of words as in a web, not in a linear chain as in a printed text. Rather than being confined within the physical limits of the printed codex, the “text” of a hypertext expands to fill the electronic network, since any block of text can be theoretically linked to any other block of text somewhere in the electronic ether. The plot of the text meanders through this web, determined as much by the decisions of the reader as by the intentions of the author. Therefore, the computer screen provides a non-linear writing surface where there is no beginning, middle or end to the text, where traditional notions of linear plot and sequence are overturned, and where the solid boundaries between writer and reader are shattered. (Staley 1998)

The allure of hypertext, indeed, echoed in many other works (Chartier 1998; Darnton 1999; Andersen 1996; Landow 1997). However, Staley’s cautionary call to “first [before rushing in to experiments] explore the implications of such experimentation, in order to ask and answer metaquestions about digital narratives to determine if we truly wish to follow this path” (Staley 1998) was inviting us to an exercise of another sort of historical imagination; one about the representation itself and the impact of techniques and technologies on it, not solely on the represented thing, to which we are more accustomed. However, his warning did not seem to have had much effect, at least on the Anglo-Saxon tradition where the tool-driven and experimentation-driven rapidly evolved in a sort of common spirit of the epoch, again, permeated by a certain culture of project. Although partaking Staley’s concerns on the need to make these metaquestions, I would say that it is only truly possible if one puts their hands-on these new technologies to manipulate them, directly. Only through this first-hand experience, it is really possible to grasp their real potential and limitations. Grasping, in this case, can be read in the terms of Erns Cassirer. Known for his relational conception of sciences and his in-depth philosophical appraisal of culture as praxis, Cassirer claims that

“all intellectual mastery (geistige Bewaltigung) of reality is tied to this double act of “grasping” (Fassens): to “grasping” reality in linguistic-theoretical thinking and to “grasping” it through the medium of knowledge; to the conceptual as well as the technical design. (Cassirer 1995, 52)

In other words, this fundamental interaction, the twofold grasping, is a ‘hermeneutic act’ (Hall and Ellis 2019, 125). This grasping can, as demonstrated by The Valley of The Shadow, and as I myself experience through Memorecord, unleash historical imagination from traditional conventions on formats and performance in representation.

I believe the relative delay for digital humanities to enter into the (more) critical turn, as well as the discipline of history to start to reflect, deeply, in the metaquestions proposed by Staley – not only suggesting that there are questions, but trying to formulate and answer them – is due to the belated realisation that building and doing are not solely a manual-technical work, but also an abstraction of a kind of historical imagination. The contact with the experimental apparatus, hence a fundamental interaction in the lines of what meant Cassirer, is essential to complete a thorough, critical process of interpretation. Without this holistic interpretation, that encompasses both intellect and senses, the metaquestions about works that are digitally done would risk being too generalising, while the possibility of reasoning through this grasping could be a way to seek objectivity, as a broader epistemological “organising concept” (Hacking 2004, 08). In other words, experimenting, even without knowing the answers to the metaquestions in advance, is a way to enhance both our historical imagination about the represented thing and the representation, and, finally, to support historians in their search for rigour amidst the (no longer so new, but ever changing) novelty of the digital component.

I am not advocating for any full objectivity since all judgments depend on subjective perspectives and worldviews. I am rather arguing for the historian’s tacit and intellectual involvement when working along with the digital component in experimentation – hands-on setting – to be acknowledged as essential to the interpretation of what we create with the digital and how we do it. Based on my experience with the digital, especially through the fairly basic computing tasks I conducted with Memorecord (e.g. activating the web scraping robot or running and adjusting scripts for updating the harvest gallery on the website), I think that the powerful aspect of graspings is that it bridges our aprioristic expertise, based on traditional historical methods, and new experiences, helping us to make better sense of what we are doing while learning it ourselves – sometimes it may confirm our speculations, other times it may refute them, and yet might elicit new questions.

A simple example of it that I have already discussed was the frustration of my attempts to use PixStori as the main tool for Memorecord. Despite my will to expand the usage of PixStori in the crowdsourcing, I only learned how the limitations of the tool would interfere in the harvest when I tested it during the fieldwork. To put it another way, if you want to learn to ride a bicycle, you need to ride the bike, no second-hand/third-person account, manual reading or theoretical treaty will substitute the experience. And again, the other way around, expanding this simplistic example: if you (knowing how to ride) were to explain to a child how to ride a bicycle before her/his first try, you would then utilise your tacit knowledge (acquired by experience) to offer some hints, you could even demonstrate it or show some tutorials; yet, even after you have mobilised all your tacit knowledge to explain it to the kid, she/he would only truly learn it when she/he had practiced it by her/himself. By trying to explain it, you would become more aware of your skills and perhaps think about them for the first time, but, only other riders would grasp what you mean by the real feeling of balance and how to reach it. The moral? One must experiment, and adopt a self-reflexive posture, to be able to imagine and answer (good) metaquestions.

We can see a fine application of some good metaquestions in the original digital scholarship experiment that Ayers and Thomas published in 2003, a few years after launching The Valley of the Shadow. In a simplistic description we could say it was an electronic journal article, but The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities was way beyond it. It was published in the American Historical Review in a more traditional form (allowing downloads in PDF) but offered a complete electronic version in a separate online environment91. A few years ago, I analysed how William and Ayers were using the hypertext feature to narrate history online, collating evidence right together with the text, in a non-linear way (Lucchesi 2014, 134–36). In contrast with other big projects in digital humanities, like digital libraries or repositories, bringing the narrative dimension to the core of the experiment was something very prized to historians. Playing with the narrative structure and ways of reading the text, in a given suggested order (navigating points of analysis, for instance) or by elective sections of the readers’ choice was not a mere transition of formats – from print to online/electronic. It was a practical example of how the digital as an expressive medium, to borrow Svensson’s sentence for a mode of engagement, could initiate and limit certain rhetorical styles. I argued we can see that they applied solutions, very probably based on metaquestions about the narrative structure, for instance, observing they added a Reading Record tool92 to provide orientation to the readers that decided to follow the narrative in alternative ways. In such a manner, through this sort of Ariadne’s thread, readers could check which areas were not visited per section – Analysis, Historiography and Evidence.

On serendipities

Following up this thread on hypertexts as the dominant forms of digital interference in the early days of digital history scholarship, I would like to propose to take a detour, and allow us to reflect a little longer on the hypertext feature. First of all, because it seems to be one of the more stabilised forms of digital interference that, despite technological development, has been a constant in digital objects, almost unaltered by the mutations of World Wide Web generations. Secondly, thanks to projects like The Valley of the Shadow and The Differences Slavery Made we can argue that hypertexts have significantly altered the scope for research’s presentation and serendipitous exploration. A general statement is that new serendipities may arise from the experimentation with digital methods. A more specific statement would be that forms of serendipities are intrinsic to the way we explore and discover things. Deriving from it, we can think about the digital component’s conditioning of the way we explore and discover things when doing or consuming digital history scholarship.

I think about ways of exploring contents and objects as well as writing, reading or consuming them otherwise as gestures that carry a disciplinary stamp, reflecting, perhaps, a certain style. Once more paying attention to the historicity of these gestures, we should consider which are the marks of history as a discipline in its more traditional fashion. As it has been brilliantly argued by Anthony Grafton, the footnotes embodied this disciplinary stamp in our discipline. Looking at the emergence of history as a discipline, Grafton concluded that in a historiographical text, the entity footnote could be considered an identity mark of the historical craft, because it:

It identifies both the primary evidence that guarantees the story’s novelty in substance and the secondary works that do not undermine its novelty in form and thesis. By doing so, moreover, it identifies the work of history in question as to the creation of a professional. Like the whine of the dentist’s drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian’s page reassures: the tedium it inflicts, like the pain inflicted by the drill, is not random but directed, part of the cost that benefits of modern science and technology exact. (Grafton 1999, 05)

That is to say, footnotes grant professional, scholarly, authority to a piece of work. It is the evidence that indicates on the shoulders of which giants we are sitting. Moreover, footnotes have also been conditioning serendipity throughout the reading of texts and references, but, for printed texts, we can arguably say that serendipitous discoveries happen at a different speed than those in electronic formats, accompanied by links to sources and publications. The possibility of accessing references and evidence right away imprints different agility to reading and exploring a given publication. If footnotes are such a remarkable indicator of professional historians in the printed, traditional historiographic culture we are referring to through this thesis as a sort of establishment, what could be the specific marks of digital history? What stands for a digital historian like the whine of the dentist’s drill stands to the dentists?

Detours

Using hypertext with internal and external links, The Differences Slavery Made provided, both authors and readers with another way to explore the text. Through the Internet browser, in a sort of layered navigation, readers could follow the analysis argument and check the sources associated right away, almost immediately, without the use of footnotes. As I noted elsewhere (2012, 05), the possibility of bringing the evidence so (virtually) close to the text can be seen as a digitisation of what Hartog called marque d’énonciation (1992, 222), the I see and later the I read, that the French historian identified as founding features of the writing of history while reflecting upon Herodotus’ autopsy as a convincing procedure. I would add that the attention they paid to adapting (for lack of a better word) the narrative and reading experience from the print-like version to the electronic one by the implementation of the Reading Record tool could be a mark of self-reflection from which we can imply that Thomas III and Ayers did their homework, that the digital project has rigour, and that they not only cared for the part traditionally meant as research (the content, the analysis), but gave proof that they further extended their criticism to the technical elements.

Figure 35. The Differences Slavery Made, Overview

Figure 36. The Differences Slavery Made, Reading Record tool detail

The hypertext, hence, could be seen as one of the first elements brought by the digital component that plays a huge interference in the writing of history. By interference here, I mean it alters the piece of scholarship at stake in two major steps: conceptualisation (e.g. how do we structure the content, the publics we have in mind connections and cross-references that we can add to make an argument etc.) and fabrication (e.g. tools and techniques – hence, other skills – needed to compose the text and layout, to embed multimedia, to insert metadata and everything else to “execute” what was conceptualised). The interference thus is twofold; it challenges the theoretical and the practical framework of research.

However, years after the playful experiments with The Valley of The Shadows and The Difference Slavery Made (accompanied by many other groundbreaking digital initiatives), Ayers notes that little has changed in terms of what is acknowledged as scholarship, although researchers have been routinely using digital technology in their daily work (Ayers 2013). Considering more specifically the innovative exploitation of the Internet, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon consider it “has been confined, for the most part, to side- stream venues; the mainstream publication has yet to be seriously affected” (2016, 86). In other words, digital scholarship and all the building it involves has not yet found its space in the mainstream.

Accidental findings

Yet another manifestation of new ways that serendipities arises in digital scholarship are accidental findings. It is arguable that the new forms of narratives and presentation briefly discussed above might also come under the category of detours; in the sense that, prior to departure at the project’s inception, the idea (the prototype) of the digital object was just an abstract plan, informed by theoretical assumptions that, in the end, turned out quite differently than what was conceived its conceptualisation. This was exactly the case with Memorecord as I extensively discuss in Chapter 2, but describing the many adjustments to the initial plan, in terms of methods and tools, was something I had to do along the way. The final outcome of Memorecord digital memory platform was unpredictable, but this unpredictability was not unwelcome since it was an experiment. By accidental findings, I mean surprising elements I did not expect to discover through this experiment. It is a subtle but important nuance here. The methodological detours and reshaping of the project design were, to a certain extent, desired, expected. While the accidental findings were more of a fortuitous event, if we like, a serendipitous discovery.

When I decided to do the Memorecord crowdsourcing through social media, I was aiming at collecting a variety of digital media content (e.g. text, video, photos, combinations of multimedia and so on). The main unit source, in this case, was a social media post on Facebook, or Instagram. I did harvest a variety of multimedia93 through the crowdsourcing, what I was not anticipating was the extra layer of indirect participation added by the social media’s interactive nature. When parsing collected posts for moderation, one fundamental step adopted to notify participants about the successful receipt of their posts was to comment on their tagged posts (with #memorecord hashtag) with an acknowledgement to, at the same time, create direct contact with participants and to assure their consent for their post being shared publicly on Memorecord’s social media channels and website.

What I was not expecting however, was to encounter something entirely organic on their timelines. In many cases, the comment section under the main post would display interesting conversations between the participants, author of the post, and one or more of their friends on Facebook, or followers on Instagram. Some stories encountered in this section, as I discuss in detail in Chapter 4, were of immense contextualisation value. An interference of this discovery exposed the fluidity of doing research on digital media and social media networks. While I was aware of the interferences posed by the unstable character of digital-born material, I always looked at this issue from the more technical point of view (e.g. issues of archiving and classification; preservation and maintenance of this material on the long term). The technical aspect, for sure, was a challenge, but as I described in the previous chapter, I managed to create a sort of pipeline – the crowdsourcing mechanism – taking its technical features into account. Yet, the crowdsourcing mechanism was faulty in dealing with the comment section’s accidental findings. Due to constraints of the privacy policies of Facebook and Instagram, web scraping the comment section is not feasible by legal means. This posed a huge dilemma for me, while I was thinking from a rather historicist point of view and wanted to be sure I could scrape and observe my digital born-digital sources.

What to do, before this crossroads? I first thought about manually printing all single comments. However, it would implicate yet another issue, one of profound ethical relevance when conducting historical research online94. I did not have the authorisation of the participant’s friends to watch and record their interaction. I could, although, access the post as many times as I wanted because, following Memorecord’s privacy policy, all posts needed to be public to become part of the collection. While I was following some of the comment sections they began growing, thus I organically started taking notes for each post in order to keep, at least, a record of my impression. As time passed, I realised that this solution was also very limited, since due to the very raison d’être of social media itself, posts were never truly closed, interaction keeps going and the conversation always remains open, unless the author of the post does not delete or change the post’s privacy configuration

Before this dilemma, once again, the need for boundary work was reinforced. The solution I found, with some organising principles for objectivity, was to follow a few hints learned from the field of ethnography, but likewise to the historical interpretation, with its particular practices updated to the digital context. Similar to what we witness within the historical community of practice, ethnographic digital work is still facing a turbulent period of transition from the analogue to the digital age. Definitional debates echo the open questions of digital humanities, which is reflected on the various ways to label the emerging practices and authenticating sentences: hypermedia ethnography (Dicks et al. 2005, 26), ethnography for the Internet (Hine 2015, 19); visual and sensory ethnography (Pink 2014, 03), ethnographic data analysis (Boellstorf et al. 2012, 159) or digital ethnography (Hsu 2014). Despite the specific emphasis of the different approaches, in the current state of play, many practices are overlapping and it is possible to identify a similar topos among the different ways to name ethnographic research by digital means. A similitude with digital history, most notably, is the (still) necessary reaffirmation of these practices as valuable research:

The increasing digital mediation in the field of ethnographic inquiry is undeniable. Through the engagement of individual users, governments, corporations, and even grassroots organisations, the ubiquity of computational technology has a far-reaching impact on social life. These technologies mediate culture by documenting, sharing, sensing, tagging, locating, trading, synchronising, filtering, automating, remixing, and mining the everyday experiences of our research associates. Rather than walking away from the digital, we ethnographers should give serious considerations to software as infrastructure and materiality at the sites of our research. We should also be mindful of our own digital research practices as we utilise digital technology to organise, manage, and publish our field findings. (Hsu 2014, 42)

In Chapter 4, I describe my composite of practices as a methodological kaleidoscope, exploring the strong need for flexibility that research on/about/through/within the digital requires in terms of boundary practices and research timing. Not the borrowing, but the true appropriation of practices from other disciplines are indispensable to conduct digital research and keep up with the constant updates inherent to the digital component. Further serendipities and accidental findings are enveloped in this ballade to the other fields of knowledge.

The Digital Public History approach

If the role of historians and public historians, agreeing with Cauvin and Noiret, is the fundamental work of interpreting and contextualising individual and collective memories, what are the specific affordances that the digital, and hence, digital public history, may have? I will try to answer this question reflecting on the points of intersection between big public history as a plural field of practice, with its multiple modes of engagement and the digital history aptitude to embrace, appropriate and apply public history. While in the appraisal of digital history practices, the digital component was the core element, so is the public in the case of digital public history.

In the same way we need to bear in mind the historicity of digital history methods, it is important to consider what came before digital public history in terms of encounters between historians and the public. There are, in fact, constant shifts of performances in “the history of historian’s role in the public space” (Cauvin 2016, 02). We can think about Herodotus and his representation of the others in his Histories, in Ancient Greece, passing through historicists in the wake of Leopold von Ranke, Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos and their introspection in the search for objectivity, and the later established professional historians who drifted away from non-specialised audiences as they plunged into a style of reasoning way too scholarly for the general public. Yet, beyond the highly scholarly spectrum, there have been several more popular historians, among which local historians and those employed by governments and institutions, that carried out relevant research in a local level or other scales also under the label of applied history 95.

Being public, thus, is not new for history, but the ways in which history becomespublic also varies in the course of history. Contemplating the ever-changing public facet of history means to look at its publics and audiences as a destination to public history, but also as places of departure and actors (i.e. people, communities, organisations), as a rich resource for both practice and reflection on practices. I like to think about the public as topos and logos for the reflection on the social function of history beyond the university walls; public as a malleable texture, a poetic matter and space for entanglements and disputes, encounters and diversity. As such, the public is ambivalent, home of conflicts and complex cultural manifestations where misuses of the past and battles of memories are in a constant scramble to dispossess the dispossessed and reassure the maintenance of the winners (Albuquerque Júnior 2019).

Beyond the most obvious goal of expanding the audience of history with the use of digital media, it is the concern with the public uses of history that brings together digital and public history. The digital seems to invite academic historians to interact more closely with popular culture, expanding the spaces of encounter (De Groot 2009). To think about the popular in history, let us remember Raphael Samuel’s idea that history should not be considered as “historian’s prerogative”, but rather as a “social form of knowledge”, a kind of work by many hands (Samuel 1996, 08). Ludmilla Jordanova points out that the past is essentially open, and narratives are public property (Jordanova 2006, 155). Identifying with the Brazilian accent of public history, that of epistemological pluralities, Ricardo Santhiago claims public history as an area of study and action. In his appreciation, he values the dimension of the encounter with the popular. This encounter, for Santhiago, happens in four intertwined fundamental forms of engagements:

the history made for the public (which prioritises the enlargement of audiences); the history made with the public (a collaborative history in which the idea of ‘shared authority’ is central); the history made by the public (which incorporates non-institutional forms of history and memory); and history is public (which would encompass the reflexivity and self-reflexivity of the field) (Santhiago 2016, 28, emphasis added by the author)

The digital is not central or indispensable to any of these specific engagements; public history has a life of its own, and the publics were there way before the digital. However, the digital component can act as a catalyst for the encounter between history and the popular. To Noiret, who advocates for the civic role of the junction of public history with the digital:

building a digital public history that is able to confront and critically mediate the incessant manifestation of private memories – and embalmed collective memories – is certainly a professional role destined to the work of the “public historian”. (Noiret 2015, 40)

The historian’s responsibility towards this civic attitude crosses all the modes of engagement. As professionals and public history historians, we should all be equipped to operate the critical mediation mentioned by Noiret. However, when it comes to curation and interpretation of data and digital heritage in a broader context, the digital component poses problems that go far beyond the problem of digital source criticism, or historical, scientific data criticism – Geschichtswissenschaftliche Datenkritik (Fickers 2020). The evolving state of play brings cross-sectional concerns for archival science, librarianship, museology, and information science (Ries and Palkó 2019). When it comes to working closely with these other fields, public historians long acquainted with the world of cultural institutions have resourceful baggage, however, the advent of the digital introduces new complexities.

A critical question here, thinking specifically on my experience with the Memorecord digital memory platform, is to consider the interplay of the public and digital competences of historians to deal with the emergence of new memory practices, such as the phenomenon of mediated memories. What could be a specific affordance of the digital to equip public historians to intervene in the mediation of memories in the public space? Does enabling the co-creation and emergence of other spontaneous bottom-up, non-institutionalised collections potentially serve this mediation? Could the creation of a digital public history project, in the lines of Memorecord, improve the conditions for this mediation?

My bet is that yes, bottom-up community projects open up possibilities for more dialogue and alternative pedagogies through which the public can be engaged in lesser passive ways. Yet when introducing the digital, we should be very mindful of the logic of the tools and environments we choose to avoid becoming victims of alienating logic that goes on the opposite way of the premises of a critical civic engagement. For instance, we can think about using the democratic power of the digital to challenge the logic of modern archival institutions and their power to include and exclude communities in the legitimated, embalmed collective memory of a given nation (Brown and Davis-Brown 1998, 20). This could be a very pragmatic contribution of digital public history projects in questioning the, often excluding, character of top-down collections done by institutions that, after all, store and create “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). Or, to think out loud, would we be shifting from an imperial grammar of archives to another, that of the digital? I ask these questions with genuine doubts, not necessarily because I have the answers for them, but because as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay discusses, we need to break the silence about the unsaid forms of historical erasure For Azoulay, one way to challenge the imperial temporality of archives is under the title of potential history, for which she urges a series of rehearsals96 in a compelling exercise for unlearning of imperialism:

Much has been written on the colonisation of land—colonialism’s signature enterprise, as the etymology of the word suggests (the Latin colonia means “settlement” or “farm”). Not enough, by contrast, has been written about another, complementary aspect of colonialism: the colonisation of time. The intertwinement of spatial and temporal conquest is responsible for the most durable forms of imperial violence in which citizens participate, often unbeknownst to them, through a plethora of mechanisms, sciences, idioms, assumptions, laws, norms, gestures, inclinations, aesthetics, affinities, and so on that became part of the exercise of imperial violence. Objects, especially those that came to be known as works of art, play a major role in rendering this double colonisation into a general condition that shapes citizens, making them complicit in perpetuating the dispossession of others with whom they are directly or indirectly governed—and to whom they should be indebted, since they have been, and continue to be, provided with plundered wealth that they consume as part of “their” culture.” (Azoulay 2019, 139)

The fulfilment of this civic engagement, though, can also come in other fashions. For instance, by ensuring more generally accessible ways for our research to reach society, be it through the way we deliver our research results to the public, how we position ourselves as historians in the public debates, or how our knowledge can, albeit indirectly, intervene in the mediation of disputes about the past and contribute to societal problems. Any of these modes of engagement with the present could foster empathy, and this, in the sense of Robert Hassan, a mechanism for action in the world (2019, 03) that I believe, is the public role of historians.

Figure 37. : Photo of a university wall in the South East of Brazil, “Does your academic knowledge get to the periphery?”, Unknown Author. Became viral in 2017.

Thinking along these lines, applying our knowledge to problems of the present, bouncing from practice to praxis, is not a passionate call for direct activism like the one by Azoulay, but the true work of historians. It is a recall for the social function of history and that the knowledge we produce should, somehow, engage with present problems that threaten our society and have roots in historical processes and events in long-disputed memory battles – e.g. racism and colonial, slavery inheritance; transitional justice and violent, authoritarian regimes (Pereira 2015).

Engaged research, however, does not necessarily require historians to hold on to slogans and occupy streets. It can also find its reason in the reflection about how we ask questions and how we conduct research to interpret and contextualise memories. Put in another way, methods are also modes of engagement with the present; the issue is whether we take a critical stance towards these practices or not. To give just one example, interrogating ourselves about why we select certain types of sources and why certain institutions have greater power in the selection and safeguard of documents. In Memorecord, when I chose to work with oral history and crowdsourced memories, one of the critical inflexions was the possibility of assessing the migrants’ memories beyond what is customarily archived by the official memory institutions. The digital, in this case, enabled a different bottom-up approach. For the contextualisation of memories, however, the way we get access to them is far from trivial. In the following pages, I will discuss how grassroots or bottom-up approaches such as history from below (Thompson 1966) and similar examples can empower both historians and publics in the process of making sense of historical experiences anchored in questions from the present.

A shared authority in practice

The public history core of Memorecord was built on the concept of shared authority (Frisch 1990). This concept, prized by oral history and public history practitioners, was developed by the oral historian Michael Frisch in the 1990’s. In a simple definition, shared authority informs us that experts in historical institutions and the public share the interpretation processes with non-hierarchical distinctions. It claims no special authority for historians, although, of course, we keep being members of a community of practice with rigorous methodological and theoretical rules to follow. In other words, acknowledging the existence of a shared authority does not mean a loss of value of the historian’s craft, but should boost our capacity to embrace other subjects’ savvy in their very own ways of telling their stories, passing them on, preserving and interpreting them. Moreover, shared-authority is a constant reminder that we, as professional interpreters, have to account for all the people’s historical agency, with no distinctions of social class, gender, race, sexual orientation or other artificial ways of social hierarchisation (e.g. intellectuals vs lay people). Most importantly, shared-authority does not treat non-professional historians engaged in public history projects or interviewed in oral history research as mere objects of study; participants, in this case, are rather partners, co-authors with a valuable say in the interpretation of the past. Shared authority underscores the ongoing negotiations over interpretations that oral historians, as narrators, shared with the interviewers. With open dialogues and iterative negotiations, oral historians and interview partners could discuss and seek compromises over disputed issues in a respectful, responsible way.

The idea of shared authority, though, is easier stated than practised. The limits of the concept, however, did not prevent it from becoming a reference for participatory and collaborative projects in recent years. It became a discussable model, for which historians needed to be in continue vigilante, but a reference of good practices within oral and public history relatable fields. Measuring the real achievement of truly respecting the principle of shared authority is subjective. However, watching for it can be an orienting rule for the mediation of the different agencies involved in a given project. Although its identification came from Frisch’s experiences in the dual setting of an oral history interview, shared authority is also manifested in the relationship and mediation of engagements of collective organisations, cultural institutions, decision-makers and politicians involved in collaborative undertakings. Shared authority could, hence, be read as the ideal temperature of the trading zones which also arise in the context of public history initiative (e.g. between historians and museologists).

The premise for shared authority, however, lies in the initiation of a dialogue. The very grounding of shared authority is the interactions among historians and other partners in the public, cultural, legal or even private sectors, be it in citizen science projects, institutional memory initiatives, or other possible engagements, such as the development of public policies, management and preservation of cultural heritage, pedagogical activities, and so on. The range of contexts in which we can welcome a sharable authority heterodox way to, in Walter Benjamins’s terms, “brush history against the grain” (Benjamin 1968, 257) is vast. However, concerning the modes of engagement of public history to mediate debates on memory – a debate which was core to Memorecord’s conceptualisation – thinking seriously about how to better ensure a shared authority is key. Frisch’s comment on the matter is pungent:

Memory is living history, the remembered past that exists in the present. In one sense, it is a force that can be tapped, unleashed, and mobilised through oral and public history to stand as an alternative to imposed orthodoxy and ofﬁcially sanctioned versions of historical reality; it is a route to a broadly distributed authority for making new sense of the past in the present. But in another way, memory is a deeply cultural artifact, manipulated in a host of direct and indirect ways, especially in an age of mass-mediation, to reproduce culturally appropriate attitudes and behaviors. It can thus stand as a prop of cultural power and authority, unless challenged in a variety of ways, of which aggressive historical inquiry and public presentation is certainly one. From this angle, it is history, not memory, that can provide the basis for shared reimagination of how the past connects to the present, and the possibilities this vantage suggests for the future. (Frisch 1990, xxiii)

Revisiting History from Below

History from below may have started, to borrow Frisch’s telling, as a way for “shared reimagination”, a reimagination of histories that were long depopulated of ordinary folks. This, of course, was not because people did not live enough, but because history, looking at the big men and big nations, occupied in narrating heroic biographies, systematically kept them excluded. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, in introducing the notion of history from below or people’s history, as Samuel would phrase it, looks at Thompson’s and his fellows’ experience in the United Kingdom, but also elsewhere in the globe. He quotes an exciting manifesto of Puerto Rican historians that at the beginning of the 1970’s expressed a feeling that many others around the global South would share, the outrage by the elitist profile of particular histories; the manifesto reads:

We face the problem that the history presented as ours is only part of our history... What of the history of the ‘historyless’, the anonymous people who, in their collective acts, their work, daily lives and fellowship have forged our society through centuries? (as quoted in Bhattacharya 1983, 03)

The idea of “historyless” people here is compelling to grasp the symbolic violence behind the process of stripping someone of their right to know their history and, ultimately, from their culture. History from below as an attempt to bring in people that served as a framework, greatly influenced by a Marxist orientation, to the emergence of social history in Britain, but also to the implementation of more democratic approaches to history, in the trail of practices emerging almost concomitantly such as oral and public history. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie adopted the perspective of people’s history to analyse a peasant community of the Pyrenee. The book that originated from this study, Montaillou (1979), was published for the first time in France and met a successful public reception, the same cannot be said about the critics of some of his erudite fellows (Sharpe 1992, 47). However, despite the criticism of his heterodox methods, the study shows the great appeal the perspective has among the, likewise, common people audience and indicated that some official historical sources could still be useful to explore these ordinary lives in the past despite the difficulty to access direct testimonies.

In our modern age, the penetration of the digital in everyday life is so deep that the problem of historians of today and tomorrow might not be exactly that of little data but that of an overwhelming amount of data, as discussed.. The challenge of the Age of Abundance (Graham, Milligan, and Weingart 2015; Rosenzweig 2003), thus, is about learning to truly make sense and interpret the copious records and traces of human activities our digital trail is leaving behind. In Memorecord’s case, despite the existence of abundant digital material, I opted, nevertheless, for the co-creation of sources by means of social media crowdsourcing. While this type of method adds noises and interferences to the interpretation (i.e. born-digital material scaled-up to Big Data curation, interpretation and archiving), it also opens unprecedented opportunities for putting shared-authority in practice and, perhaps, revisits the history from below idea from yet another angle.

The digitisation of life and technological ubiquity is producing an unprecedented amount of historical data, but to approaches like the history from below, there is a fantastic assortment of digital egodocuments and other genres of records generated by each individual in the digital environment that opens the possibility for yet another closer perspective of the common life, rather zoomed in on the frugal details, perhaps way too close:

You do something, access a website of automobiles. You move from your home to a clothes’ store, evaluate the seller and give your email and address. You think of someone and click on that person’s profile at Facebook (with this you can notice that their posts will appear more often to you. You go to a coffee shop and have a cup of coffee while you use the Wi-Fi that is free to you if you make check-in in the cafeteria. You do a search about Denmark on the Internet. You did all these things, but you don’t know why you did it. Meanwhile, everything has gone through recording systems that reveal a connection between everything you’ve done: the insertion into a data field, the crossing of information and the development of a psychological-market profile that is highly detailed will provide companies with an optimisation in the supply of services that are of your wish. So there’s a trace of knowing why you’ve done all these things and what are other things you are more likely to do. But this information doesn’t belong to you: you’re ignorant about your wills, decisions, choices, and also what motivates them. Thus, Big Data decrees the end of free will. Big Data decrees the end of free will, of privacy, secrecy and autonomy. (Benevides 2017, 08)

The ethical implications of the above-described process are enormous, not only considering the unauthorised or improper use of one’s data for commercial use but also concerning the risks of other types of abuse. Academia has not yet provided researchers with unanimous guidelines for research in these circumstances. Insofar, most of the lessons are coming to the field more specifically from experimentational investigations that do not have a set of shared protocols or best practices in place, but that explore the field by extending safety nets anchored in analogue practices while trying to grasp the best way to assess the digital material and how to better respect the integrity and the privacy of the subjects involved. The situation is no longer a lack of sources or the problem of source interpretation; it has scaled up to data critique.

I believe that the possibility of closer interactivity between historians and their public partners, in this scenario, could favour the emergence of another degree of history from below, but now, no longer assuming historians have to go down. Drawing on the notion of shared authority, we could, perhaps, propose an approach that is rather horizontal, from equal-to-equal, and use the digital tools to approximate, even more, historians from the public partners. We could try to subvert the invasive perverse logic of Big Data, and start to experiment on more constructive, civic forms of engaging with people by means of digital communication. We could set out to a historiography that is less detached from ordinary life. And we must try to do this in a conscious and very vigilant way in order not to become accomplices or hostages of the process of freedom and knowledge alienation interpreted by the technical mechanism that conditions our research practice.

Towards a 360º history

Just as the overture to hands-on and thinkering attitude is central to the completion of a thinking by doing mode in digital history, which I have discussed under the rubric of digital hermeneutics, the true experience of shared-authority is necessary to enable a genuine exercise of what I am suggesting to be a historiography closer to ordinary life, one that, finally, could try not to hierarchise the subjects and their ways of life. My claim originates from the perception that terms such as below or grass-rooted or bottom-up still refers to people’s history as a somewhat inferiorised approach. Or, putting it in another way, while it is instrumental to employ the oppositions top and bottom when referring to research approaches, the very choice of words may be reifying the class struggle and the hierarchisation of society in a what comes first (top), what comes last (bottom) logic. History from below is, notwithstanding, the main inspiration here. However, I believe that it is opportune to reassess the way we label it, as the title we give to it may be less productive today than it was at the time when it was coined. Back then, history from below was as statement in itself; the method and the title criticised the absence of ordinary people from historiography, more, specifically, working class in the tradition heralded by the History Workshop. Today, I believe that historiography is well acquainted with the denounce made in that statement. The internationalisation of public history, actually, also helped to invigorate this debate by shedding light into other forms of popular history, such as community project, with which Memorecord is also identified. However, all these histories are legitimate history afterwards. By emphasising that we are taking a perspective from below, there is an implicit suggestion that we are somehow descending from our regular point of view to another level. But where would we be descending from? The historiographical canons? I am convinced that rethinking this labels might be productive vis a vis the communities authority.

I raise the idea of 360º history inspired by Memorecord’s experiment design. Engaging with community members not only to collect the data, but to involve them in the process of shaping the platform was an eye opening experience. Likewise, interacting with participants of the crowdsourcing on social media helped be to gain a different visibility. I feel unease, however, to define that the perspective I had along the way was really from below. Throughout the different phases of the project, in many circumstances, I found myself looking at the community from different angles, using different ways to reach and maintain an exchange with them. Moreover, not all the people I encountered had the same role in the project; some were more actively participating then others, and the quality of their participation was also diverse: some have granted me an interview; others helped in in the pilot test of the PixStori app; some gave feedback on the design and layout of the platform; other suggested me issues on the very concept of the crowdsourcing; and most of them joined the memory harvest on social media. Finally, it is important to mention that many of them took part in one or more activities, or were collaborated with in the project without having never assuming any expected task related to the design of the platform or the feeding of the crowdsourcing, some helped me by simply welcoming me into the community, opening doors, introducing me to a few people and networks. Fundamentally, I realised at the end of the project that the 360º scope of the experiment, aiming at (re)visiting all the research’s phase, was not only a practical decision of how conducting the experiment, but became a fruitful approach to engage more fairly with community partners in different circumstances. This helped me to gain a better understanding of their different capacities within the project. It also contributed to my perception of the participants’ heterogeneity and how interchangeably they their role could be along the way. The 360º history highlighted in the title of this section is less to offer a new title, but to suggest that we need a new frame of reference; as such, the 360º outlook seems pretty useful. Instead of closing the historian’s visibility in a single standpoint it reminds us of the possibility of moving ourselves around to look at things from a different angle. That is, at last, what all community projects may require.

This circularity approach, so to speak, is ignited by digital public history methods that enhance communication with the publics and audiences of history. By doing so, 360º history also seize the opportunity of this closer encounter to rekindle history’s very bond with societal struggles. While closer to the people from whom we are learning from, the empathetic effect of our practices should not only be a potential result of our work outwards the discipline, it should also sensitise historians about the real meaning of the engagement with the public. In the age of Big Data and scalable readings, this closer look should also rewire our senses with the importance of individual contexts and experience to reimagine the past, as Frisch proposes, in the fairer way possible. Being out in the field for this kind of practice, even if we should end up interacting with people mostly through digital media (like happened with me in Memorecord), should, additionally, help us to refine our analytical capacities in a manner to welcome more diversity in our historical record samples. Likewise, being closer to ordinary life could sharpen our sensibilities in a way that we can imagine less homogenised narratives, and, yet, offer a meaningful contribution to historiography. In addition, it could help us to devise, improve and readdress our practices of interpretation and contextualisation in the digital and public space. In short, a historiography that is closer to ordinary life is practising history in its most empathetic way. Finally, I am fond of the 360º approach for its complementarity with the metaphor of the roundabouts for digital public history which I develop next.

A roundabout for digital public history: empathetic triggers

Figure 38. Illustration, Roundabouts. Photo collage of sixteen different types and designs of crossroads around the world. By Barbara Menezes.

Keeping with the metaphor of crossroads, I would like to propose another imagination exercise, now, proposing an encounter of what I discussed above as the crucial context for digital history to flourish with further paths that I believe can foster the empathetic approach of digital public history. Considering that in the perspective of a historiography closer to life we will need to apply digital methods to get in touch with our various publics and audiences, I would like to invite those prompts in the crossroads for digital history – openness, collaboration, infrastructure, training & evaluation – to join us in a potential roundabout for digital public history. I believe the metaphor of roundabouts is the perfect fitting for this sort of looking ahead exercise because roundabouts bring people together, in the same manner as the intersectionality of crossroads. But, in traffic, roundabouts were also designed as solutions to keep people going. It can, simultaneously, be a place of encounter, just as the crossroads, but invitintg people to move. Furthermore, around the world, we can find roundabouts of all flavours, with one or multiple lanes, slow or fast ones, with or without vegetations or monuments in the middles, and so on. When thinking about digital public history, we can imagine that historians will need to adapt their practices according to the local context and needs. While the shape and the surrounding landscapes may vary everywhere around the world, roundabouts are about accessibility, and it is possible to turn around the ring one more time if you need to reconsider your exit. Poetically speaking, if we let go of the stress of rush hours, roundabouts are also where things go round, it is a smoother intersection. Nevertheless, sometimes things can get a bit confusing when it is too crowded, but in compensation, in contrast with the simple crossroads, that sometimes obliges us to stop (e.g. traffic lights, works, accidents), roundabouts let everybody in. Hereunder, two further prompts that, instead of working as programmatic, should be read as flexible, open, empathetic triggers:

Shared authority:
As we saw above, the concept of shared authority could be read as the ideal temperature of the partnerships or trading zones that arise in the context of public history. However, shared authority is not an easy balance to meet. There are many challenges of authoritative discourses and the different languages spoken by the various partners. Finding a compromise on a certain interpretation proposal is not always an easy task when individual goals are too distinct or there are hidden agendas. Moreover, an important aspect of ensuring a shared-authority is the even distribution of roles and responsibilities with transparency. In many crowdsourcing projects, for instance, participants are not given the full account of the project, or, more problematically, it is offered to them with very little room for qualitative inputs in complex tasks. While there is no recipe for guaranteeing shared authority in place, a good solution, learning from the field of oral history, would be to establish a few protocols to orient the collaborative work or the participatory activities. Ongoing negotiations and periodic evaluation could be good thermometers. The most relevant is making sure that shared authority is not taken for granted and foresee, within the project structure, ways to check and ameliorate it in all the different phases of the project. Digital tools can help improve communication, as well as, if desired, give a few solutions to remote assessment.
Participatory Design:

Here, once again, it is important to think about how these different prompts are intertwined and should be iterative. Participatory design is the way, as I try to argue during Chapter 2, to engage participants in a meaningful way, in complex tasks that are fundamental to the development of a given project. If we want to ensure good maintenance of the shared authority temperature of our project, we should consider the implementation of participatory design as an infrastructuring aspect of digital public history projects. Participants can be involved in a massive variety of tasks along with a project development and may not become full-time partners, although it is necessary to guarantee that in a participatory design setting, participants are not simply offering inputs to basic tasks, but are really involved in activities that may shape or impact the project in its conceptualisation. Participatory design is, ultimately, great experimentation of shared authority.

Back to Hermeneutics, but which one?

Despite due criticism, the late resonance of the arguments in favour of more self-reflexivity and greater engagement in cultural criticism had in the digital humanities could be explained as a side effect of the transition from analogue to digital. As I discussed in the introduction to this work, the speed of technological changes and the uncertainties about the development of computing, its new gadgets and the connection to the world wide web, may have corroborated so that at the dawn of the Digital Age there would be the greatest interest in the more practical dimensions of the changes at stake – formats, materials, tools, methods – while questions about the epistemological impact of these brand new facets of the artisanal work in the humanities would still be running in the backend. Experimentation, thus, gradually became the ordre du jour in the first years of digital humanities. The following trend was the establishment of laboratories and similar infrastructures to try out new research apparatus, manipulating the tools and materials in an environment where trial and errors would be recurrent, and failures could become more acceptable. Labelling these spaces under the umbrella of laboratories, mirroring the tradition of the hard science, not only lent them the right to innovate and eventually fail but was tactical in guaranteeing funding and employment for many researchers to sail through the crisis. In other words, looking retrospectively, before the plea for criticism could become a shared agenda for the digital humanities, the digital component became tactical for the humanities agenda.

While the previous waves of digital humanities have deeply explored the potential of the digital tools and methods, despite scattered criticism about the prevalence of doing over thinking, “building and making rather than theorising” (Spiro 2012, 28), it was only very recently that the critical deficit has reached more resonance among practitioners and is getting discussed more thoroughly, not only by the theorisers – who have been raising this flag for a while now – but also by the builders. There is, indeed, indications of a critical shift seen in the third wave of digital humanities, although, it is not seamlessly incorporating the dialectic dimensions of criticism, meaning the meta-criticism (i.e. self-reflexive exercise on using the digital) and the external criticism (i.e. cultural criticism, acknowledging that the digital technology and material are also cultural phenomena).

With respect to this latter point, some authors claim that taking on self-reflexive pedagogy, as in building as a way of knowing, could be an interesting exercise for bridging theory and practice in digital work. This proposition implies taking the instance that building is a form of scholarship (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, 76) and that digital objects, as well as other forms of scholarly products, can embody arguments (Galey and Ruecker 2010, 412). An underlying argument for this assumption which I would like to bring forward here is the understanding that digital prototypes could do “rhetorically what a theoretical discourse does by presenting a thesis” (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, 77). In this direction, in line with what Lev Manovich said during a Q&A session in the DH 2007 Conference, Alan Galey and Stan Ruecker (2010) suggest that “a prototype is a theory”. The authors claim that “the creation of an experimental digital prototype [can] be understood as conveying an argument about designing interfaces” (Galey and Ruecker 2010, 405) and propose to expand John Unsworth’s notion of scholarly primitives – discovering, annotating, comparing and so on – for including terms such as designing and prototyping.

The shift to this rather hybrid way of producing scholarship, as I argued in this chapter, could be an indication that a new style of reasoning about digital public history could be on the way. Within this style, the call for experimentation and the introduction of digital interferences are novelties to which historians are still not completely familiarised. To make sense of the unknown, I discussed the need to introduce a hermeneutic dimension within the practical and the theoretical work of digital historians that would take into account the ontological and epistemological implications of the digital in a pragmatic way: identifying and flagging interferences, and devising solutions to deal with them.

Digital Hermeneutics as Hermeneutics of Practice

Finally, with the intention of providing a few directions to walk through the fog of the digital work realms, I depicted crucial contexts with short, open and flexible prompts which I retained the most suitable to ensure the best practices for digital history scholarship and digital public projects. In respect to digital history, I imagined crossroads bringing together openness, collaboration, infrastructuring and training and evaluation that could equip historians with the necessary skills to conduct digital history research and apply digital hermeneutics. For digital public history, I propose a roundabout that would combine the prompts of digital history with two further references for digital public history: shared-authority and participatory design.

In digital public history, the social function of history was made prominent and I emphasised the importance of participatory practices in the process of creating empathy. Uniting the digital history competences with the digital public history approach suggested the live practice of digital hermeneutics, underscoring the need for a continuous conjugation of theory and practice, interpretation and participatory projects, hermeneutics and/as practice. By systematically braiding theory and practice, and adopting a necessary self-reflexive stance toward everything we do, and we think when conducting digital hands-on work, we enable a new form of hermeneutics of practice. This specific hermeneutical approach may function as a visibility broker, assisting us in the process of unveiling the unspoken and implicit aspects of the research, facilitating the identification of the digital interferences we encounter throughout the research process. In this sense, the hermeneutics of practice should improve the researcher readiness to face the new research conditions placed by the digital component. Recovering Hacking’s styles project, in an eventual stabilisation of digital history and digital public history as a new style of reasoning, a hermeneutics of practice should become a sentence of this particular style, supporting the search for historical objectivity.

Chapter 4: The historian’s kitchen, or how to cook your memories?

We need projects that will involve people in exploring what it means to remember, and what to do with memories to make them active and alive, as opposed to mere objects of collection. To the extent this is done, we will be seizing an opportunity not nearly so accessible to conventional academic historical scholarship, whatever its virtues: the opportunity to help liberate for that active remembering all the intelligence, in the way I am using it, of a people long kept separated from the sense of their own past.

Michael Frisch, The Memory of History, 1981.

Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives was a bold plan for an experimental case study. The collaborative process of shaping the Memorecord platform, as described in Chapter 2, was full of insights and setbacks, which resulted in many practical lessons, but also required constant negotiation with the original plan. The participatory design of the project and the technical aspects involved required time and flexibility to learn new skills and collaborate with experts when my competencies were limited. The topic of migration added another layer of complexity to the practical side of the project, reaching participants to share memories of their migration trajectory publicly was challenging, especially considering how the topic can arise sensitive questions. In this chapter I examine more closely how the subject of migration and its eminence in the Grand-Duchy’s society, in addition to the methodological issues identified by now, have played a strong part in the shaping of the project and may have contributed to the scale and quality of collection obtained in a different way than I was expecting, perhaps ingenuously.

Nevertheless, the exercise of building the digital platform from scratch, setting up the crowdsourcing mechanism and making it run, technically and across the community, was of extreme significance for my reflections on the ontological and epistemological implications of the digital component in the historical research. I discussed this in greater detail in Chapter 3, elaborating on the digital interferences and conditioning. In addition, the experiment allowed me to reflect on the locatedness of our practices and how decisive the context in which a research is embedded can be. I expanded this reflection through the proposition of crucial contexts for digital history and digital public history development. The Memorecord case study, however, would not be complete without expanding the discussion beyond its how (described in Chapter 2) and why (analysed in Chapter 3). After documenting the process of building Memorecord and explaining the crucial role of experimentation in the making of digital history scholarship, in this chapter, I will discuss what I found through the Memorecord’s harvest.

Just as the project plan had to be adapted many times, the expectations about the collection varied along the way. In the end, results were in any case different from what I could anticipate. The interpretation phase of the study, hence, also required some adjustments. If the original plan was a recipe, I could say that at the end I had to cook by heart. And doing so does not mean to lose sight of the original recipe, it just suggests that I had to adapt a few things according to the resources available and, like in the kitchen, the cook builds improvisations on the basis of great old savoir-faire. If interpretation is the historian’s kitchen, let us think about a traditional recipe that was just awaiting the harvest to be cooked but, as in many other cases in the past, the crop was not as expected; some products, or ingredients, were missing. Some new ingredients, strange ones, were found among the others. In the lack of a cookbook, for the preparation of these ingredients, as for the criticism of the harvested memories, we will need, again, to try out new ways of doing it. Old pots and traditional tools might not be enough, when lacking a fully equipped kitchen to deal with it, and some bricolage comes into place, perhaps a bit of alchemy, to find or invent new tools and flavours that will still make a good meal97.

Before revisiting the cooking, let me introduce the tools and materials available, as well as the techniques used to improvise the composite methodology used for the interpretation and contextualisation of the sources collected in the making of the Memorecord case study. Even when I introduce some working concepts hereunder in a separate way, I believe they are closely tied to my analysis and the resulting interdisciplinary framework that arises is the fruit of what I tried to introduce in Chapter 3 as a hermeneutics of practices.

Boundary work & conceptual tools: the kitchen

In 2007, philosopher and historian of science Robert Crease wrote about a certain ambiguity of the novelties in communication for historians, making the point about preservation:

new communications techniques are good for scientists, encouraging rapid communication and stripping out hierarchies. But for historians, they are a mixed blessing. It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive. Nor is it that the information in emails differs in kind from that in letters. Far more worrying is... whether email and other electronic data will be preserved at all. (as quoted in Poulos 2008, 112, emphasis added by myself)

Indeed, although studies and experiments on digital history have already accumulated some thirty years of work, only recently has the debate on the history of the Internet and the impasses posed by web archiving gained more prominence among historians. In 2009, internet history was still a “relatively blank page, not to mention the subdiscipline of web history” as observed by Neils Brüggers (2009, 115). Eight years later, Jane Winters wrote a whole piece to the Internet Histories to demonstrate the “value of internet (and web) histories” (2017). This makes it sound like the vast debate on the generic challenges of digitisation and preservation is taking too long to come into the spotlight, while little attention has been given to Internet and web histories in particular. Most dramatic is overlooking the great variety of digital-born materials emerging from all kinds of electronic and online activities. In terms of scale, instead of talking about digital-born sources, we even label it digital-born data. Data that will be precious for writing the history of the 21st Century, but only if we dare to work with it and create conditions to deal with its perennial ephemerality. Winters makes a clear statement on why historians should look closer at this debate:

Contested though they may be, web histories are very much here to stay. They are not, however, the whole story when it comes to the record of our digital lives. If historians are already lagging behind in their engagement with the archived web, how much greater will be their difficulty in coming to terms with social media, apps and other forms of born digital data which fall outside the scope of web archives? Some of this information is imperfectly captured by current web harvesting methods, often appearing as a tantalising ghost presence in the archive, an indication of what we do not have. Still more of it is inaccessible or missing altogether, and will never be susceptible to archiving within the frameworks that we have developed for the web. Some of this data is in the hands of businesses, who will only preserve it for as long as it retains commercial value; some is explicitly designed to disappear almost as soon as it is created – ephemerality is built into the DNA of Snapchat, for example. The voices of individuals, and particularly of the marginalised, may be louder here than they are on the web, so it is all the more important that we look beyond web archives and seek other digital challenges. A web archive does not, and cannot, contain all of our digital data, but it is at least part of the picture. (Winters 2017, 179)

On the handling of digitally born data, I identify the mixed blessing of the Memorecord case study. On the one hand, experimentation is a chance to grasp all the beautiful possibilities of the great novelties – as in launching a crowdsourcing campaign for co-creation of sources (!). On the other hand, the lack of references, protocols or consolidated best practices to deal with the generated data can be puzzling. Still, it is necessary if we want to move past the simple projection of all the wonderful things the digital can do for us and try it out, tackling the inherent problems on the way as an opportunity for reflection, assuming the risk of some (perhaps, artful) failures as we go.

To do so, although departing from a framework of social history to complete the analysis of the memories harvested, Memorecord resorted to conceptual tools from interdisciplinary domains such as Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Research to name a few. In other words, beyond the digital history trading zone (historian – computer experts) in which I developed the digital memory platform at C²DH, in Memorecord’s analytical framework there is a fundamental overture towards other communities of practices and boundary work. This openness was fundamental to equip me for an interpretation exercise that would not merely consider the content, but also the digital interferences in the material collected. Most importantly, articulating my analyses with the discussions on technologies of memory and mediated memories, as I explain hereunder, was key to understanding the cultural dynamics embedded in the digital-born data generated in the Memorecord’s crowdsourcing.

Taking into account the role of digital technology, mediation is fundamental to understanding how the people project their self in constant negotiation with the large collectivity through the act of sharing their stories online. In other words, this kind of mediation is not neutral in the relationship between individuals and culture at large, it engenders new perceptions of private and public, of how individuals relate to collectives, as observed by José van Dijck (2007, 21). As individuals and as culture, we are more and more susceptible to digitally represented material, which brings social and technical practices of memory-making and memory retrieval in the digital age upfront in the field of memory studies. Nancy van House and Elizabeth F. Churchill also argue that “what is remembered individually and collectively depends in part on technologies of memory and the associated socio-technical practices, which are changing radically.” (House and Churchill 2008, 296)

Beyond the interplay between memory and technology, another critical lens for this case study is the attention to the nexus between memory and migration from a long-term perspective, looking at its political and social relevance. In the last few years, this nexus has been more closely explored by historians, but also anthropologists, political scientists and sociologists. As contended by Irial Glynn and J. Olaf Kleist, the understanding of how politics of memory have been attached to migrant incorporation in many countries with immigration (Glynn and Kleist 2012, 23). Although based in a collection somewhat attached to the more recent migration in Luxembourg, in addressing these memories I pay attention to the roles played by them and other testimonies identified through auxiliary documents and literature in the shape and reshaping of the past. This dialectical relationship of memory and migration, as I discuss in the second part of this chapter, is accountable for a shifting discourse about migrants in Luxembourg. As previous studies have shown, the nexus between memory and migrant incorporation is pivotal in understanding the strategies adopted by newcomers in negotiating their place in the new country, as well as to the receiving society in the continuous discussion and remoulding of policies (idem, 2012, 03). These dynamics are also present in the long migration history of Luxembourg, from the end of the 19th Century and continuing to this day. In my analysis, I noticed how, in the recent history of migration in Luxembourg the emergence of an official discourse of immigration as a success story had demobilised this nexus, homogenising the different perceptions of the past at play, in an attempt to forge a social cohesion that, nevertheless, remains flawed.

In the next subsection we move to one of the first conceptual tools that I retain critical to the understanding of the analysis that will follow it: mediated memories. Next to it, I introduce technologies of memory and digital ethnography, which I consider as my cooking tools, so to speak. Among them, I present an overview of the crowdsourced memories gathered through Memorecord, that along the kitchen metaphor would be the precious ingredients obtained through the memory harvest.

Mediated memories

Figure 39. Detail of Memorecord home, accessible on https://memorecord.uni.lu/

The empirical study carried out with Memorecord aimed to realise a systematic analysis of the mediated memories (Dijck 2007) of two specific groups of immigrants in the Grand Duchy: Italians and the Portuguese. The concept of mediated memories can open up meaningful paths of investigation, not only in what concerns the study of the migrant memories but also to support our analysis in dialogue with the broader transformations in the culture entailed by technological change. The preface to Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (2007) begins with a personal story of the author, recollecting the experience with her first digital camera, that she bought in 2003, in an attempt to digitise her own memories by photographing her shoebox of old belongs and souvenirs. Dijck tells us:

The concrete contents of my shoebox, caught in a limbo between analog and digital materialisation, provides a window onto contemporary debates addressing the relation between self and others, material and virtual, private and public, individual e collective. Mediated Memories aims to theorise our personal shoebox but turning them into a prism - a conceptual tool through which we can understand larger transformations currently at work in our culture. These large transformations include but are not restricted to the issue of digitisation. Digitisation only partly reveals the complex interconnections between mind, technology and culture (Dijck 2007, xiii).

The idea of going beyond the simple digitisation and considering a more complex relationship between memory and technological development that cannot be detached from culture is of much value for this project. The broader notion of digital culture reminds us that what is being digitised, becoming digital, is much more than multimedia doubles or mere copies of what is present in the analogue world, not to mention the born-digital. When considering this digitisation in the writing and other representations about the self, it is necessary to observe how the digital component produces a chain of creation and recreation of meanings around memory objects and memory practices. In spite of having online environments and gadget screens as their main place, the new digital memory objects and the memory practices around it are not at all disconnected from the actual world. As Pierre Lévy noted in the early 2000s, it is impossible to separate the human from its material environment, as well as from the signs and images we use to make sense of life, meaning that all human activities on digital platforms, that he had broadly elaborated as cyberspace, is in a continuum with the actual world (2001). The working concept of mediated memories shall offer a better understanding on the mutual shaping of memory and media (Dijck 2007, 21), again emphasising this continuum between the digital/virtual and the actual.

When it comes to memory studies, as well as in the migration realm, emotions, objects and places have close relationships. Exploring these intertwined relationships while opening the Memorecord shoebox, inspired in the one suggested by Dijck, may favour discoveries that would not be possible otherwise. For instance, we will see in Memorecord collection, that digital mediation opens another window to understand the multiple attachments of migrants with people, places, objects, pieces of music, past selves and new perceptions of their identity thanks to the emotional charge elaborated in some posts, with more cathartic tone. Observing how people deal with images of objects, places and people dear to them throughout the collection suggested ways in which their relationships and perceptions of self were shaped by their migration experience. At the same time, it also allowed me to notice how the virtual interaction with these objects, places, people and so on was key to value their migration experience. Fieldwork encounters with people and some interviews conducted in the context of Racontez Votre Histoire were also representative about how the digital, not only as means of direct communication (i.e. calls by Skype, WhatsApp and other messaging apps), is changing migrant’s feelings about their circumstance of being in a constant shifting between what Abdelmalek Sayad has elaborated as double absence (1999) – drawing on the interplay between emigration and immigration, feeling the “absent presence” there, in the home country, and the “present absence” in the receiving society – and a sort of double presence, or rather scattered presence, evoked by the digital.

What I want to highlight here is that the material collected through Memorecord should be read and seen as digital objects on screen that elicit a particular performativity that needs to be evaluated in the light of the cultural dynamics engendered by the digital and not as simply “virtualisation of former analogue products and practices” (Dijck 2007, 110). In 2007, thinking about the phone camera, Dijck pointed out how this kind of emerging digital tool was affecting how people socialise and interact, how they maintain relationships and consolidate them in their memory. In 2020, as I finish the writing of this thesis, data on social media consumer adoption shows that today “users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day multi-networking across an average of 8 social networks and messaging apps” (Chaffey 2020). Some thirteen years later, we see that the topic Dijck was seizing upon in her Mediated Memories still deserves more philosophical contemplation, as she called for back then, as well as ethnographic research and psychological theorising. In the limits of this case study, I will not be able to offer a deep analysis on the broader implications of the digital mediation of memories in our lives, however, I tried to analyse the co-created sources I gathered through the Memorecord harvest bearing in mind some significative considerations already offered by Dijck in 2007:

Personal memories are not infallible recordings of past experience, but they are reconstructions of the past that are filtered, interpreted and expounded upon through projections and desires. Our ability to create stories of the past does not depend on our ability to recollect precise facts; on the contrary, stories create memories. The morphing nature of episodic memory may lead machines to enhance that quality. According to reconsolidation theory, memory is a creative amalgamation of fact and fantasy, and the biggest advantage of computers is that they may support this essential feature of episodic memory better than any previous technology. (Dijck 2007, 163)

Episodic memories, indeed, are more prominent in the Memorecord collection. However, in the very similar way that performance is essential for oral history, the projections and desires that come along the episodic memories on social media are fundamental to understanding the context in which these posts emerge. Moreover, it is necessary to take into consideration the manipulative potential of digital photography, as indicated by Dijck, and I would also add other forms of digital expression that allow image control – editing, application of filters and other effects that may alter the initial picture. The aesthetic features are not only present in the equipment used to take a photo or record a video but are offered as a finalising touch by the social media sites itself. The image control in social media goes beyond the technical manipulability. It also embraces rhetoric and other language tricks, as well as resources specific to online conversation, that grants expressivity and versatility to all kinds of posts in social media: emojis, emotional indicator, picture frames, hashtags etc. everything plays a role in the statement made.

While cultural historians could address the discussion about authenticity implied here in greater depth, instead of focusing on the problem of the inapprehensible “true” picture, I am interested in how this “manipulative potential” is being used for identity construction “allowing more shaping power over autobiographical memories”, put in another way, digital egodocuments that are used as “public signifiers’’ (idem, 2007, 119). In the Memorecord collection, for example, I observe that in various situations, participants wrote their posts in a different language than their mother tongue (e.g. Italian and Portuguese sharing content in English) even knowing that they could make the posts in any language they want. I found it very interesting to notice that they were not simply sharing their contents with me, but they envisage a certain audience among their own friends or in the Memorecord community itself. This and other examples will be further discussed in the second part of this chapter.

Technologies of memory

In the composite of this boundary work, a background discussion coming from human-computer interaction and science and technology studies I want to take in consideration for my analysis is the one about technologies of memories, deeply braided with the theorisation on mediated memories proposed by Dijck. Like any other media in the past – radio, photography, film, television, videos – computers and digital gadgets such as smartphones and tablets are more and more implicated in processes of documentation, preservation and circulation of memories. Nowadays, for instance, the family photo album gains another life in the digital variations of photo displays in social media like Facebook (albums, posts, stories) and Instagram (posts and stories). All these forms of sharing images, not only photos but also video, animations (i.e. GIFs, stickers and others) allow memories of specific situations to be saved for the future. In this case, we could consider that they function like technologies of memory, preserving for later generations, the memory of a particular moment. However, in contrast with some analogue media, such as tape recording, the digital format embodies the risk of being ephemeral due to the fragility of the digital. Actually, some of the digital forms, purposely seek ephemerality, like Snapchat98 posts and variations of “stories”. Nevertheless, the digital relatives of paper, film or photography are still potential containers, carriers of memory.

All technologies of memory, however, seem to be entangled with the paradox of the “junk-in-the-attic” or, as sharply put by Harald Weinrinch “stored, in other words, forgotten” (2004, 207). James Poulos described it in a whimsical, yet captious way:

boxes of keepsakes stashed away at important moments find themselves on the curb one spring-cleaning morning. Stacks of receipts to be itemised for tax season disappear into drawers dumped into the garbage when full. The capture of memories as data with no real size, shape, or location heightens the illusion that what we sock away today will be just as vital this time next year. But instead of stocking the warehouses in our minds, we export our memory into external hard drives, into cyberspace. We forget what needs remembering. (2008, 112–13)

Somehow the dichotomy pointed out by Weinrich and Poulos resonates the tensions between total memory and total loss expressed in Sigmund Freud’s “reminiscence” (Reminiszenz). Computers, clouds and other digital supports enhance this duality. Facebook, for instance, plays around it by offering a section called Memories in which users can see old posts from years before “We hope you enjoy looking back on your memories on Facebook, from the most recent memories to those long ago”. Moreover, in this section we find contents like: “On this day, 11 years ago” or “Your most liked photo of 2011 – Anita, this photo from 9 years ago today was your most liked that year. We thought that you’d like to look back on it.”. Similarly, Google Photos and iPhone iOS suggest “memories” from times ago. However, it is not only the guarantee of preservation that is at stake, digital technologies of memories are changing the very ways in which we produce and remember our memories, the Facebook suggestion is just one example of how algorithms are now interfering in the way we remember (or are reminded) of things we did in the past. Likewise, social uses of cultural memory are changeful in the digital age. As House and Churchill noted in the referential paper on technologies of memories in 2008:

In the last few years, digital photography has all but superseded film for most personal uses, revolutionising picture taking, sharing and archiving. People take more pictures by orders of magnitude than before and keep most if not all of them on personal hard drives, making archiving and retrieval highly problematic. And they share more images more easily, via email, photoblogs, personal websites, and dedicated photosharing sites. (2008, 297)

In the following decade, after the authors published this paper, the social media boom catapulted the complexity of this scenario even further. For historians, this situation has yet another ramification, which is the one I want to pay attention during my analysis of Memorecord’s harvest, as Astrid Erll contends “like memory, media do not simply reflect reality, but offer reconstructions of the past” (2011, 02). As Tim van de Heijden remarks in his study on home movies

The affordances and constraints of the medium largely influence how people re-experience and therefore remember what the medium conveys. It matters, for instance, whether a medium is able to capture memories like the child’s first steps in movement, colour and (synchronous) sound. Consequently, memories are both mediated, that is made accessible through the medium; and mediatised, that is shaped or constructed by the medium. (2018, 36–37, emphasis by the author)

For my study, I look at memory less as a representation or neutral trace of the past, but as a performative process, which is continuously shaped by the technologies of memory and, as such, conditioned by it.

Crowdsourced memories

At the end of the Memorecord crowdsourcing I did not consider the collection a success. Despite my participation in public events, interviews and radio shows I believed that participation was too limited (see table 1)99. My first hypothesis to this response is that most of the people who were interested in participating, although appreciating the project proposal, did not feel comfortable in sharing certain stories publicly. Second, I think that my outreach plan and communication strategy may have failed to reach the target audience at a good time, because the project was launched in the month of May 2018 and a few weeks later most migrants were leaving for the long summer break. Associated to the timing, there was a personal health issue which forced me to cancel some offline activities that were planned for 2019, in association with the Festival of Migration (e.g. event in collaboration with the collective Cuisine du Monde and a portrait studio with a Portuguese photographer from the Bonnevoie quartier, in Luxembourg Ville).

Table 1. Crowdsourced Memories: quantitative summary of the offline and online activities100

Crowdsourced Memories – summary
	Facebook	Instagram	PixStori	Interviews Video	Interviews Audio	Total
Units	29	30	12	13	02	86
Duration	not applicable	not applicable	1h01	7h43	03h30	12h14

Nevertheless, the Memorecord website got significant traffic and session duration (see Figure 40), which made me believe the second hypothesis might have slightly less of an impact in the collection than the first one on the sensibility of the topic in Luxembourg’s society.

Figure 40. Google Analytics summary for https://memorecord.uni.lu/, 2018

For the analysis of the harvested material, I have adapted a coding framework developed by Michael Frisch in the context of the Rutgers-Newaer Migration Oral History Project in the late 1990’s. Frisch’s model was originally created to work along the InterClipper software database. As much as I enjoy working on tailored digital tools interfaces, and today there are a great range of tools for data analysis and oral history interpretation and divulgation, I decided to work in a more artisanal way for the comprehensive analysis of the material collected in my experiment. The multimedia content that I collected through the Memorecord crowdsourcing that could not be turned into clips using a software like InterClipper or Clipmaker . However, these contents were scraped in a way that automatically created a database on a Google Spreadsheet according to configurations I established prior to run the scraper tool . Through this method I kept my own records and adapted this coding model in a way that I could apply it to all the materials collected – interviews, PixStories, and the variety of media present on Facebook and Instagram posts.

Figure 71. To #memorecord from Facebook: Love for Cuba | Identity >> Journeys >> Music & Art >> Turning Point >> Cuba, London

Way before his experiments with the “talking pictures” in PixStori, Frisch was already claiming that in the field of oral history we need more attention to the orality and aurality of original records, however, even now, in the Digital Age, the field seems to be strongly attached to the paradox of being oral but working mainly on the transcript texts for almost every interpretation and presentation that follows the interview. In 2008, Frisch argued that:

The Deep Dark Secret of oral history is that nobody spends much time listening to or watching recorded and collected interview documents. There has simply been little serious interest in the primary audio or video interviews that literally define the field and that the method is organised to produce. This is not really a secret, of course. On reflection, everyone recognises that the core audio-video dimension of oral history is notoriously underutilised. The nicely cataloged but rarely consulted shelves of audio and videocassettes in even the best media and oral history libraries are closer than most archivists want to admit to that shoebox of unviewed home-video camcorder cassettes in so many families - precious documentation that is inaccessible and generally unlistened to and unwatched. (M. Frisch 2008, 223)

Very recently, during a live discussion transmitted on Facebook exploring photo-prompted short-form oral history and its crowdsourcing dimension for Covid-19 documentation , Frisch also drew a powerful comparison between oral history forms and literature. He proposed that we think about the traditional long form interviews as novels, and prompt forms as alternative genres, such as short stories and poetry. He invited us to think in forms that would flow more naturally with spontaneous storytelling and rather than focusing on the text; that we think, not only utilising PixStories, but on other ways of recordings that would favour the audiovisual element in oral histories over the text. Many of these insights, as Frisch shared in other occasions , come from his past experience with InterClipper and the possibility of working with story units, meaningful excerpts that can be extracted from long interviews. For this reason, in my handling of the recorded long and short interviews I decided to work with story units, as shorter passages in the recording where I identified some specific element of interest. To identify these stories I went back to the original recordings and analysed them according to the flow of the narrative, establishing time stamps for segments – longer consecutive summary passages – and stories and then, in another listening/watching, I attributed meaning to segments and stories by adding thematic codes (i.e. major themes such as education, family or civic life; migration trajectories with subjects as origins, push/pull or making a new life; and more specific topics on migration, distinctive qualities and specific references expressed in the passages). Although most of the coding model comes from Frisch’s framework, I added and excluded a few rubrics in the adaptation to the sample obtained in my case study. The overview of the coding model can be seen on Figure 41 and a sample of story coding on Figure 42 The same classifications are applicable for the Memorecord harvested posts.

Figure 41. Coding model adapted to Memorecord by myself.

Figure 42. Sample of story coding on interviews, by myself.

Digital ethnography

For the analysis that follows hereunder, I look at the digital, as a medium, as well as social media, as a specific place in the digital environment that entails specific affordances and constraints, but also emulates a range of practices from the actual world. Each social media site will have its privacy policy, but also specific relationship and communication logics among user members. Due to the technological mediation, these logics are not freely enacted by the people, but informed and molded by the site’s usability features and algorithms, that ultimately determine the way in which people consume and interact with information on these platforms. Socially, however, the people’s behaviour on these sites are rooted in their “real” life.

The interpretation of the memories harvested is grounded in some emerging theory and methodology of digital ethnography. Although I did not pursue an anthropological study or adopt a systematic ethnographic approach right from the beginning, I considered insights from the field to get a better understanding about the context and activities that I only encountered due to the crowdsourcing. And I did it rather on the fly, from a praxis-based perspective. This helped me make sense of the dynamics and behaviours that were not explicit or intelligible looking exclusively at the content of the posts. While some ethnographers use tech-savvy tools and methods for capturing performances, in my case – out of necessity – I added a good dose of participant observation in my assessment of the crowdsourcing on the way, as I started noticing that there were some discursive aspects of interest taking place in the interactions that were not identifiable on the single posts. For instance, the recurrent identification of participants’ friends with the story shared on the main post. I found it interesting, and I will get back to it later on, how in a post written in English about an Italian grandparent, the words “nonno” (grandfather) and also “nonna” (grandmother) were typed many times throughout the text in Italian, as in a gesture of affection, connection with that specific, intimate way of referring to one’s grandparent. In a comment on this post on Facebook, one of the participant’s social media friends, writing in Luxembourgish, said that “...erennert mech un mein Nonno & Nonna…” (“...reminds me of my Nonno & Nonna…”), adding a note of regret for having never met them. The author of the post reacted to this comment with a heart (“love”). I realised it would be important to be able to report it, and somehow, articulate this kind of interaction with my interpretation.

Only then, the need for resorting on digital ethnography became evident to me, when I stumbled on the impossibility of capturing, in its integrity, the interactions that were taking place in the conversations that were established in the thread of each post. As explained in Chapter 2, the web scraping of the posts was technically limited to the main content of the post added by the author, which was, according to my early expectations, the meat of the crowdsourcing. However, as the crowdsourcing began, I realised that the comments and interactions in reaction to the main post were meaningful elements to the contextualisation of the shared posts. Observing the conversations and interactions not only provided me with more contextualisation, but also brought insights on the technological mediation and the digital interference inherent to digital-born material: the incapability of reliable and representative archiving of ongoing conversations.

If, on the one hand, the use of screenshots seemed the most obvious solution to capture, at least, a transient representation of these ongoing activities, it would still lack some relevant metadata, such as the specific time of each reaction. Moreover, making screenshots of every post could only be considered a possibility given the fact that Memorecord got a very small participation rate, otherwise it would be counterproductive, if not, impossible, to get an image of the interactions happening in all the posts. On the other hand, inadvertently saving conversations that involved people who were not actively participating in the project or who had not given their prior consent for Memorecord to use the information in that thread would raise quite problematic ethical issues. The solution, in this way, despite the impossibility of getting any kind of evidence surrogate, was ethnographic observation. However, ethnographic observation adapted to the specific environment of the Internet, most precisely, social media sites, like Facebook and Instagram. Therefore, I added a tentative approach of digital ethnography to support my analysis.

Like in history and other humanities research domains, the increasing mediation of practices brought by the digital is impacting ethnographic inquiry. Wendy F. Hsu remarks that in scholarship about digital ethnography, as in “in-situ engagement with people’s lived experiences through the frame or the implementation of digital media and technology – has fallen in a continuum between theory and methodology” (Hsu 2014, 43). Authors working with the digital as a subject of research frame it as “media ethnography” (Miller 2011; Burrell 2012), or “virtual ethnography” when studying digital social environments. The digital has also been seen as a tool of study and, ultimately as an extension of the face-to-face participant observation (Boellstorff 2012; Boellstorf et al. 2012).

Digital anthropology would encompass all these different engagements with the digital. However, as elsewhere in digital humanities, a theoretical appraisal of what the digital adds to ethnographic studies is still being formulated, but critical understanding is emerging from practice. To what concerns its application on Memorecord, the most relevant remarks from the emerging field I found in Daniel Miller and Heather A. Horst. They assert that “[i]n anthropology there is no such thing as pure human immediacy; interacting face-to-face is just as culturally inflected as digitally mediated communication” (2013, 12) and conclude that “digital anthropology will be insightful to the degree that it reveals the mediated and framed nature of the nondigital world. Digital anthropology fails to the degree it makes the nondigital world appear in retrospect as unmediated and unframed” (2013, 13). The call for observing online worlds as other arenas alongside offline worlds, without fetishizing predigital culture as it would have some supposed authenticity, makes me think about how, when calling for hybridisation on digital history, we try to avoid the kind of dazzled views of the digital and, instead of proposing a rupture with the analogue, we resort on lessons from historicism while doing our digital. In addition, it reminds us of the continuity between the actual and virtual worlds.

Two insights deriving from ethnographic efforts to research about and by means of the digital were relevant for the interpretation of Memorecord crowdsourcing as a whole . First, is the fact that, despite specific hidden (i.e. algorithm selection of posts one can see) and apparent (i.e. use of hashtags, emojis, types of reactions such as “like”, “love”, “sad”, “angry” etc.) logics, etiquettes and modalities of articulation inherent from social media sites, what people do and say on the digital platform is informed and shaped by their life in the actual world in a reciprocal iterative way. As I mentioned earlier following Lévy, there is no rupture, there is instead a continuity where new techniques, both material and intellectual, of practices, attitudes, ways of thinking, and values that develop along the expansion of this other realm. The second insight is about the situation or locatedness of certain digital platforms being correlated to the actual spatial context where users belong. As Miller and Don Slater observed in their ethnographic study about the Internet in Trinidad, the understanding and assimilation of digital technologies happen “somewhere in particular”, the Internet in Trinidad, is not The Internet. This suggests an essential element for consideration in my analysis; the Internet in Luxembourg, or more specifically, Facebook and Instagram in Luxembourg is not the same as elsewhere. When looking closely at the character of this particular place where the Memorecord crowdsourcing happened, a further point of reflection is the translational character of our circumstantial somewhere.

Having presented this conceptual tools, in the next section I move to a contextualisation that is important for the understanding ot the analysis that comes alongside and after it. In the following pages, I highlight a series of secondary sources and opted to make it in a certain storytelling mode in the attempt to offer the reader a bit of the Stimmung I encountered in my fieldwork. Stimmung here is evoked in the sense of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in his Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (2012). Drawing on the literary criticism, Gumbrecht argues about the expressivity of Stimmung that could help us in the narrativity challenge that is promoting a certain immersion into history (Gumbrecht 2011, 41). The interesting feature of this German term to literature, and we can extend it to history, is “voicicity”, which I bring from a Portuguese text of the author, vozcidade, which really difficult to translate (idem). In the root of the word Stimmung there is Stimme, that in German means “voice”. I believe the concept is quite suitable for this chapter, especially due to the articulation I establish later on between the born-digital sources and the notion of orality in both oral history interviews and online conversations. Finally,

To gain awareness and appreciation of the different significations and shades that Stimmung conjures up, it is useful to look at the various clusters of words that translate the term into other languages. English offers “mood” and “climate”. “Mood” stands for an inner feeling so private it cannot be precisely circumscribed. “Climate”, on the other hand, refers to something objective that surrounds people and exercises a physical influence. (…) Toni Morrison once described the phenomenon with the apt paradox of “being touched as if from inside”. (Gumbrecht 2012, 3–4)

Historical context: what is on the menu?

The above mentioned concepts oriented my work on the memories of Italian and Portuguese migrants in Luxembourg. They emerged from my hands-on work in a digital public history setting as important tools to understand the Memorecord experiment as it was unfolding. It is an exercise rooted in the hermeneutics of practices, as I argued in Chapter 3, chiefly informed by experimentation gesture and relying on multimodal literacies. In the Memorecord case, it also involved some media and medium criticism which I applied, leaning on mediated memories, technologies of memory and some lessons from digital ethnography in order to make sense of the experience and performances involved taking into account the digital interferences in memory practices and social interactions at stake in the proposed crowdsourcing. This, I believe, turns Memorecord into a multipart object of cultural analysis that, beyond the content of the memories gathered, offers great insights into the how’s and why’s people, most specifically migrants, remember what they remember in Luxembourg today. In this way, Memorecord’s result is not only the collection; nor is it the critical scrutiny of the co-created sources. The case study outcome is a comprehensive appraisal of historical memories of migration that might contribute to shedding light on the lively aspects of these memories in the present time. These lively aspects are transient and could be observed in terms of locatedness, practices and performances. I hope this experience of a rather holistic approach, despite its limited sample, may help to advance historical research on the interplay of politics of memories and the immigrant incorporation in Luxembourg. The politics of memories, as observed by Glynn and Kleist:

can be intense and passionate since different political actors’ interpretations of the past compete with others to establish a society’s belonging and the direction of its policies. It is therefore also significant for societies that debate migration, in which case the memories recalled make specific statements about belonging and migrant incorporation. Moreover, the politics of memory are historical and respond to general developments and changes in society, both by adjusting the perception of the past to shifts in social constellations and because actors can utilise memories to meet new challenges. (Glynn and Kleist 2012, 09–10)

I believe that if we want to assume the civic, public role of historians, beyond aiming at building exhibitions or offering another top-down interpretation, we need to get closer to the very political actors involved in the dynamics of these politics of memories. As claimed by Michael Frisch in the epigraph chosen for this chapter, we need to involve “all the intelligence” in an active remembering (Frisch 1981, 22).

In Luxembourg, Marcel Lorenzini  observes that in the “official history of Luxembourg” there is, still, too many open questions and silences about the past of its migrants. Lorenzini is not an expert historian but follows, quite closely, the historiographical development and noticed that in recent years, perhaps meaning the advancements perceived in the last two decades, the subject of migration is well presented in historical research. Nevertheless, he points out a few issues that he has observed:

In 1963 Luxembourg celebrated the millennium of its “origins”. As a young schoolboy, with a passion for history, I could not help wondering: how was I - as the son of immigrants - affected by these festivities?

Then, in the aftermath of May 68, the reticence of the Luxembourg working class (which included many sons of former immigrants), which remained insensitive to the revolutionary appeals of leftist militants (of whom I was one), soon made me doubt that these miners and steelworkers were the real subjects that were supposed to lead us to a better tomorrow. We were rather in the presence of a bourgeois part of the proletariat, which jealously tried to keep its small privileges and did not care to see its newly arrived class brothers brutally exploited (that part of the world that will soon be called the Third World?).

finally, in the eighties, seeing this same working class aristocracy in its turn completely disoriented by the end of the era that was coming in our regions for the iron and steel era, I took part in the foundation of an association that was supposed, among other things, to develop a history specific to the communities of this district of Dudelange that we call “Little Italy”. (Lorenzini 2009, 227, tr  

As we see, Lorenzini’s questions and anxieties lead him to engage even more closely with the cause of migration. He engaged in the creation of the cultural association Les Amis du Quartier Italien (ACAQI) and in the founding of the CDMH . Antoinette Reuter remarks that the investment in memory projects is prominent in the life of many ordinary Italians of the same generation of Lorenzini (born in 1952) in the face of a lack of recognition of the contributions of Italian immigrants by Luxembourgish society at large. Reuter highlights Lorenzini’s projects and also Vanna Colling-Kerg for her engagement in the project of the monument “Abbraccio” in Esch-sur-Alzette (Reuter 2014, 52). Indeed, Lorenizini’s attempts to break the silence of the history “written by the winners” (2009, 228) go in the direction of a militancy, of an active engagement with the issues of the memory of migration in Luxembourg. For Lorenzini, it is clear that the history of migration is intrinsically connected with founding myths of national identities (i.e. one people, one territory, one language) and that “son existence contredit toute glorification d’un passé harmonieux de toute une société.” (2009, 229). In name of a “common and harmonious destinity” the class struggle, which he associates with the migrant struggles in Luxembourg, are ignored by the national history. And, on the side of migrants, a sort of strategy to cope with this situation arises, he writes:

The acceptance of the judgments of the natives (a kind of recuperation of the subconscious of “his master’s voice”: our successful integration, our will of integration...);

The will to be forgotten and to forget oneself, one’s own past as a migrant (this is particularly true for the descendants of German immigrants in Luxembourg;

The will of the “integrated” to show to “deserve” fully his promotion to the rank of native, by proving to be more than 100% one. (2009, 230, translated from Fr  

With these issues on the table, at the end of the two-year international workshop held in Dudelange in October 2007 and 2008, organised by CDMH and the Fondazione Centro per la Documentazione delle Società di Mutuo Soccorso entitled “La Storia Siamo Anche Noi” (We are history too), Lorenzini evokes open questions for future research that precisely hit upon these dynamics of silencing, criticised by him: a “real” history of the Quartier Italien in Dudelange; biographies of militants in the Italian labour movement in Luxembourg; more studies on the regional origins and the motivations for emigration; and last but not least, research “on the so-called “success story” of Italian integration…” (2009, 232, translated from French by myself) .

This last question raised by Lorenzini is exactly the one I had in mind when I started designing this research project. I imagined that public history would be the perfect arena to develop it, reaching, as Frisch suggested a long time ago, all the intelligence, in the effort to challenge the history “written by the winners”. Lorenzini, as well as Father Benito Gallo before him with his memorialist works on Italian migrants, and his contemporary fellow and co-founder member of CDMH, Antoinette Reuter, are, arguably, the most active public historians engaged with the “active remembering” of migration in Luxembourg. Without their documentation efforts and critical engagement in the process of studying these documents and making them public, fostering debates to both general and academic publics by means of exhibitions, guided tours, edited volumes and numerous pedagogical materials, the work of academic historians to dig up the forgotten histories inferred by Lorenzini in these brief quotes we just saw would be much harder. Beyond non-academic historians, CDMH is also open to collaboration with scholars, former and current members of the Administrative and Scientific committees, playing a major role in bridging Academia and associative community projects in Luxembourg, just like they did to support Memorecord. It is not by accident, therefore, that I depart from their recent contributions to contextualise the memories collected in my research.

Transnational Perspective

John Sundholm has noted a “dissatisfaction with the strong focus on the nation and its past in memory studies” (2011, 01). The national frame and the focus on collective memory seems to suppress research on specific subject cohorts such “as ordinary actors and practices of the diaspora, migrant groups and particular professions” (2011, 02). This pushes research like mine away from the national paradigm and towards non-state ones. As reminded by Ann Rigney, the role of collective memory in nation-building has already been approached by Ernest Renan in the classic Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? in the late nineteenth century (1882):

Renan defined nations in terms of groups of people who see themselves both as sharing a programme for the future and as having shared a common past. This sense of a common past could only be achieved, however, if certain parts of the past were remembered and other things forgotten (the implication was that the more you know about the past, the more divisive rather than consensual that knowledge must become) (2007, 367)

Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad also criticise this idea of the nation as a ‘natural container of the memory debates’ (Assmann and Conrad, 2010: 6). Taking a critical instance in this regard, Chiara de Cesari and Rigney (2014) brought together a collection of works illustrating how it is possible to go beyond the “methodological nationalism”. Previous research has discussed that by using the nation as “the natural social and political form of modern world” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 301) we would be assuming the “the nation-state is the natural container, curator, and telos of collective memory” as recalled by Cesari and Rigney (2014, 01). Transnationalism, then, emerges as an alternative approach.

Transnationalism can have many different meanings, as shown by Steven Vertovec (2009). The use of the term in the social sciences, at least, has increased markedly since the mid-1990s (Cano, 2005). This growing interest, according to Vertovec, relates to the growth of social scientific interest in globalisation and leads to a number of ways of looking at cross-border relationships in economy, politics and social movements, amongst other areas (Vertovec 2009). In other words, not all the uses of transnationalism are purposely seeking to overcome the nation as a frame; it can also refer to inter-nation relationships (e.g. diplomatic or capitalist). Vertovec indicates, yet, that among the various uses of the term, there are some possibilities of alternative frameworks. As, for example, “transnationalism as social morphology”, as “type of consciousness”, “mode of cultural reproduction”, “avenue of capital”, “site of political engagement”, and “(re)construction of ‘place’ or locality’” (Vertovec 2009: 4).

Over the last twenty years, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristiana Szanton Blanc have also argued that a global perspective on migration has helped to develop a specific “transnational migration paradigm” (Basch, Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994). Their social field approach was multi-scalar:

Approached as a network of networks, the concept of transnational social fields builds on empirical observations that allow a researcher to trace multiple, intersecting and often unequal social relations across space and through time. It is a building block of a relational sociology through which the political borders of states do not delimit the world of the social, although the role of states is one important element in the analysis of power relations (Schiller 2015, 2277)

Within this big ‘transnational migration paradigm’, it is possible to mingle some of the possibilities envisioned by Vertovec, in such a way that it could also allow the contemplation of memoire de les proches in the way proposed by Ricœur (2007). When describing transnationalism as type of consciousness, Vertovec quotes some works and interlinks them in an interesting sequence of thoughts that can be enlightening in this sense:

While some migrants identify more with one society than other’ write Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992b:11) ‘the majority seem to maintain several identities that link them simultaneously to more than one nation’. […] The awareness of multi-locality stimulates the desire to connect oneself with others, both ‘here’ and ‘there’ who share the same ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ (see Gilroy 1987, 1993). For Stuart Hall (1990), the condition of diaspora or transnationalism comprises ever-changing representations that provide ‘imaginary coherence’ for a set of malleable identities. Robin Cohen (1996:516) develops Halls with the observation that: ‘transnational bonds no longer have to be cemented by migration or by exclusive territorial claims. In the age of cyberspace, a diaspora can, to some degree, be held together or re-created through the mind, through cultural artefacts and through shared imagination. (Vertovec 2009, 6)

These perceptions on multi-locality, simultaneity, imaginary coherence and shared imagination can be very resourceful to work with memories of migrants in a transnational frame. First, it supports the problematisation of memory locatedness in a transnational perspective, as well as the geographical and symbolic circulation of those memories. Second, it is insightful to consider how “shared imagination” plays a role in the cultural construction and representation of national characters. In Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen’s description of etnotypes, this constructed character is underscored:

Etnotypes (i.e. stereotypical characterisation attributed to ethnicities or nationalities, national images and commonplaces) take places in a discursive and rhetorical environment; they are representative of literary and discursive conventions, not of social realities. (...) These characterisations and attributes, to the extent that they lie outside the area of testable reports or statements of acts, we call imaginated. Generally, imaginated discourse (a) singles out a nation from the rest of humanity as being somehow different or ‘typical’, and (b) articulates or suggests a moral, characterological, collective-psychological motivation for given social or national features. Imaginated discourse offers characterological explanations of cultural difference (Beller and Leerssen 2007, xiv)

A better understanding of etnotypes, hence, may illuminate some issues on the making of the nation and on the identification of the place of the others on it, which seems to be essential to the critique of the recent master narrative of Luxembourg as an “immigration success story” (Fetzer 2011).

In Luxembourg, the research project “Biographies and Transnational Social Support Networks of Older Migrants In Luxembourg”, developed at the Integrative Research Unit on Social and Individual Development (INSIDE) research unit of the University of Luxembourg, explicates the importance, and need, of adopting a transnational perspective in their findings. Ute Karl and Anne Carolina Ramos demonstrate through a study based on qualitative approach (with long-form interviews) how the social network of a person who experienced a relatively recent migration experience cannot be limited to national borders (Karl and Ramos, 2016).  More recently, another work originated at the University of Luxembourg, about the modes of belonging in the second generation of Portuguese migrants has adopted transnationalism as a way of overcoming the limits of the nation as container and framework, most specifically, the linear view of migration routes entailed by it and shift to a greater focus on the long-distance exchanges and multiple identifications of the é(im)migré, in the way Heidi Martins phrases it, with it all-encompassing ambivalences (Martins 2019, 26).

Figure 43. Memorecord. Detail of world map view in: https://memorecord.uni.lu/map/ 

Italian migrants: a well-liked epithet

A monument with the words of Jesus from Matthew 25:35 – “ech war friem, an dir hutt mech opgeholl” – written in Luxembourgish, is what currently stands on the view of the old Italia Alta (Upper Italiy) has from the Usine, today “Rue de Miniers”, in the quartier Petite Italie in Dudelange. In English: “I was a stranger, you welcomed me”. The sculpture shows a line of Italian immigrants, carrying their suitcases towards the crossing of “Porte d’Italie”, the title of the monument conceived by the Luxembourgish artist Yvette Gastauer-Claire, in 2007 . The monument is placed next to the rungs that go down the plateau with a direct exit in the Gare-Usine train Station (surroundings of old Lower Italie). A few metres ahead, in the opposite direction of the train station there is a bridge over the railway that connects the old Italian district to Dudelange Centre. In front of them, on the other side of the gate, the Italian immigrants can see a Luxembourgish amily waiting to welcome them with arms wide open.

Figure 44: Overview of the monument Porte d’Italie with the biblical inscriptions nailed on the stone in Luxembourgish and Italian Language “Ero straniero e mi avete accolto.”

Figure 45: Details of the monument from a picture on the website of the artist Yvette Gastauer-Claire. In this picture, we can see the welcoming family waiting for the Italian.

The whole scene is laden with meaning, but most symbolic is the fact the sculpture was a donation of the Italian community to the city of Dudelange on the occasion of its centenary in 2007. In other years, the CDMH and the Italian Catholique Mission celebrated the monument’s anniversary. In reporting the activities organised for 2016, Alexandra Parachini, for Le Quotidien, comments: “Elle symbolise l’accueil et l’intégration des Italiens.” .

Figure 46: Details of the monument from a picture on the website of the artist Yvette Gastauer-Claire. In this picture, we can see the representation of an Italian family with their suitcase.

If we consider that this monument could be representative of the way the Italian community currently remembers and relives the memories of the generations before them, we could have the impression that the contemporary well-liked epithet of the Italian as a community that is well integrated with the Luxembourgish society. An ambition already clamped by Lorenzini was concretised a long time ago. However, the historical background of the quartier and the immigration work that has characterised Luxembourg’s industrialisation since the end of the 19th Century could tell a different story.

First of all, it must be considered that before it became a country of immigration, Luxembourg was marked by emigration and internal migrations, mainly from agricultural areas to the mining South of the country. The rural exodus in the wake of the Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon often forgotten in the historiography of migration in Luxembourg. From 1840 to 1890, Luxembourg had a negative migratory balance that indicates an excess of emigration over immigration in more than 66.000 departures over arrivals . In 1880 there were about 40.000 Luxembourgers in France (Alsace-Lorraine, Champagne and especially Paris), and some other 20.000 in the United States. It was only in the last decade of the 19th Century that massive labour immigration was beginning to make itself felt in bassin minier in Luxembourg, that is embedded, more broadly speaking, in the emerging industrial Saar-Lor-Lux area (Scuto 2010, 14; Leiner 1994). In 1899, Esch-sur-Alzette in the South of Luxembourg, close to the French border was one of the most important industrial communities in the area, besides Dudelange and Differdange. Local authorities concerned with the registration of the movements of people could already be noticed. On March 28th, 1898 and April 10th, 1899 a resolution from the Escher municipal council had already suggested a strict arrival registration rule, with a delay of maximum five days after arrival, from the 1920’s onward the Grand Duchy would deal with the population documentation and control at a national level (Leiner 1994, 23:41–42).

Figure 47: Overview map of the Sar-Lor-Lux industrialisation area studied by Stefan Leiner, showing cities of Malstatt-Burbach, Diedenhofen (Thionville) and Esch-sur-Alzette. (Leiner 1994,.

This preoccupation with the registration of people was less for the will of documenting the demographic effect of these first immigrations, but to control it. Even now, residence registration is among the first things anyone needs to do upon arriving in Luxembourg while housing policies in the country are also concerned with the number of people and the state of the domicile, watching out for any risks of insalubrity .

Table 2: Total population by nationality (1871-1910). Table elaborated by Denis Scuto (2012). Results of the general censuses of 1871, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1890, 1895, 1900, 1905, 1910. NB: Due to the Franco-German War of 1870, the census was postponed to December 1st, 1871.

Beyond the immigration of proximity, internally and originated in the border regions, between 1890 and 1914, German and Italian workforce arrivals became prominent in the steel and mining industry. However, the German labour supply, mostly coming from German steel regions (Rhineland, Westphalia, Saarland, Palatinate, annexed Lorraine) were noticeably engaged in higher positions (e.g. engineers, forepersons, technicians) while the industrial patronat recruited Italian men for non-qualified jobs (e.g. mostly heavy labour, as in transport, clearing and loading) with short-term engagements. The short-term engagements usually followed the need of the industry. They impressed a character of rotation – a turn-over movement – outstanding among Italian migrants from the end of 19th until 1960. Unpublished research quoted by Michel Pauly in one of his articles on the series about prejudice on the Forum magazine, state that in Esch-sur-Alzette, for instance, between 1900 and 1925, around 70% of the immigrants stayed in the country less than three years, among which 65,53% had stayed under 300 days. In Dudelange, the sampled years are different but the results are quite close, between 1898 and 1912, 72% of them stayed under three years while in Differdange, from 1904 to 1913, the rate of those that stayed under three years was 82% (Pauly 1988, 26) . Nevertheless, even considering this rotation, Italian immigration changed the face of some Luxembourg communities. In the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th Century, Italian quartiers start to take form, like the Petite Italie in Dudelange, or the Brill-Frontière in Esch-sur-Alzette. In 1898, as observed by Denis Scuto, the Italians had already outnumbered the Germans (2010, 19). They represented the most significant foreign contingent in the mines and factories. Coming mostly from the Nord (Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Emilia) and Central (Marche, Abruzzo, Umbria) Italy.

The rather short stays and the rotative character of these first decades of migration represented a tendency that helps to understand the role of the immigrant workforce as a soupape de sécurité (safety valve) of the Luxembourg labour market, “the valve that opens when business is good and closes when there is a crisis” (Scuto 2010, 25). Besides relegating immigrant workers to immense instability, this behaviour of the labour market has also had other consequences in regards to the coming and going, establishment and incorporation of the immigrant population of “Penisola” in the Grand Duchy. A curious story regarding a possible etymology behind the Luxembourg term Bier (Bear) used in the past about Italian migrants lies precisely on these dynamics of seasonal work. As Claudio Cicotti explains, the Gastarbeiter (the guest worker) had to quit the country at the end of the work season, which mostly coincided with the winter. From there came the association between the Italian workers and bears. Another captious explanation shifts the humour to a considerably pejorative tone, identifying Italian with bears due to their physical structure. However, as observed by Cicotti, the association with the physical could also come from the relation to the heavy work they did in mines and factories, as well as the way they dressed to do it:

The Italians worked mainly in the mines where, even in summer, the temperature did not exceed 6 or 8 degrees centigrade. The miners wore heavy overalls and certainly could not afford to work shirtless...” (Cicotti 2015, 457)

Figur e 48: 1895, Group of workers. Archives de la Ville de Dudelange, Fond J-P Conrady

The “Bier’’ habitat par excellence was the Italian districts emerging in the South. Despite the affective value and heritage that these neighbourhoods carry to this day, with the right to certain romanticisations and reinventions, the past of the so-called “well-integrated” Italian immigrants of these neighbourhoods were not at all a path to integration. On the contrary, the very existence of these small Italianised universes speaks more of separation than rapprochement. The daily life of the immigrant worker was more or less confined to these areas where the architecture of the houses, the small shops and bars mimicked the distant land and neighbours could talk familiar patois, rather than Dante Alighieri’s Italian (Reuter 2014, 52). The Scalabrian priest Benito Gallo, in reflecting about the reception of the pionieri (the pioneers), those arrived from 1890 until 1918, makes some elucidating points:

Furthermore, the Luxembourgish population, how did they react to Italian immigrants? At first, she was somewhat reticent towards these newcomers, whose language and traditions she did not understand. There were also moments of severe tension. However, the Italians tried to avoid the frontal clashes, entrenched themselves in small “national islands”, especially in the cities, where their numerical presence was significant. (Gallo 1992, 09, translated from Italian by myself) 

Figure 49: The 1920’s, Italian districts in the Mining Basin (Gallo 1992, 09, as in Kathleen Griffin “Population movements in Luxembourg between 1861 and 1964)

The precariousness of the workers is also something that escapes today’s reverence to this past of urban development and economic growth through the praise of Luxembourg’s industrial heritage. In his published memoirs Dall’ Italia al Lussemburgo – Storia della mia famiglia (2011), Silvio Grilli (born in Luxembourg, most precisely Differdange in 1930), tells us of family experiences and vicissitudes from the past, through his memories and things he heard from relatives. Grilli narrates events of the hardship experienced by his immigrant ancestors and later by himself. A reality shared by so many compatriots who lived in the most rudimentary way possible in order to send some money to their families back in Italy. His grandfather, Giuseppe Grilli, was one of those who, right after paying the rent and food to the pension where he lived in Esch, sent everything he could to the family that remained in Fiuminata (province of Macerata, in the Marche region.) in Italy . Working in the blast furnaces of the Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange (ARBED) in Esch, his grandfather breathed in a great deal of dust, contracted pneumonia and eventually died in 1910. The attention given by the authorities to register and document the arrival of the immigrants was not the same as that of the register of deaths. Due to the lack of records, the family could never find the resting placeof Giuseppe Grilli (2011, 26–27).

Grilli’s book is an extended breath of reading, full of colours from his childhood times, despite the hardships, including the adventure of following his father in the neighbourhood while he was taking an extra job as a butcher, in the difficult 1930s, from door to door (Grilli 2011, 34). Sometimes killing pork was a job for four men. However, his father was crafted, moulded on hard work and equipped with various skills that he had been forced to develop in very early Fiuminata since Giuseppe’s premature death in the Granducato. However, while Grilli found a moment in his life in which he felt the need and had the opportunity to write a book of memoirs to his future generations , many other ordinary Italian persons that came before and after Grilli did not have the same opportunity or did not meet this moment. Although, the absence of their accounts does not mean there were no other thought-provoking stories to be shared; there were many. The interest in people’s history is precisely that of wanting to hear, redistribute these stories, and let them be known.

It was for that reason, that on the April 20th, 2016, I welcomed with great happiness Rino Del Nin at the atelier Racontez Votre Histoire in the CDMH. Better said, I did not welcome him effectively, he entered the room with a Discman on one hand, and a bag of papers on the other. Talking excitedly, in a mix of languages that I was not able to fully identify. After a few seconds of commotion, we introduced each other. We found out that Italian was the best language to choose. Del Nin heard about my project through his son, who at his turn, received the information via email, from CDMH. He told me he would like to take part.

I took a glass of water, some paper to take notes and we sat on the second floor of the CDMH, at Gare-Usine. As I prepared the camera, he waited with agitated hands. In the very first minute of his story, his first words were about another kind of migration memory, not about his connection to Luxembourg. Instead, he spoke of the departure of his uncle to military service in Russia; when he was six years old, the uncle said goodbye to him next to the headboard of his bed and hey never saw each other again. An emotional moment for him. He continues on recollecting childhood memories, some happier than others, and his speech seems to take another tone and speed. He tells me that the whole family on his mother’s side immigrated to America in 1927. However, his mother managed to stay because his father, following his grandfather’s advice, got her pregnant. In 1954, his brother went to Luxembourg for work.

Nonetheless, he was, like many others since the end of the 19th century, in the “turn-over” movement and went back to Italy during wintertime. At that time Del Nin auditioned to play calcio (football) in the Udine team. He was accepted, with a contract of 20.000 lire per month, of which he gave 10.000 to his parents and took the other half. Because of a fight with the coach, he left the dream job and went to Luxembourg. He gives many details, but a particular story that happened two weeks after his arrival caught my attention, click on the image link to watch the passage:

Video 1: Rino Del Nin, Story: “Luxembourgish Italy”, Community >> Friendships >> Neighborhood >> Turning Point >> Places, Dudelange. Story link (00:04:08). | Full video link (00:47:50) 

In less than five minutes we got so deep in the colours of the old quartier Italie. After two weeks in Luxembourg, he wanted to visit a friend who lived in France. He asked his brother for directions, who said he should get off at the Dudelange train station, where the train stops, and from there take a bus to France. Instead – and I recalled it happened to me the first time I went to Dudelange as well – he got off at another Dudelange station, at Gare-Usine. When he left the train, he felt confused, and a funny situation unfolds:

Sono uscito e non ho trovato niente, no? E… esco e dico ‘ma dove sono qua?’ E ho visto due vecchietti che erano su una banca lì seduti e dico ‘dove sono qua?’

– Ma sei in Italia! mi dissero. (Del Nin, Memorecord Interviews)

____

I went out and found nothing, right? And... I go out, and I say, “Where am I?” Besides, I see two old men sitting there on a bank, and I say, “Where am I?

- But you are in Italy! I was told. 

His lively anecdote gives us so many details about people and life in the quartier in the 1950’s. Everyone spoke Italian, and there were many bars, music, dances. He mentioned the same kinds of games that Grilli refers to in Differdange as well, such as morra and bocce. He was so amazed at the ambience that he skipped the plan of visiting his friend in France. It is interesting, from the transnational point of view, to notice that even before arriving, he had a friend in the French border. All reconnected to the shared past of work immigration in the Grand Region. Following the rest of his first day in the quartier Italie, we notice the presence of women working at bars, which is expressive that women were not only dependent wives. According to Scuto, the immigration of women has been fairly ignored until de 1945, but even before then were women running pensions, bars, working as rent washers, and cooking. Historiography needs to pay more attention to the immigration of women, as also noticed by Lorenzini. Scuto writes that:

Labour immigration, women’s immigration and family immigration can no longer be seen in a way that is radically dissociated even for periods prior to official “family reunification” policies in the 1970s. Some accurate figures for Italian immigration. In 1910, 10138 Italians were registered in Luxembourg: 7738 men, but also 2.400 women. In 1930, out of 14.050 Italians, 8,710 are male, 5.340 are female. Even if the men arrive alone, many quickly bring their wives and start or expand their families in Luxembourg. Immigration Luxembourg is therefore from the outset also family immigration and therefore immigration of settlement. (Scuto 2010, 21, translated from French  

It is worth noting, for instance, the existence of a fairly organised feminist movement in Luxembourg already in the 1930s. Grosso modo, most of the women involved were from elite backgrounds being travelled and literate. However, the discussions were not only on the philosophical level of what it means to be a feminist, but also went on into civic rights such as voting and nationality. The collective l’Action Féminine, of Esch-sur-Alzette, for instance, published in 1938 about the question of the nationality of the Luxembourgish women. If marrying a man from another nationality, they should lose the Luxembourgish one. Why should women subscribe to the husbands’ nationality?

Figure 50: L’action Féminine, December, 1938, vol. 10, n. 12. 

Another side of the emigration coin is also about who remains. In Friuli, the same region where Del Nin originates, women traditionally governed the family economy, managing all the remittances from abroad, paying bills, raising their children and taking care of the elderly. Until the First World War, Friuli’s economy depended substantially on external work. Most of the continental income would come from Central Europe. Women would be autonomously responsible for the domestic economy and in a “mutual responsibility” or “mutual trust”, both aimed at improving the socio-economic conditions of the family group (Grossutti 2016, para. 24).

Figure 51: Archives CDMH, Dudelange.

Finally, from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, women and gender studies shed light on how women were involved in stereotypically male-centered phenomena. Like Anna Treves observed, women did not have a negligible role in migration processes. They were fundamental in the construction of migratory processes; staying did not mean being unproductive and dependent (Treves 2007, 56). In his memories about the early childhood visits to Fiuminata with his father, for instance, Grilli would tell about his amazement with the collective oven in the centre of the village, beside the water fountain. In his recollections, beyond the many fruits and vegetables unknown in Luxembourg, there was the smell coming from the oven. Each family baked their bread, cookies and pizzas (not yet known in the Granducato!). He remembers the women being responsible for managing the collective batches schedule. Women would carry their stuff to the oven on sheet metal plates in the head, and while the oven was on, families could profit from the heat to cook their dishes (Grilli 2011, 45). Grilli’s account gives us an illustrative example of the feminine self-management; this sort of administrative skills, indeed, was what made many women the guarantors of migration experience (Tirabassi 2003, 180).  Nevertheless, feminine migration deserves, as well noted by Lorenzini, much more attention. Women, as well as children, have been groups long overlooked in the study of people’s movement, both in terms of their trajectories and their workforce engagement, mostly because women were obliterated by their husbands’ stories (sometimes only documented under their records) and children being largely under-documented, inviting researchers to look for alternative sources, testimonies (direct and indirect) and other forms of egodocuments (Bonora 2011; Venken 2015).

Another topic we can observe in the passage about Del Nin’s encounters in quartier Italie is the camaraderie. The solidarity of the Italian fellows, inviting Del Nin to do things is also remarkable – he ate polenta , went to a ball, discovered the local football club l’Alliance, he sang and ended up spending the night with the new friends only waking up in the next day at 6 am to return to Bertrange for work. The friendliness of Italians belongs to tropes of the constructed national character of the Italians, according to Beller in his Imagology work with Leerssen. In the critical survey on the cultural construction of Italian national representation, quoting from varied literary traditions, he highlights the “laid back courtesy” or the “easy-going epicurianism” of Italians, which is positive on one side of the coin but also carries negative judgements like “the savages of Europe” (Beller 2007, 197). This observation triggers to me another point of reflection on the warm reception depicted in the monument Porte d’Italie and some controversial histories. As Scuto reports, already before 1914 there as a speech about the foreign “threat” on the make:

From 1890 to 1914, a vision of the foreigner was gradually established. Before 1914, a discourse was formed which mixed the elements of “unfair competition”, “(a)normality”, “danger” and “security” and linked them to the question of foreigners. By amplifying the cases of violent brawls in cafés in industrial localities between Luxembourgers and foreigners or between foreigners, cases reported in the “faits divers” section of newspapers, the stereotype of the dangerous foreigner is elaborated. Just before the First World War, this vision penetrated as far as the parliamentary arena. (Scuto 2010, 22, translated from French by myself)

Figure 52. Archives CDMH, Dudelange.

In July 1913, in a heated parliamentary debate about “life in concubinage” of the immigrant workers, the mayor of Differdange, Emile Mark, speaks of “these foreigners (who) become in large part a danger to security, for order and morality in the communes” . These judgements on competition and morals & good customs seemed to be based on the xenophobic inclination present in the Luxembourgish society, that ran aground the Law of October 28th, 1920 and an executive order of the same day that intended “to stem the exaggerated abundance of foreigners in the national territory” (Campbell 2009, LUX-16). It means to say that a hundred years ago, “every foreigner intending to enter the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg must be in possession of passport delivered by the consular authorities in his country” and “the passport must to contain a visa delivered by a diplomatic or consular agent of Luxembourg” (idem). Henri Wehenkel estimated that about 500-600 men were expelled due to political reasons between 1924 and 1931; there was an ostensive watch over the “dangerous communist” (Wehenkel 1999, 157).

Another engaging story brought up by Del Nin, among so many other adventures in his journey, was the episode about his work on the heights of Junglinster’s Radio and TV antennas for RTL Luxembourg. The antennas were as high as 260 metres, and he was the only one to go up with the Germans to build it. He told me that the German team that should be doing the job had got into some troubleand were sent home. Then the boss approached and asked he and his colleagues who would be willing to go up to build it with the Germans. He decided to go up since the payment was convenient – every +50 metres there was a higher salary.

Video 2: Rino Del Nin, Story: “The antennas of Junglinster”, Work >> Making a living >> Work >> Courage >> Vocabulary. Story link (00:01;17). | Full video link (00:47:50)

In the picture Del Nin holds, we can see a young man exchanging steps on top of an antenna, with open arms seeking equilibrium like in a tightrope. We see no safety equipment; no rope, no helmet or safety net seem to belong to the scene. Despite the narrative laden with courage and determination, young Del Nin was up in the air, abandoned to his own fate. In 1960, 21.511 occupational accidents were declared to the “industrial section” of the Accident Insurance Association. Of these, eighteen cases were fatal. Surprisingly the latest figures, from 2018, are not much lower, 19.514, of which fifteen were fatal . One can question the proportion of workers and the practices of accident reporting that probably oscillated a lot from the 1960s to the present, especially considering the increase of regulations of safety parameters and inspection. However, the number impresses and introduces an important issue to be considered about the world of work, and therefore of immigration as well, in Luxembourg: the working movement for better working conditions, safety and wages. The story of Del Nin is that of thousands of Italian fellows. The struggles to improve work conditions has its roots way back in time, half a century before Del Nin arrived in Luxembourg.

Figure 53 Detail of La pagina dei fratelli Italiani (The page of Italian Brothers) in the left-socialist satirical Der Arme Teufel (The Poor Devil).

Although historiography positions the origins of the trade union movement in Luxembourg around 1916, other forms of mobilisation among workers were already taking place way before that (Lorenzini 2009, 231). Various forms of organisation preceded the institutionalisation of trade unions in Luxembourg, such as the società di mutuo soccorso (mutuality associations) and other kinds of fratellanza (fraternity). These cardinal organisations arose in Luxembourg long before the crisis brought about by the First World War, right in the early years of Italy’s presence in the Grand Duchy. The first mutuality appeared as early as in 1982, in Esch-sur-Alzette (Caldognetto 2009, 27). Other collective initiatives, such as the weekly L’Operaio Italiano are also symbolic. Although it came from unions of the German mining basin, it became known among the Italians of the neighbouring countries. Or even, in Luxembourg, the existence of the section “La pagina dei Fratelli italiano” (Lorenzini 2009, 232).

Possible explanations for the lack of strong political engagement in the turn of the centuries could be the novel and hybrid character of the working environments, especially in terms of nationality and language. Another issue, besides this diversity, is the growing competition between the different groups on the labour market, a factor that, together, could have hindered the emergence of group consciousness (Scuto 2010, 24). Nevertheless, there were some German trade unionists, Italian socialists and anarchists who held propaganda conferences in the basin. Apart from these meetings, other efforts were made in the attempt to bridge the national and socio-cultural differences, as, for instance, the printing of posters and pamphlets in two languages or by using the Italian language in relevant organs of the socialist workers’ movement. These actions may have been more organic, but recent literature see them as attempts to establish some supra-national workers’ identity and to include immigrants in local forms of political organisation (Trinkaus 2016, 138).

Before 1914, the Italians were the most active in the workers’ manifestations. Moreover, for this reason, already early in the 20th Century, the Italians were in the sights of the Luxembourg police. The first police polls aimed at political repression date back to March 1900, when Italian workers in Dudelange published an anonymous call, signed by the pseudonym L’imperscrutabile, for a demonstration on May 1st of that year (Wehenkel 1999, 153). The search for better working conditions took as a reference the date of the riots for the eight-hour working day which happened in the United States, later culminating in the bombing whose aftermath became known as the Haymarket Affair, during a rally on the May 4th, 1886, in Chicago , just four years earlier, the act at the base of International Workers Day. As we can see in Figure 17, the pamphlet made references to international socialism:

Workers! Refrain from work on May 1st; celebrate the auspicious date [...] May 1st was chosen by the strongest champions of international socialism to remind the capital of its origin, and in the unstoppable and progressive serenity of social evolution, its inevitable destruction. Long Live to the May 1st! (Figure 55, translated from Italian by myself)

Figure 55: Photo Archive de L’Etat Luxembourg.

It is worth noticing, that despite the surveillance, the mobilisations among workers continued with organisations of strikes and collective meetings. Italian immigrants were prominent in the manifestations. A major part of the 2.300 who marched on May 1st, 1911 were Italians, reveals Henri Wehenkel. The first and only violent repression in Luxembourg’s modern history, according to Scuto, happened in a strike organised by Italian workers in a factory in Differdange on January 26th, 1912. Four workers died – two Germans and one Italian killed by the police and one Luxembourger of Italian background who was caught by a bullet from the strikers (Scuto 2010, 24). Between 1924 and 1931, Wehenkel considered that expulsions of 500 to 600 foreigners happened due to political repression, in a pool of 10.000 to 15.000 immigrants (Wehenkel 1999, 157). However, beyond the political context, it is crucial to consider the diminution of the presence of foreigners with the unfolding of the First World War and the protectionism of the period between wars. There was a significant change in the rate of immigrants in the active population; they were 32% in 907 and fell to 17% in 1935, and to only 13% in 1947.

Figure 56 Front and back of a worker’s request dated from February 16th, 1927, with the authorisation for ten months of work. Remuneration of 3.70 fr per hour, six days a week. Archives CDMH.

As the economy was shrinking, the valve was closing. Things would start to change again with the need for reconstruction after the Second World War and the negotiations for bilateral agreements with Italy. Although the Luxembourgish Government seemed to be reluctant to grant employment stability, allowing a maximum stay of only six months.

It was only in 1948 that a first bilateral labour agreement was signed, which was regularly renewed until 1957. It provided for immigration to be limited to a pre-defined annual quota, required the recruitment and hiring of immigrants in Italy itself, and granted employment contracts of limited duration, albeit renewable. (Pauly 2010, 67, translated from French by myself  

Nevertheless with need, the valve was slightly reopened and from 7.622 Italians in 1947, in 1966 the Grand Duchy would be the country for 24.902 of them . However, in the 1960s, the Italian economic boom promoted a shift in this trend. For the first time, in 1967 the number of returns from Luxembourg would overtake departures in Italy. The migration scenario in Luxembourg changed. Italians, arguably unsatisfied with living conditions and not being able to bring their families, would go back to Italy or be attracted by the economic recovery of other European countries (e.g. Germany and Swiss). The children and grandchildren of those who took Luxembourgish citizenship are not included in the statistics for this time, as Caldognetto notices. Increasingly, new professional possibilities would be opened for the sons and daughters of these generations. They find employment in the banking sector and the European institutions, leading to a more composite profile compared to the past (Caldognetto 2010, 510).

Graph 1. Luxembourgers, Italians and foreigners in Luxembourg 

Del Nin is among those who stayed after the 1960s. He did go to Italy, for over forty years, but just for the annual vacanze with his family. The interview with him offered valuable insights on how the life of Italian migrants in Luxembourg from the 1950s and 1960s onwards would still resemble that of the beginning of the Century, slightly changing as the economy in the Grand Duchy shifted focus from industry to financial. His stories added texture to situations, places and relationships with relatives and friends – the district life, the dancing, the singing, the football. Insomma, the Italian conviviality, whose sounds, colours and flavours have depicted the imagery of receiving countries about the diaspora. One of his latest projects, at age 69, was learning music. He studied in the conservatoire in Dudelange and this was why he arrived at CDMH with a Discman. He gave me a CD with tracks featuring him at his best singing.

The piece – the Song of the Mountains – evokes the mountains of Piedmont. Toni Ortelli, the composer, was an alpinist; the story goes that he composed the song during an excursion in the mountains of the Pian della Mussa in Val d’Ala, while listening to the singing of a shepherd. The ode to the mountain is curious, especially considering that a large part of the autonomous Italian emigration, such as that from Del Nin, historically comes from the mountains, both from the Alps and the Apennines. The mountains, a place of hard work and humble peasant life, were the firsts to see the departure – and very often, returns – of Italians fleeing the agrarian crisis of the 1870s to 1890s (van Laere 2009, 25). Umberto Vidali, born in Muggia, “in cima alla collina” (on the top of the hill), will tell us, in his Storie di Prima (Stories of Before), about his anxiety for meeting his fiancée’s relatives and friends, as well as to introducing her to his friends and family in Italy . After having done so, he says:

“[l]’avvicinamento di cui ho parlato doveva avere un terzo aspetto. Volevo portare Renée in montagna. Per me, era come presentarla a qualcuno” (Vidali 2010, 57)

___

The rapprochement I mentioned had to have a third aspect. I wanted to take Renée to the mountains. For me, it was like introducing her to someone.

In this way, the mountains will be quite familiar motifs in many narratives about the first emigrations, especially those coming from northern Italy. Among the most southern Italians of the peninsula, the sea will also appear as a recurring motif laden with identity and nostalgia. I was able to observe during the Memorecord’s harvest that the contemplation of nature and landscapes has a great space in the narrative of immigrants and, at times, would be tied to the meanings of belonging, of feeling good or bad, far or near “home”. In the case of the Portuguese, for example, the sea, the vast Atlantic Ocean, will often be a reference. It was, in fact, already a central theme in the luso imaginary since the Great Navigations, the common element linking the heroes of the National Pantheon, among which the poet Luís de Camões (1524/1525? -1580), exalted by his epic “Os Lusíadas” (1572), in which the history of Portugal and the adventures of the Portuguese people in the world were singularly narrated, often compared to Homer’s (928 a.C. - 898 a.C) works. The sea, indeed, has been an element in permanent ambivalence of meanings, between open horizons and freedom, on the one hand, and the conquest narrative, with the burden of domination on the other hand. The sea is a powerful element in Portugal’s imperial rhetorics which, even today, is present in the emigration policies of the country, as well as in the multiple interpretations of the Portuguese diaspora (Hinger 2017; Sadlier 2017, chap. 1).

Nevertheless, let me get back from the mountains – that is how far imagination goes following the generous account of Del Nin. Let us go back to Luxembourg and Memorecord. If work in factories and mining was the tonic of Italian immigration at the beginning of the 20th Century, towards the end of the 1900’s we see a diversification of profiles, with the increase of another qualified workforce, new push and pull factors and diversification in terms of the regions of departure. Maurizio Cassetta, for instance, native of Palermo (Sicily), came to Luxembourg in 1988. However, his principal motivation was tutt’altro che lavoro:

L’amore! It was love, a relationship, that was the primary motivation for Cassetta to initiate his trajectory towards Luxembourg. Furthermore, he seemed to have chosen this opening statement in a very conscious way; we restarted the recording after a quick pause, as he was not very comfortable with the camera. After restarting the recording, he repeated the same story with conviction, but that time, with arms slightly relaxed. The first time, when he mentioned “love”, he did it with a flip of the shoulder, a change in his gaze and with crossed arms. I asked myself if perhaps he felt it was not a justifiable enough reason to put in an interview, or if, somehow, the place where we were (CDMH), which he knew, carried a past of labour work, put some pressure on him. Perhaps, it was only a matter of becoming confident with the camera, because in the next few minutes his posture seemed a bit more at ease.

Nevertheless, work came up right away in his narrative. He mentioned that he worked as a draughtsman in an architecture studio in Palermo and upon his arrival in Luxembourg he was “lucky” to continue in the same profession, but then, in a construction company. In 2016 his working conditions were a bit different; it became a little complicated for several reasons, but the tonic of his narrative was not as much about work.

Family was prominent in the organisation of his story. He formed a family with the woman he went to Luxembourg with, after having met in Sicily. He became a father of two, an 18-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy (in 2016), who were both born in Luxembourg. The course of his married life was abruptly interrupted, but overall, he was happy about the family they built together. Speaking of his family, he highlights some of the moral conflicts the couple had concerning the Luxembourgish educational system regarding the children’s education:

Cassetta is very cautious about introducing he and his ex-wife’s concerns about the gaps in the Luxembourg educational system. The idea of changing their daughter from a Luxembourgish public school was conflictual for his beliefs that the state should guarantee a public and egalitarian education system. The couple felt intellectually compelled to take a measure that they probably would not have taken elsewhere in the world, according to him. Enroll their children in a private school that follows the French teaching model, not Luxembourgish, a decision with which they followed first with the older daughter and then with the boy. However, in explaining the process of making this fundamental decision to the future of their child, Cassetta exposes a dramatic situation, shared by his daughter’s teacher:

I bambini portoghesi che erano la maggior parte dei componenti [...] di tutte le classi di primo ciclo, dalla prima alla quinta, si trovavano in difficoltà enorme. [...] E non era una cosa eccezionale. Tutti i bambini, incredibilmente, quasi tutti i bambini figli di portoghesi avevano delle difficoltà didattiche enormi.

_____

The Portuguese children who were the majority of the members [...] of all the first cycle classes, from the first to the fifth, were an enormous difficulty. [...] And it was not an extraordinary thing. All the children, incredibly, almost all the children of Portuguese children had enormous teaching difficulties.

To address this issue, the two teachers involved with the elementary classes asked for help from the Ministry in charge – today, the Ministry of National Education, Child and Youth Affairs – requiring a supporting teacher. A request to which the answer was un no netto (a net no). All this happened when Cassetta’s older daughter was in her third year of elementary education, almost a decade back in time from the moment of the interview. Back then, the Cellule d’accueil scolaire élèves nouveaux arrivants (School reception unit for newcomer students) was already in place. Since 1998, the service, provided by the same Ministry, coordinates actions to favour the insertion of immigrant students in the school. However, this did not seem to have made any difference to the appeal made by the teachers Cassetta mentioned.

The educational issue Cassetta points out in this passage is not new, as we can imagine. However, one would expect that a country which has been so dependent on immigrant labour could have, at this point, mitigated a few issues related to school integration, most notably, language. Currently, as it reads in the booklet published by the Ministry’s Foreign Children’s Schooling Services, schooling for children aged 3 to 11, foresees that in cycle 1 (3-5 years old) “the children learn to understand and express themselves in Luxembourgish, which is the main language of communication in the classroom”; and cycles 2, 3, and 4 (6-11 years old) “The children first learn to read and write in German, which is the teaching language for all subjects apart from French. The learning of spoken French continues; from cycle 3 onwards (children 8 to 9 years old), the children begin learning written French.” (CASNA 2018). According to a study of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), in the years 2000 and 2001, the proportion of foreign citizens enrolment in primary school (in Luxembourg, from age 6 to 12) was 37.9%, the highest among the EU countries (Luciak 2004, 13).

This is a critical aspect for the migrant family’s incorporation in the Luxembourgish society, echoed thoughtfully by other Memorecord participants. Moreover, this early school-age issue has an impact on older students. It will impact the life realisation and career development of a significant part of the active population, which makes it a topic of pivotal importance to society at large. Test results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)  give a concerning picture of Luxembourg. The main findings from 2018 are eloquent on the impact of the socio-economic profile of immigrant pupils in their literacy performance:

In 2018, 55% of 15-year-old students in Luxembourg had an immigrant background, up from 40% in 2009. That is the most substantial increase observed among PISA-participating countries. Three in eight immigrant students in Luxembourg were socioeconomically disadvantaged (similar to the OECD average).

In Luxembourg, advantaged students outperformed disadvantaged students in reading by 122 score points in PISA 2018 (OECD average difference: 89 score points). This is the most significant difference observed between these two groups amongst all PISA-participating countries and economies. Amongst OECD countries, only in Israel was a similarly large gap observed (121 score points). In Germany and Hungary, 113 score points separated these two groups. In Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, the Slovak Republic and Switzerland, the difference amounted to more than 100 score points. In PISA 2009, the performance gap related to socio-economic status was 115 score points in Luxembourg (and 87 score points on average across OECD countries).

The average difference in reading performance between immigrant and non-immigrant students in Luxembourg was 35 score points in favour of non-immigrant students, compared to the OECD average of 44 points. The difference shrank to 17 points after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profiles (OECD average difference: 24 points).

First-generation immigrant students in Luxembourg performed better in reading (461 points) than second-generation immigrant students (450 points). That stands in contrast to many participating countries. Non-immigrant students in Luxembourg scored 491 points.

Some 22% of immigrant students in Luxembourg scored in the top quarter of reading performance. Across OECD countries, only 17% of immigrant students performed at that level.

But the weight of the migration background does not only influence the immigrant students’ performance but also how they feel about their school and life in general:

In Luxembourg, some 68% of students (OECD average: 67%) reported that they are satisfied with their lives (students who reported between 7 and 10 on the 10-point life-satisfaction scale). However, immigrant students in Luxembourg were less likely to report that they are delighted with their lives (65%, compared to OECD average of 64%); Compared to non-immigrant students who so reported (72%, compared to OECD average of 68%).
Only one in six students in Luxembourg agreed or strongly agreed that they feel lonely at school. One in five agreed or strongly agreed that they feel like an outsider at school, proportions that are similar to the OECD averages. However, immigrant students in Luxembourg were more likely to report that they feel like an outsider at school (21%, compared to the OECD average of 23%). In contrast to non-immigrant students, 25%, (compared to the OECD average of 21%).

The question of education raised by Cassetta, hence, is profoundly relevant to Luxembourgish society. As many insights on the work world that could be drawn from Del Nin’s interview, it is interesting to look back in the past to understand the school system in Luxembourg. Since the beginning of the 20th century, this system did not mean to incorporate immigrants. As early as in 1912, the anti-German sentiment about competition for the best jobs in the market, or better said, the stereotype of the foreigner job taker, will push the Grand Duchy to put in motion a school reform. During the parliamentary debates, Pierre Braun, Ministry of the Interior, or general director as denominated back then, claimed that:

“in order to equip [workers in the metallurgic industry] intellectually, to enable them to compete with foreigners, to obtain jobs as foremen and well-paid workers, they must be provided with a very solid primary education, which must form the basis of their subsequent vocational education...” If we do not want to be relegated to the background in the economic struggle with our competitors, we will certainly have to supplement our intellectual tools. (as quoted in Moes 2013, 35, translated from French by myself) 

Braun became the epithet for the Education Law of 1912. By this law, Luxembourgish became a mandatory subject. The emphasis on the intellectual aspect and the focus on well-paid positions was not, of course, a reaction to Italian concurrence. After all, the workers from the Penisola would mostly take the most underpaid jobs. The main concurrent worker in mind at the time were the Germans who would be “menacing” to take all the white-collar positions. From what I have seen during my five years of research in Luxembourg, where I also lived full time as an immigrant, is that we can see that Braun’s objective has been attained quite satisfactorily. At least, the elite des fonctionnaires – the State employees in Luxembourg – are all Luxembourgers. During the encounters I had in my fieldwork observations, mostly involving in the community sensitisation part of the Memorecord project, I heard the same resigned complaint from different people, belonging to different generations, often speaking to me in different languages; in Luxembourg, only nationals can apply for state positions, and they are those who more often succeed to pursue intellectual careers. At the same time, people with migration backgrounds who grew up in the country are pushed to technical studies . That is so because In Luxembourg’s secondary system:

the preparatory stream lasts for three years and does not lead to any specific qualification. Secondary technical education can last for a period of three to seven years and aims at technical matriculation or intermediary qualification. Secondary classic education, on the other hand, aims at matriculation after seven years and prepares for university studies. While the ratio of pupils with foreign citizenship in Luxembourg’s preparatory stream was 57,7% in 2000/01, their proportion was 37,3% in secondary technique, and only 13,3% in classic secondary education. Immigration groups, which are concentrated in the preparatory-stream, afterwards face a distinct disadvantage in the labour market. (Luciak 2004, 21)

Beyond the legal text and formal organisation of the School System, however, the most fascinating conversations I had were with people resentful of their schooling experiences due to the relationship with their teachers. It is worth noting that to teach in public schools, since it is State employment, one needs to have Luxembourgish nationality. One of my interviewees, who grew up in Esch-sur-Alzette in the 1970s, the son of an Italian family, considered that he was dispensed a discriminatory treatment by the teachers in his time back in school. When it was the moment to decide whether he would pursue technical or classical studies, teachers would try to convince Mirko and his parents that he was not tailored for classic education. He had to endure and prove, by achieving positive results in tests, that he could make it. Later in his adult life, married to a French woman, he would still notice a difference in the treatment his kids got in school. Usually, it was the mother of the children who attended most of the school meetings and activities. However, since she did not speak Luxembourgish, the communication with the teachers always happened in French, and she would share with him that she was feeling judged. It was only when Mirko came to the school and spoke in Luxembourgish to the teacher that his family felt they were being dispensed an equal treatment in the school community.

More and more, as we revisit the history of topics raised by the interviewees and put issues such as work conditions and educations in a long durée perspective, we can challenge the notion of success implied in the recent discourse of successful immigration stories that seem to ignore the hardship and discrimination faced by the migrants of different generations in the Grand Duchy. There is, however, in the core of the associative world in Luxembourg, a positive attitude from most of the ONG’s in the country dedicated to improving the wellbeing of immigrants and foster cultural activities to debate and educate both national and non-national residents about the integration challenges. But it is still a quite recent chapter in the long history of immigration in Luxembourg. It follows the rediscovery of Luxembourg as a “country of immigration” by other nationalities with the arrival of the 1970s. Since the 1950s, a constant increment of non-national population and the growing demand of the economy have contributed to it. The population grew from 291.000 in 1947 to 340.000 in 1970, with immigrants going from 11,4% in 1947 to 21% of the economically active population in 1970 (Scuto 2010, 31). In 1970 there were 5.743 Portuguese in the Grand Duchy, in 1980 this contingent had grown exponentially to 29.309.

Indeed, the 1970s are a watershed moment concerning the attitudes toward foreigners in Luxembourg because of the changes in its international positioning in the post-war years. Overall, the aftermath of the Second World War brought about a reorientation of the Grand Duchy’s foreign policy. Having taken part in the war effort on the side of the Allies, Luxembourg abandoned its status of neutrality and, despite being a small country, assumed an important place in the international community formed after 1945. The Grand Duchy became a founding member of all the post-war multilateral cooperation institutions: The United Nations, the Benelux, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), the Brussels Pact, the Council of Europe, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But it was within the framework of European Unification that Luxembourg highlighted its place in the European map. It is not a secret how proud the Luxembourgers are by the role of Robert Schuman  “The French Foreign Minister between 1948 and 1952 in the origins of the unification”. Schuman, born in Luxembourg, his father was French and his mother Luxembourgish, in 1950, launched his plan for the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and the Benelux countries were involved. Due to the creation of ECSC as a first supranational organisation in Europe, the “Schuman Declaration”, dated 9th of May 1950, is considered to be the birth of the European Union. The pride of being the country of Schuman, the Father of Europe, also has echoes among some participants of Memorecord. It is rather common for the more recent migrant to identify themselves more as a European then X or Y nation identity . The idea of a European identity, however, is profoundly complex, it:

includes meanings which vary depending on the discursive situations in which the idea is being produced, defined, and used [...] is easily politicised at both national and European levels [...] in several ways overlapping dimensions of the collective and the individual (Lähdesmäki 2014, 78)

I will get back to the Europeanness discussion in my sample, but before that, I would like to articulate, briefly, how Europe became a major theme in Luxembourg. This process is not for nothing, disconnected from the unfolding immigration policies and the most recent profile of immigrants we see in Luxembourg. Indeed, the additional boost to Luxembourg’s standing in Europe, and I believe the reciprocity of it – the ideal European growing in Luxembourg – was given when Joseph Bech, Foreign Minister of Luxembourg at that time, managed to ensure that the headquarters of the High Authority of the ECSC would be located in Luxembourg. In 1957 all institutions were brought together in the European Economic Community (EEC), which would later become the European Union (EU). However, ECSC retained its independent identity until the expiration of the Treaty of Paris in 2002.

Following the momentum of the European Social Charter and the recommendations of the European Commission, in 1964, the Luxembourg government created the Service d’accueil et d’assistance sociale aux travailleurs étranger (Reception and Social Assistance Service for Foreigners Workers), which turned into Service d’Immigration (Immigration Service) in 1972. Until that time, as Scuto explains, all social assistance for immigrants was provided by Catholic organisations such as the Missione Cattolica, which I have already mentioned, the Caritas, or by social offices in the municipalities. Or sometimes, by organisations such as the Red Cross or the League against Tuberculosis (2010, 32). But it was only in the 1970s that the accueil of immigrants became part of the State agenda. In May 1970, Luxembourg signed two agreements, one with Portugal and the other with Yugoslavia, “regulating the employment in Luxembourg of the workers” from both countries. However, while the agreement with Portugal allowed family reunion, the one with Yugoslavia did not. Immigrants were wanted for work, but to stay longer and bring their families they needed to fit in the profile: European, white and catholic, preferred by the Grand Duchy’s immigration policies. In his review of political scientist, Joel S. Fetzer’s book, Luxembourg as an Immigration Success Story. The Grand Duchy in Pan-European Perspective (2011), Scuto points to the absence of a family reunification clause in the bilateral agreement for workers from Yugoslavia, or Luxembourg’s efforts to limit Cape Verdean immigration in the 1970s speaks to this targeting. While this could mean immigration does not reserve any success for the immigrants outside of this targeting, it could have been a strategy for the success of the targeted immigrants, as Scuto notices that:

This will and this government policy have been reinterpreted as the fundamental causes of successful integration, since government discourse is widely picked up by all elites and conveyed through the media. “Miracle immigrated to Luxembourg: economic prosperity and the religious origin of foreigners, two characteristics of the ‘model’ proposed by the Grand Duchy”, headlines of Le Monde in 1992. (Scuto 2013, 125, translated from French by myself) 

It is in this context, however, that the first Non-Governmental Organisations will appear in Luxembourg. The first one was the Association de Soutien aux Travailleurs Immigrés (ASTI)  – Association of Support for Immigrant Workers – founded in 1979, engaged with essential debates for the right to vote and to help immigrants, in general, to have equal rights in Luxembourg. Among the activities, cultural and pedagogical projects are for people of all ages and nationalities. With the emergence of other non-profit associations occupied with closer subjects, always having the concern for the immigration in the background, in 1985 a platform for associations dedicated to foreigners was created, the Comité de Liaison et d’Action des Étrangers (CLAE). During its second congress, CLAE reunited 102 associations occupied with the immigration cause. In 2020, the 37th edition of what became the Festival des migrations, des cultures et de la citoyenneté (Festival of migrations, cultures and citizenship) received more than 30.000 visitors. It hosted a book fair and more than 400 stands of associations, media representatives (printed press, TV, Radio…), artists, libraries and civic organisations. “You can’t miss the Festival des Migrations!” – a colleague told me as soon as I arrived in Luxembourg and she learned about the topic of my case study. Indeed, it was through the Festival de Migrations that I met most of the people who “open the doors” to me in Luxembourg, that were happy to share, to help me to find interested people to take part in my research and that were, above all, of a contagious enthusiasm about the idea of living together for real, and the challenges along with it.

It was in the Festival de Migrations of 2016 that I met Paola Cairo for the first time. With her friend Maria Grazia Galati, Cairo created the PassaParola Magazine , the first and only Italian magazine in the Granducato. At the stand of PassaParola in the big LuxExpo hall, in Kirschberg, I recieved a good Italian espresso as a greeting. The Festival was busy, and PassaParola’s stand is a hot spot. We could not talk much, in fact, because – they needed to work, Ragazzi! Anyway, Paola and I agreed to stay in touch. Memorecord’s website was not online yet. However, Paola found me on Facebook because although I had been in Luxembourg for only a few months, I got to know people who got to know people and Luxembourg is very, very small. On Facebook Messenger, I further explained the research scope for her. She said she could help and I asked her to test the PixStori app, and the following video link was her answer to me:

Figure 57: PassaParola Magazine, PixStori by Paola Cairo. Languages >> Cultural Identity >> Culture, community >> Communication >> Institutions, Organisations | Full video link (00:00:37)

In Luxembourg, the legal recognition and practice of three languages – Luxembourgish, French and German – makes the media landscape singularly multilingual. In contrast to countries such as Switzerland or Belgium, however, in the Grand Duchy, there is no regional distribution. The population across the whole country is mainly considered polyglot. The affluence of the Italian and Portuguese migration, although unofficially, adds Italian and Portuguese language to this scene. In the press, then, it is not rare that different languages are published side-by-side on the same page. While German and French are predominant over the other languages, Luxembourgish can also be found in certain vehicles. Since the 1970’s we have identified the emergence of médias ethniques, in other words, from immigrant and minority communities, they are Portuguese, Italian, Bosnian or English-speaking (Cascão 2013).

PassaParola was created under an a.s.b.l. (association sans but lucratif, non-profit association) regime, in 2004. In addition to the rubrics on Italian culture (cuisine, music, books, arts) it also offers a “legal rubric” that obtains a large audience and discusses legal aspects of both Italy and Luxembourg. The publication on the advantages of the civil solidarity pact – in Luxembourg commonly referred to by its French acronym PACS (pacte civil de solidarité) – for example, obtained more than 4800 views from the date of its publication until June 2020. PassaParola also has the distinct column of Remo Ceccarelli “Tanti Italiani Fa ...” that chronicles Italian life and culture in Luxembourg. A column that, in 2019, gave rise to Ceccarelli’s autobiographical book Tanti Italiani fa… in Lussemburgo. Viaggio nella memoria (and a po ‘di storia) della nostra emigrazione published by PassaParola Editions itself. The Radio show PassaParola Voices, on Radio ARA run by Cairo and her husband, Paolo Travelli, is another ramification of the magazine and presents Italian music and culture at large, also interviewing artists, members of the community – and even researchers like me  – that have something to share about / with the Italians in Luxembourg.

Writing about the media public sphere in Luxembourg and the participation of the médias ethniques in the scene, Suzana Lopes Cascão observes that these media, like the lusophone Contacto , founded in 1970, play an essential role in the political literacy of the non-national population:

Political participation presupposes a good knowledge of the political, economic, social and cultural realities of the country where one lives and works. Contacto has contributed to the rapprochement of Portuguese-speaking and Luxembourgish cultures by facilitating access to information on Luxembourg. But members of the Portuguese-speaking community, for their part, will have to commit themselves in order to become full citizens. To accomplish this step, it needs to have compelling access to the Luxembourg national media. Fluency in the country’s languages, therefore, plays an essential role in the emancipation of immigrant communities. (Cascão 2013, 47, translated from French by myself) 

In any way, the simple existence of these non-Luxembourgish channels attests to the formation of a market niche, consuming their information, but is also eloquent to express how different the migration chart in Luxembourg at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. People come to stay longer, even if many still arrive in Luxembourg planning to return home. The changes regarding the cultural and linguistic landscape of Luxembourg and the evolution of the media did not happen overnight, though, the process gradually unfolded with the changing in immigration policies in the 1970s. It underwent yet another reshape in 2000-2010 with the popularisation of the Internet and social media. The so-called national, mainstream media does not include, insofar, languages other than French and German systematically in their publication. It is difficult to say if it will happen someday, but somehow, it is also an expression of how Luxembourg has changed in the 21st century, but is still not necessarily the melting pot of multiculturalism, as some spokespeople of the immigration as a success story refrain depict it. One could arguably say that there are still some geographic, linguistic and other vernacular borders in this melting pot abstraction, likewise there are porosities and breaking outs of these borders, but the latter is less generalised fashion.

By porosities, I do not mean it could be a way to the melting pot of culture. I prefer to believe that there are other ways for immigrant incorporation in receiving societies that do not necessarily subject their cultural heritage and identity to homogenisation. When I think about porosities in the imaginary borders that still separate the various national groups in Luxembourg, I instead recall the image of “national islands”, as Father Gallo’s called the Italian districts more than a century ago and considering there is not so much isolation now. Italians are no longer restricted to the limits of their quartiers, some Italian descendants have even taken the political path and have become popular representatives, like the former mayor of Dudelange, Louis Rech, or those who got to sit in the national Parliament, like Mars di Bartolomeo and Marc Zanussi. The accomplishments of these individuals, however, and their public appraisal would not have been possible a century ago. However, it also does not mean that non c’era male (there were no problems) for them and others of their generation and their Italian families. Grilli, born in Differdange in 1931, a Casa Balezo, is almost the same age as Rech (just four years younger), and would tell us a different story. In his memories, which I evoked other times in this section, he describes the awkward bullying he suffered from an engineer who was his manager in 1961. Back then, Grilli and his wife were running a well-frequented grocery store in Esch-sur-Alzette, Madame J.-P. Ney-Schmit.

Nevertheless, Grilli was still working in the mine division of HADIR (Hauts-Fourneaux et Aciéries de Differdange) and often was called to work on Sundays, to what he usually replied positively. One time, as his business was going well, and he was tired of the double workload, he decided to stop working on Sundays. On one Monday, his boss arrived, yelling:

“Dove’era lei ieri?”. “A casa”, fu la mia risposta. A quel punto si arrabbiò ancora di più e urlò: “Si vede già dalle molte macchine che stanno laggiù [referring to the parking space] che oggigiorno voi operai ve la passate fin troppo bene. Lei doveva essere qui. Lo sa che con questo gesto ha commesso un ‘rifiuto del lavoro’?”. Io gli risposi che, se avesse guardato quante ore straordinarie avevo gi{a fatto, si sarebbe comportato diversamente. “Lei, adesso, diventa per di più insolente!”, rispose “e, se dice ancora una parola, la mando giù dalla montagna ed è licenziato senza avviso”. (Grilli 2011, 168)

____

“Where were you yesterday?” “At home,” was my answer. At that point, he became even angrier. He shouted: “You can already see from the many cars over there [referring to the parking space] that you workers are doing all too well these days. You were supposed to be here. Do you know that with this gesture you have committed a ‘job rejection’?”. I told him that if he had looked at how many extraordinary hours I had already worked, he would have behaved differently. “You now become insolent!” he replied, “and if you say one more word, I’ll send you down the mountain and you’re fired without notice”. (Grilli, 2011, 168)

After this episode, Grilli himself quit the job. A few years later, Grilli’s business was a success. They incorporated commerce of wine from the Vinicola S. Gabrielle di Tombacco. Their sales were good, and in a short time, in the 1970s, they managed to build whole new offices, with modernised equipment, printers, computers (with the most potent hard disk back then, 90 megabytes!), and even a cutting-edge Telex. The many success stories of self-made men like Grilli may indicate that with time, hard work, and new policies immigrants could also rise socially in Luxembourg, slowly abandoning, at least for Italians, the stereotype of the manual labourer. However, it is not proof that the well-liked epithet of the smooth integration is simulatenously applicable. At the same time, I am not suggesting the contrary, that people are still dying due to work-related causes and being buried as destitute without a hint for the family. Not at all. Much has been improved in terms of work conditions, thanks also to the syndicate movements and the work of professional chambers, as well as the backing of immigration services and the overall increase of state and non-governmental cultural and educational initiatives to welcome and improve the quality of life of all immigrants, but this was a long process. It is also necessary to bear in mind that nationality, per sé, is not the only trigger for discrimination. However, class, race, gender, religion, all are entangled. In Luxembourg, however, the different origins – and henceforth, the diverse cultural, social and economic background it brings about – still seems to play a pivotal role in determining the fate of subordinated classes.

Portuguese migrants: A missed epithet

The massive presence of the Portuguese in Luxembourg is by comparison, far more recent than the Italian one. As recent as the end of the 1960s but especially after the bilateral agreement between the Grand Duchy and Portugal, signed in 1970. The shorter history of Portuguese immigration to Luxembourg, however, does not make it less arduous. In the epoch, Italians were recruited to work in the mines and steelworks of Luxembourg and the Greater Region, Portugal was experiencing the apex of its transatlantic emigration. In the 1960s, still under the Estado Novo regime (1933-1974), the Portuguese “emigration zone” (Barreto and Almeida 1974) was being updated, including other regions. Historically, the North and Centre of the country were the most common departure areas, being responsible for over 2/3 of the emigration throughout the 20th century. It is, however, mainly with the economic crisis of 1973 that the exits are intensified, and the selection of European destinations becomes more frequent (Góis and Marques 2018).

The arrival of the Portuguese in Luxembourg will also find the country in mutation and the group of immigrants arriving was significantly different from the immigrant mass that Luxembourg knew until then, like the Italians, whom we saw above, but also the Spanish. They worked mainly in mines and factories. Very soon, with many Portuguese men becoming the arms of civil construction and most women assuming the role of the femme de menage (cleaning ladies), these would become their main stereotype, the harder work for both genders. Another difference was the departure of the family as a whole, it was not only men who went to seek work and a better life in Luxembourg. Women were also part of this mobility, couples went together and established families there, thanks to the conditions guaranteed by the bi-lateral agreement between governments.

The continuum immigration from Portugal to Luxembourg, however, would also include, in the upcoming years, the arrival of qualified professionals that would be absorbed by the European and other private institutions. From banking to financial and insurance services, from security to the media, to education and companies, associations and liberal or independent careers. It was not long before the Portuguese became the second-largest resident community and the largest community of foreigners. In 1970 there were only 5,783 Portuguese in the country, corresponding to 1.7% of the country’s total population and 9.3% of the foreign population.  In Graph 2, we can see the evolution of the non-national population regarding the autochthone from 1875 until the last census .

Graph 2: Luxembourgers, Portuguese and foreigners in Luxembourg 

In the census of 2011, the total population in Luxembourg exceeded half a million: 512.353 people, among which 220.522 of the residents were non-nationals. Italians were then 18.059, equivalent to 3,5% of the total population while the Portuguese were 82.363, representing 16,1% of the total. In 2018, on the occasion of the National Day of Italy , the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (STATEC) issued some highlights on the Italian population in Luxembourg on 1st January, 2018 and, according to this data, Italians were 21.962 – 6,9% of the total population. For the Portugal National Day , STATEC released a similar reporter, under the rubric of “The main communities of the country”. Up to 1st January 2018, the Portuguese were representing 16% of the total population, with 96.544. Portuguese are younger, with a median age of 36.7, and Italian a little older, with average age 43.6. Portugal is, hence, the ‘biggest nation inside Luxembourg’ (as I have heard from many Portuguese off-record). On 1st January 2019, the updated figures showed that although in decline, the Portuguese still represented the first foreign community, amounting to 15.6% of the total population of Luxembourg (613 894), and coming next were French (7,6%), Italians (3.7%), Belgians (3.3%) and Germans (2.1%) .

After this summary of the demographic situation in Luxembourg, since work and immigration are so closely related in the Grand Duchy, I believe it is interesting to observe the kind of activities the population of interest here – Italian and Portuguese – are involved in the more recent scene of migration in Luxembourg. The current picture is not at all the one of mines and Usines and agriculture, like in the penultimate turn of the century, but will still have most of the hard work, these days notably represented by construction and handcrafts, performed by foreigners. While the active Luxembourgers are 22% of the gross of workers, 81% of Portuguese in Luxembourg work in the chantiers (construction sites), against 37,4% Italians . Among Italians, the proportion of “white collar workers” has increased over the last 40 years of the last century. The distribution of occupations of those who arrived between 1991 and 2001 resembles that of immigrants from neighbouring countries. Among those coming from Belgium, France and Germany, in the same period, 22.8% were technicians or had an intermediate profession. It is insightful to compare the professions of Italian and Portuguese regarding the duration of their stay in the Grand Duchy in the graphs below:

Graph 3: Occupation of Italian immigrants by the length of stay in Luxembourg, year of reference 2001.

Graph 4: Occupation of Portuguese immigrants by the length of stay in Luxembourg, year of reference 2001.

The tendency that is observed among the Portuguese to stay longer in less qualified occupations is a problematic factor that, on the one hand, recalls the first decades of Italian immigration, in which the profile of immigrants was rather unqualified. On the other hand, this data also suggests that, among the Portuguese, whose immigration had a more markedly familiar profile since the beginning, a great difficulty in qualifying and ascending professionally persists. This finding brings socio-political challenges to Luxembourg’s society. According to a study by Marc Glessener on Etude sur les interrelations entre immigration et marché de l’emploi (Study on the interrelationships between immigration and the labour market)  , there is a risk of increasing segmentation of the labour market. This means that work “tends to become an environment in which homogeneous groups coexist from the standpoint of status, nationality and language” (Glesener 2004, 04). The problem arising from this is that work is functioning less and less as a place of exchange between nationalities and, therefore, as a place of integration. Another challenge, which could, in the long run, mitigate the impacts of what I just mentioned, would be that the Luxembourg Government stop considering “foreigners as a simple ‘factor’ of economic balance between supply and demand” (idem). Those are compelling societal challenges that would demand a finer questioning about the stabilisation of this population in the host country and the means that can promote their integration and participation.

There are, however, some nuances to be considered in this debate of the immigrants’ distributions in the job market . Another study, published by the Centre d’études de populations, de pauvreté et de politiques socio-économiques (Center for Population, Poverty and Socio-Economic Policy Studies) in 2005, has shown that the compartmentalisation of occupation by certain national groups may not be exclusively related to actual qualification, and that prejudice and stereotypes play a role on it:

According to the interlocutors met during the qualitative interviews, this segmentation of the employment market also seems to have entered the mindsets of members of the staff of companies. A certain number of people would indeed find it hard to imagine that Portuguese women or African women could occupy other jobs than that of cleaning lady. .

Several examples of Portuguese, African or other non-EU women with high qualifications are reported, who have presented themselves for jobs in the private or in the public and who have been told that there is no need for maids [footnote on the segment quoted above] (Besch et al. 2005, 47)  

Even though another report on work and discrimination, published by the same authors involved in the study above, mentioned that they found through qualitative interviews that companies try to recruit Luxembourgers into general management in order to facilitate relations with Luxembourger customers and with the administration (Besch et al. 2005, 27). That is not, apparently, a sort of discrimination. Although, one can arguably admit that the control of Luxembourgish language, in this case, is being used as a hidden filter to fill the positions. The study also showed that discrimination can be manifested in many forms and that harassment and stereotyping can begin even before the recruitment interview:

A few examples were cited of people of North African origin who claimed to have had many difficulties finding work when they gave their names. One organisation reported the repeated experience of two people of North-African origin who claimed not to have received answers to their applications when using their names of origin. In contrast, such was no longer the case when they used their spouses’ names.

These examples concern positions as labour-worker and administrative secretary in the private sector. They also show the difficulty of proving discriminatory practices which can take place even before an actual work interview. One can also cite the examples of a name that ‘reveals’ a Luxembourger of Portuguese origin and that of an organisation which has chosen to incite people of Yugoslav origins to present themselves directly to the employers rather than send a curriculum that would give away their origin. (Besch et al. 2005, 19)

Once recruited, keeping the job can also be difficult for some people who feel harassed or are exposed to unequal work conditions. Some examples:

A person of colour complained of repeated jokes, of insults based on his/her ethnic origin, and of the degrading work conditions in a middle-sized transport company, by its German employees, and for which the manager, also German, did not intervene. The person concerned is said to have left the company and withdrew the complaint at the last minute.

In the catering sector, a young woman of Cape-Verdean descent was imposed work conditions that were more unfavourable than her white colleagues with the excuse that she had asked for a 4-week summer holiday in order to visit her family in her country of origin.

A young cleaning woman of North-African origin was affected to other areas of work after 11th September 2001 in order to avoid contact with the public.

A person of North-African origin claimed to have been insulted because of his/her ethnic origin by a regular customer of a supermarket. Reportedly, the manager of the supermarket did not intervene, and the complaint was withdrawn at the last minute. (idem, 23)

In sum, evaluating the occurrence of discrimination due to racial or ethnic origin, the study suggested that it can be worsened by skin colour and family name, however, the authors are careful to affirm that those could be the sole cause for a job position refusal, they write “other reasons probably explain the employer’s reticence (language skills, experience and professional experience, presentation, network of connections)” (, 18). Last but not least, the authors also noted how complex it could be for some victims of discrimination to file their complaints:

Often, victims of discriminatory acts do not talk about it and do not file complaints. The self-censoring mechanisms are circuitous: one can be afraid to lose one’s job, to be passed over for a promotion or else not to be taken seriously by the competent authorities or indeed to compromise one’s career path. (, 30)

I brought some figures and examples from statistics and reports to help those not familiar with the job market context and because I believe these reports and studies shows the existence of some problems. However, they also give evidence that the Government is, at least, keeping pace with these dynamics, being purposeful in requesting studies to rethink policies. The same is valid for the organisations of support for migrants (most of which are Non-Governmental Organisations), that are sometimes involved in the production of studies and reports like the ones quoted, and that, on their own, elaborate informational and didactic material in a wide range of languages to support integration to their best.

Figure 58: Collage of informative leaflets from organisations, services and activities aimed at immigrants.

The engagement of immigrants in these organisations is also remarkable and I would think about them, with the pardon of some anachronism, as similar structures to what were the fraternities and mutualities in the first decades of Italian immigration to Luxembourg, but now, with a rather international profile, although some are still organised around national groups . Thanks to organisations like those on Figure 58 and on note 159, I met some of the participants of my project. Antonio Valente, whose interview I want to quote hereunder, I met in 2016 during the seminar Luso-Luxemburguês, but Valente was also vice-president of the CLAE. Beyond participating himself in the project, he put me in touch with many people. Valente, his surname, is also an adjective in the Portuguese language that means courageous, brave, but may also translate as gallant and valorous. I think a lot of this is real for Valente.

Video 6. Antonio Valente. Story: How everything began in Luxembourg >> Journey >> Making a new life >> Marriage, family / Work, career >> Conflict Story link (00:08:23) | Full video link (00:29:08)

When we recorded this interview, on the 6th May 2016, Valente had been in Luxembourg for over 21 years. However, his migratory experience started long before that. At age 17, he received an invitation to spend three weeks in Caracas, yet he fell in love with the place and ended up staying five years. He started working in a bakery, and at 18 he was already a manager. Then he became a partner in the business. The ambient of concurrence was such that many people called him to physical fights, so he needed to enrol in a martial arts school to learn how to defend himself. He saw the revolution in Caracas and many of his friends and acquaintances were killed. He lost confidence in the people of the region. Since there was a love story on standby in Europe, he crossed the Atlantic again. Before coming to Luxembourg, however, he planned to move to Germany to reunite with his girlfriend; however, a love delusion changed all his plans again. He settled in Portugal, bought a bakery and again was working hard, but things were more difficult than in Venezuela.

In 1995, by invitation of a cousin, Valente went to Luxembourg. He fell in love with the country – it was so green! So clean! – and he met his current wife. He returned to Portugal intending to get rid of his old business to return to Luxembourg. Sooner than he expected, just one week later, as he recounts in the passage above, he receives notice that he will have a job in Luxembourg. He went to Luxembourg and started working as a forest ranger. He loved the job and his furry companion, Max, the horse. He then married, bought a house and had a daughter. After about a year at that job, he wanted to try something else. He registered himself to the agency responsible for the management of jobs. He soon received a new offer to work at the airport. In the highlighted passage, he tells us what happened when he got a better job and how a situation of envy and injustice got him out. The unlucky story, as he says, unfolded in a positive way for him, after some months of depression and unemployment. He managed to find, through a friend, a position in another company, in thermal and acoustic insulation. In this new job, he was soon promoted to an “in charge” position and today he earns almost four times more than he would receive in the airport. Nevertheless, for him, it was not only the salary that was important but the fact that we would have a regular workload, would be free on Sundays and have time for his family and friends, so many quotidian things that he could not do before because the workload was too charged. Free time was essential for Valente’s engagement in the associative world in Luxembourg, as well as the positive network he cultivated over more than 20 years.

Valente was happy to dedicate his time for local and Portuguese organisations, thinking not only about promoting the integration of Portuguese but also, in the area where he lives, the integration of Luxembourgers that, according to him, were not always integrated. Through cultural activities and festivities, it seemed to him that the neighbourhood began to get to know each other and be more friendly (e.g. saying “good morning” when crossing each other in the streets.). However, the dedication to community problems did not always feel rewarding. He recollects the lack of engagement of a group of Portuguese language students in one association in Diekirch and said that their absence to some activities, which were organised with a great deal of dedication, was one motivation for him to quit; he was disappointed. Nevertheless, this gave him time to engage in other activities and was also due to this that he was elected vice-president of CLAE. This kind of volunteer work, he says, demands continuous working to fundraise and prepare activities. However, he enjoys doing so and is happy to be able to engage with the community in this way, which was only possible because of his professional ascension. Not only because of the time investment needed but also the financial investment that it represents, for instance, to fill the car with petrol for visits to various associations.

One of the activities he liked the most was visiting the Penitentiary Center of Luxembourg, the one for migration detentions. He recounted that his job there was levar um pouco de sol para aquelas pessoas (bring a bit of sun to those people) . Valente goes mainly to listen to their stories and learn about their conditions, whether they need a lawyer or not and, if they do not have one, he tries to find one. He deals mostly with asylum seekers waiting for judgement, people that fear to be sent back and go through a hard time in the prison. Valente tries to move them from suicidal thoughts and bring them a bit of comfort. Most of them, he says, have a displeasing feeling toward Luxembourg, but when they meet him, they are surprised that in Luxembourg there are people like him. He tries to explain that if a police officer was mean to them, it does not mean that everybody in Luxembourg is the same. The time that Valente spends at the penitentiary is deeply influenced by his experience in Caracas, where he once went to prison for being caught on the streets without his documents. It was only for 12 hours, but the horror he saw was enough to leave in him the will to be closer to people in similar situations. Beyond his notable empathetic attitude, Valente is also politically engaged. One goal of his most recent projects, by the time of the interview, was to convince foreigners to vote in local elections. He finds it absurd that Luxembourg gives them the right to decide their local representatives and many foreigners still do not know or do not engage.

Nevertheless, many people do not seem to be interested . Valente was speaking of the local elections that would take place in 2017. For that year, the Government made an intensive campaign to raise awareness among the non-national residents and their right to vote, many organisations were involved (e.g. in the PixStori by Paola Cairo, at PassaParola, we can see a leaflet about it, as well as in Figure 58, there is a leaflet on the campaign “jepeuxvoter.lu”). After the elections, the Centre for Intercultural and Social Study and Training (CEFIS) presented a study on the results of these awareness-raising efforts, at the State level, municipalities and civil society. The results showed that 22.8% of foreign residents (of 134 nationalities) registered for municipal elections of 2017, amounting 34,638 people. In 2011, this rate was 17%. In absolute terms, the Portuguese registered in the most significant number, with 13.093 people, followed by the French, with 5.120 registered, Italians, with 3.378 and Belgians, with 3.126 (Besch and Dubajic 2018). Despite the considerable increase in comparison to the previous election, it is still far from being representative, and there is more than an awareness campaign that needs to be done. As the survey in the graph below indicates, the causes that refrain people from participating is rather about political education than about the understanding that they can vote.

Graph 5 : Questionnaire for multipliers “What are the main difficulties you encountered during this campaign? (many responses were possible)” 

The responses on the graph above could suggest that the background problem lies in political literacy. In her article, afore quoted, Cascão stressed the close ties between media and political education (2013). Cascão researched the history of the Portuguese newspaper Contacto for 40 years, observing, for instance, how, on the side of the Portuguese press represented mainly Contacto in the beginning, there was a preoccupation in presenting the history and the language of Luxembourg to the Portuguese readers, as well as representing some stories – both successful and not so glorious – of Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg. Stories would also approach some delicate topics, such as stereotyping, discrimination, or adverse living conditions. These excerpts from Cascão’s research give a taste of the type of stories reported in the 1900s:

In an elementary but meaningful account, António Abreu Serôdio, tells of how he crossed the border in Spain and his many ordeals until he found in Luxembourg his home. Not without mentioning the difficulties and the dismay: “the looks Luxembourger girls would throw at us Portuguese men as if we were gipsies” and the various humid and lacking conditions places he used to live in Grund. (…) Nowadays, I have a big and good house. Built by myself. With a garage and a garden.”

[...]

Contacto reported on less glamorous living and working conditions too, like the one of Valter Pimenta de Azevedo, a worker who had been living for 14 years in a men’s residence and whose only aspiration was that eventually each man is granted “a room of his own” (2012, 79) 

According to the mission of the newspaper, this kind of content could help to integrate the community. Nevertheless, the other way around was not so accurate, non-lusophone media were not so keen on portraying Portuguese or discussing the matters of their community at a national level (2012). The role of the press becomes even more relevant if we consider that migration is structurally part of Luxembourgish history. However, the topic is still underrepresented in mainstream education. Its dominant presence in the History textbooks used in the country seems still to be related to the industrialisation chapters . Another aggravating aspect of the teaching of migration history in Luxembourg is that the Grand Duchy does not have fully nationally edited textbooks; it uses mainly French and German books (Nicolas, Lefrançois 2016).

The tendency of limiting the presence of minorities and ethnic groups that compose society to an exact period of national history, usually limiting the narrative about the moment when a group arrived or was inserted in a specific society, is often part of systematic and ideologic oblivion that neglects to those people the right to know their history and, ultimately, their full citizenship. This kind of gap in schooling scholarship cannot be taken as neutral. This can lead to many problems related to the integration and dignity of those groups in a specific society. An analogue process has been observed in Brazil, where the black population, who still face racism and other prejudices as legacies of the country’s slavery past, was for a long time neglected in the history textbooks, mainly presented in the chapter related to slavery. The formulation of a National Law became necessary (Lei 10.639/03) and was signed by Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, in 2003, to regulate the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history in the school system (Müller 2013; Eugênio and Lima 2015) . The Brazilian case is an example of how this problem can be faced with public policies and law enforcement and that it is not upon single teachers to cope with and to solve this sort of structural discrepancy.

I believe the discussion on education and the school system, though, goes beyond the content. It is also about the school community attitude towards immigrants in general, which might be in reciprocity with the lack of consistent teaching about the history and culture of these populations; what is their background, what is their history in Luxembourg, beyond being the economic valve they have been for over a century. For Italians, the use of the pejorative Biers might have fallen away with time and their progressive ascension in terms of occupation in the Luxembourg job market (Cf. Graph 3: Occupation of Italian immigrants by the length of stay in Luxembourg, year of reference 2001). However, the fact that four out of five Portuguese are doing manual and low-grade service jobs engenders a strong stereotyping that goes far beyond the immediate consequence of their position in the job market. It is resented by the Portuguese people in other spheres of their lives, as I noticed in my observations, but especially by the second generation when it comes to education, as the sociologist Heidi Martins demonstrated. Reflecting on the experience and feelings narrated by a Portuguese participant that went abroad to study, Martins remarks that:

Once elsewhere (another home, other relationships, another context of life, another language), Diana [28 years old] found herself liberated from a gaze that bothered her, [in Germany] she was rid of the stereotypes (linked to her migratory background) that haunted her. She goes so far as to say that this allowed her to “rethink her identity”. It should be noted that Diana does not stop at the negative stereotypes associated with the Portuguese in Luxembourg (mothers are cleaning ladies and the fathers, construction workers), but also underlines the low expectations on the part of the teachers towards pupils of Portuguese origin. (Martins 2019, 330, translated from French by myself) 

The relationship between teachers and students highlighted by the participant in Martins’s study is highly problematic too, especially if we consider that such pejorative regard to another culture is coming from educators that are expected to be role models to their classes. Beyond revealing a narrow view from those in charge of the essential work for civic and citizenship education, which is concerning at a more significant societal level, it can have further implications in the life of people with migratory backgrounds. Such a judgmental attitude can trigger a feeling of intellectual distrust, as it is known in accounts of impostor syndrome manifestations in various educational settings. The imposter syndrome also referred to as the imposter phenomenon, “refers to an individual who doubts their own skills, abilities, successes, and overall capabilities in their life” (Le 2019, 22).

On the specific matter of impostorism and minorities, a recent study from the University of Texas at Austin suggests that impostor feelings fuel adverse mental health outcomes among ethnic minority college students (Cokley et al. 2017). This situation, in Luxembourg, considering more specifically the public school system, poses a great deal of stress and social pressure to students of the first and second generation who feel like they need to prove their abilities continually. Ultimately, this feeling underscores a tense form of belonging, a thorn in the educational path of many kids, as reported by Mirko (p. 233). According to the European Migration Network glossary, an impostor is “A person claiming the identity of another person, for instance by using the other person’s authentic identity documents”, deep down, a possible reading is that an impostor is someone who does not have the right to be there.

Perhaps, as a response to the lack or inconsistency in teaching about migration history, among the organisations’ agenda, one of the most prominent activities will be related to the elaboration of pedagogic dossiers and the promotion of educative contents dealing with ethnic-racial relations. It called to my attention the number of informative materials elaborated by these organisations. There is materials for all ages, often available in French, but many times in other national languages plus Portuguese, English and sometimes Arabic too. These materials are mostly aimed to be used in formative activities within the organisations’ Program. However, sometimes there are also brochures, guides and more ludic materials (i.e. memory games, dynamic group games) that can be distributed or sold to broader publics. One example is the card games Histoires des Migrations – Luxembourg  , co-created by the CDMH and the association Alter & Ego , in collaboration with the Luxembourg National Archives. The game aims to discuss the history of migration in Luxembourg in a longue durée offering contextualisation of centuries of history (58 BC - 2017). It consists of 37 cards with an illustration and an informative phrase about a specific event in time. Cards have two sides, one with and one without the date of the event. In the development of the game, they might be placed in a coherent timeline, ideally, with the mediation of an animator. The card game is aimed at publics aged 12+, but they can also be played with family or between friends by people of varied ages (6+). The game elaboration was done under the coordination of Reuter, on the CDMH and Mylène Porta, on Alter & Ego side. The game was launched on the occasion of the International Day of Archives 2018.

Figure 59: Overview all 37 cards of Histoires des Migrations – Luxembourg, photo by Anita Lucchesi

Figure 60: Detail of six cards of Histoires des Migrations – Luxembourg, photo by Anita Lucchesi

The game addresses the causes or constraints that push people to migrate, discusses border controls throughout history and their motivations. By putting migration from a broader perspective, as a human phenomenon, it tries to deconstruct certain representations, prejudices and stereotypes linked to the migratory phenomenon. Along with the cards, the game has an educational booklet that provides further information on migratory events and situates them using sources kept at the Luxembourg National Archives.

The availability of material like that and the very existence of more services and community support to the newcomers makes a significant difference for those arriving in the Grand Duchy in the 21st century. Despite the problems mentioned above, on the job market absorption of the foreign workforce and those related to the school system, this new welcoming infrastructure, plus the excellent wages (among the top wages in the EU), of course, seems to present a rather xenophile environment for those who have only just arrived. In fact, among my interviewees, those who arrived most recently were the ones to experience fewer problems. Even among those who already lived through some hardship due to their immigration, the overall portrayal of the life they have nowadays in Luxembourg is generally favourable. Elisa Coimbra, who came to Luxembourg in 1969, at age 17, recalls a different experience of arrival. She came to Luxembourg at the request of her sister, who already lived in the Grand Duchy and was pregnant with twins, so she called for help with the children. Her-brother-in law was the “barber of the Portuguese”, he knew everybody, he was also someone who could sign her first work contract. Until building her family, she worked in several places. She used to be a cleaner, a sewer and a bartender. Almost 50 years later, those stories remain far, and she reaffirms she is happy in Luxembourg with her family. Coimbra recollects the difficulties with gravity, but her account is chiefly one of overcoming with hard work and persistence rather than any sort of regret.

Video 8. Elisa Coimbra, SEGMENT 4: BY THE BOOK >> Languages >> Making a New Life >> Neighborhood >> Communication >> Work Segment link (00:28) | Full video (30:42)

O Luxemburgo era muito pobre! Luxembourg was very poor when she arrived, she said. The housing conditions were complicated, and she remembered the toilet being outside. It was the immigrants who formed Luxembourg as it is today; she keeps the argument. To give an example, she mentions the fact that there were no big supermarkets, they did all the shopping in small épiceries (grocery stores). She recalls that every time she needed to go to the épicerie, her sister would make a list looking into the French dictionary for the translations of what she needed to buy. Her sister would write on a piece of paper, and when Coimbra arrived at the store, she would deliver the paper written in French. Neither she, at 17, nor her sister could speak French. The first language she learned was Italian. She went to work in a sewing factory with two Italian women, they were like sisters to her, and soon enough she learned Italian.

Coimbra’s story reminded me of another one I heard from a Portuguese lady who was taking part at the Memorecord launching, at the Espace H2O in Differdange, in May 2017. Fátima was not visiting Memória Episódika, the exposition of Edmond Oliveira within which I launched the Memorecord Website officially, she was working for H2O. However, at a certain point, I invited all those present to sit in a circle and exchange which kind of memories the exhibition was triggering in them. I was not, at first, looking for participants to post something right away on Memorecord. However, I wanted to propose the exercise of remembering and exchanging things together, which would be, afterwards, the goal of Memorecord, but online. During this round of exchanges, everybody started to speak, mostly in French, about their experiences when they arrived in Luxembourg, or things they could remember from their childhood times, growing amidst a family of migratory background, of simple things that they could recall about themselves or their family home country. Fátima then remembered that when her father brought her family to Luxembourg, she was still a child, at the beginning of the 1970s, the day they arrived it was very, very cold. Soon they would learn that during winter the snow would accumulate to the height of the knees. It was not easy to leave home for anything, but her father worked hard. The house they lived in, at first, did not have any heating system, nor good isolation; she would sleep in the same bed as her sister in order to be warmer. Hot water was also out of service, hence the shower needed to be taken at the local public school, in Differdange. She remembered asking her father to go back to Portugal.

Figure 61: “I work. I starve. This is not heaven”, Image headline on the Contacto reportage by Paula Cravina de Sousa and Ricardo J. Rodrigues, on 12th March 2020. 

All things considered, Luxembourg may not have been the El Dorado it seemed for everybody; not in the past, not even today, but some are still looking for it. More recently, however, with the rising of housing costs, Luxembourg is missing the epithet of El Dorado for many people who would still believe in itor see the country as “cold” but “rich” (another common pejorative brought up by people with migratory backgrounds, especially from Southern countries) and prefer to live in the risk of poverty than in the certainty of it, as I read on a reaction by a Portuguese man to a Facebook post in the issue of poverty in the country. The reportage about the “new poverty” signed by Paula Cravina de Sousa and Ricardo J. Rodrigues on Contacto tells us about the drama of many people, among which Luxembourgers and immigrants, that are suffering from this phenomenon. Even working, they are exposed to the risk of poverty, they struggle to eat, they do not have time to rest (due to the need of having extra jobs), they cannot have holidays, they get debts and this all seems to be accumulating in a snowball effect.

Every year, on 17th October, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the figures for social exclusion in the Grand Duchy are published. The at-risk-of-poverty rate is measured as the percentage of residents with an income of less than 60% of the median national income. In 2016, it reached 16.5% in Luxembourg against 17.3% in the EU. In 2019, it was 18%, meaning it affects 105.000 people (13% of the active population) according to the Economic Bulletin of the Chamber of Commerce. These figures put Luxembourg just behind Romania in terms of the risk of poverty faced by the active population. We are in front of a paradox then: one of the globally richest countries has one of the highest rates of poverty risk in Europe. It is not difficult to imagine, with the high concentration of the Portuguese on manual work occupations, that the Portuguese are among the most exposed to the risk of poverty, a situation that tends to become even more complicated in the aftermath of the COVID-19 sanitary crisis, as alerted by Marie-Josée Jacobs and Robert Urbé from Caritas, Luxembourg, in April 2020 .

The missed-epithet of terra dos sonhos or dreamland has been recently so present among the Portuguese community that it inspired a documentary suggestively called Eldorado (2016) .

Video 9: Detail of documentary “Eldorado” by Rui Abreu, Thierry Besseling and Loïc Tanso, 2016, Samsa Film. Link to the movie trailer

The trailer of the documentary opens with a striking voice-over: “Luxembourg is the land of dreams. When you get there, it’s a nightmare… Pretty strange dreams, anyway”. Right when the movie was launched, due to my research activities, I had the opportunity to be in touch with the movie directors and was invited to the avant-première. The cinema room at Utopolis Kirchberg, the European quartier in Luxembourg City, was full. I enjoyed the project of the movie, but due to the way it was filmed, and the drama added, I would not willingly call it a documentary, but a proper feature film based on real person biographies. Perhaps, this was my critique speaking louder. I believe that as a historian, going to the movies to watch a documentary, I was expecting documents, facts, dates and instead, the directors presented a provocative portrait of the reality of four people based on their testimonials and followed their steps.

Nevertheless, Eldorado was touching and insightful for me, as I had been in Luxembourg for only seven months back then. The narratives of Fernando, Carlos, Jonathan and Isabel were somewhat dissonant to what I kept hearing on the surface of my first months in Luxembourg. I remember that having moved to the Grand-Duchy during the summer of 2015, it had been challenging – and surprisingly expensive, even for what I expected – to rent an apartment. I got a 28m² studio in Belair, in Luxembourg City, which I later discovered was one of the most expensive areas in the city, I could only stay there for one year, having moved later on to a shared house later on (with three, sometimes four other people), in Esch-sur-Alzette. Before moving to Esch, I heard from a neighbour in the city that “In Luxembourg there was no poor people”, the topic of the conversation was my astonishment to the fact the in our street the cheapest car parked would be a BMW, which, for us in Brazil, is something that gives one an ensured status.

Coming from a country of which the exchange rate was very unfavourable (Brazil), the move from Rio de Janeiro to Luxembourg City was impactful, not only culturally, but on my bank statement. I had to use savings and borrow money to be able to make the international trip and settle in Luxembourg. With the exchange rates at the time, the amount I spent on the trip and in the first month of the apartment (e.g. rent, insurance, real estate agency, internet hiring, first purchases of the house), about 6,000€, was equivalent to R $ 18 581.50 (BRL, Brazilian Reais), which, in the table at the time, corresponded to more than 23 Brazilian minimum wages. I could only make the move thanks to jobs I did as a public historian before moving to Luxembourg, if I depended on my previous salaries, from three, four years before, as a History teacher, I would not have been able to afford Luxembourg.

Back in July 2015, when the taxi was loaded with my baggage to the International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, in the back of my mind, mixed with feelings of saudade and anxieties about the future, in my naive expectation, I was trying to tranquilise myself about the financial investment. Knowing that I was moving to one of the wealthiest countries in the world, I believed that soon, with a better salary of the Luxembourg doctorate scholarship (which was a luxury for this position), I would have recovered everything. However, to allow me to travel to Brazil sometimes (something I did in 2016, 2017 and 2018) I was never able to recover my savings, on the contrary, after I had resolved the debt for my move and was living for almost 18 months quite comfortably (but not saving anything), unforeseen bills due to personal and family health issues appeared and I became even more involved in debt. Ironic as it may be, even though I belong to a privileged portion of the population, with an intellectual occupation and a research position, with social insurance included, I still found myself struggling on the poverty line.

Like many immigrants I met in my study, I also have to send money “back home” every month and I ended up finishing the doctorate period poorer than when I started, with debts I acquired in banks and with friends to supply the emergencies that my salary could not handle. In 2019 I got married, and my wife (also Brazilian), although speaking fluent English and intermediary French, was struggling to find jobs when she moved. Her technical course in Nursing studies would not transfer to Luxembourg right away, she needed to finish a specialisation, and for it, she needed to learn Luxembourgish. Even for the most basic functions, full fluency in at least one of the official languages of the country is necessary. Since her French was not perfect, she accepted any kind of job, cleaning, babysitting, waitressing and this is how we survived. We did not have a car and sometimes she would find jobs that were far from our home and since public transportation finishes early (1 AM), sometimes, she would lose the last train, she would need to pay a taxi to get home. Furthermore, this would mean almost the whole day of work, 75%-80% of it; or a night out in the cold.

I have made this brief personal retrospective in a guise of conclusion for this section because I believe that: (1) my researcher position and sensibility is as deeply influenced by these lived experiences as it is by theoretical assumptions that I have learned by reading; (2) after all, this living does not allow me to generalise the situation in one of the poles, only successes or only struggles. On the one hand, despite the positive stories I heard about more complicated, both in terms of overcoming personal difficulties for adaptation and integration or professional thriving, Luxembourg is more complex than the painting of the immigration success story. On the other hand, the Grand Duchy is also diverse in terms of the hardships one might face (e.g. social, material, psychological). What I want to say is that the fall of the Eldorado may not explain everything, nor does the homogenising view of multiculturalism. As the Portuguese saying puts it, “nem tanto ao mar, nem tanto à terra” (not so much to the sea, not so much to the land), there are people who stay, thousands of them.

Furthermore, it is for those who stay that the subtitle of this section still carries an interrogation mark: Is the missed epithet missed, is Eldorado gone? Believing that the definite answer to this question is yes could mean taking the risk to assume that the mass of people who stay, stay because they like, or they do not mind suffering. After the stories I heard, I prefer to believe that among those who stayed, some may have stayed because they have no other choice at that moment – which may be more accurate for most refugees – and that others stayed because they found good reasons to do it and may have invented and developed satisfactory ways of living that escape the math of statisticians who tell them they are at risk.

Analysing the harvested memories: the Memorecord’s cooking

In the previous sections, on Italian and Portuguese migrants, I tried to offer an overview of the historical context linked to the life stories I heard during the atelier Racontez Votre Histoire and in the encounters and insights I had during the process of building the Memorecord platform. In this section, we get back to the cooking, trying to find out whether the ingredients from the previous phase can help us in the preparation of the material harvested through the crowdsourcing. As mentioned under the Crowdsourced memories, the results from the crowdsourcing fell under the expectations. Nevertheless, they were insightful to understand the contemporary face of migration in Luxembourg, allowing historical links with trends like work, education and community engagement as we saw above, but also bringing up new contents both in terms of topics but also audiovisual documentation.

However, a lesson learned from this experiment is that the collection alone, with no historical research to support it, or with lesser fieldwork observations, could have turned the meaning of the posts shared somewhat hermetic for future research. On the one hand, the topical and prompt character of the type of digital-born material collected is promising, to the extent, it discloses subjective aspects of the individuals’ experiences that do not emerge very often in the long form of oral history interviews. On the other hand, since these kind of posts tend to offer shorter testimonies, the risk of decontextualisation can hinder the historical inquiry. As argued by Fickers a few years ago, in a debate with Rens Bod, context, not merely availability data, is paramount to digital history:

The practice of digital history will have to be based on the critical analysis of the creation, enrichment, editing and retrieval of digital data as much as on the application of classical source criticism and historical contextualisation. Suppose ‘content’ or rather ‘data’ is king in digital humanities, as imagined by Bod. In that case, context is its crown – at least for digital historians. (2013, 155)

The mise en place

To get an idea of the different topics emerging from the online crowdsourcing (i.e. through Facebook and Instagram), and the ones emerging in the more extended interviews, I elaborated a visualisation of the topics for each group of sources. At first, I experimented with topic modelling using the text of all the posts together, but given the variety of languages and the small size of the corpus, the results obtained did not seem representative enough. Another reason for dropping topic modelling is related to the fact that this method would not take into account the combination of audiovisual content and text. Hence, I elaborated a comprehensive coding, based not only in the textual part of the posts but also accounting for whatever multimedia was attached. The same grid of coding, as commented earlier, was used to analyse interviews and the crowdsourced posts. I had a matrix grid adapted from a previous oral history project on migration. However, during the coding, this matrix was refined, being iteratively updated, according to the collection. The posts, and likewise the interviews, were curated on Google Spreadsheets. Every post, like every segment or story unit of an interview, received up to five keywords, distributed in the following layers: Major Themes; Migration Trajectory; Migration Topics; Distinctive Qualities and Specific Reference. For each post, next to the metadata extracted from the social media, I added annotations that help me navigate the table and make sense of the single ones, as well as being able to have a quick overview by filtering the coding keywords. To do so, a post label with a concise outline of the story is added; next to it a slightly more elaborated summary of the content, considering the media and the text; then a few hints on the overall sentiment of the content and conversation (i.e. impressions on the posts, overall positive is somewhat happier or cheerful and overall negative is sadder or tense); quantitative input about interactions (e.g. the number of reactions, shares, comments); qualitative input or observation on the online conversation; and, finally, the coding entries. The overview of a post annotation looks like this (Figure 63):

Figure 63: Example of post annotations and coding by Anita Lucchesi .

Extracting the coding added to each line, I created two sets of keywords, one for the interviews (600+) and one for the crowdsourcing (200+). To a small corpus like this (under 1000 words), the word cloud seemed the most suitable type of visualisation. Hereunder we see the two clouds for comparison (Figure 64 and 65) :

Figure 64: Word cloud elaborated with Voyant Tools, based on a text file filled with the keywords extracted from the coding of the posts. Total of 245 unique words.

Figure 65: Word cloud elaborated with Voyant Tools, based on a text file filled with the keywords extracted from the coding of the individual interviews. Total of 646 unique words.

In order to check whether word clouds were meaningful enough, the kick-off for the analysis was checking the most prominent terms in the two visualisations to see whether it was possible to draw any conclusions from it. The three most accentuated terms were work, family and journeys, family being a frequent highlight to both clouds. Looking at the interview cloud, it is easy to understand the predominance of work, which is a major theme in my coding, but also a common migration topic, determinant to the history of migration in the country. Quantitatively speaking, work, indeed, was present in over 80% of the interviews collection and a leading theme for over 20% of the story units and segments that appeared most relevant when breaking down the interview into significant passages. So far, no big discoveries in the visualisation of the interviews.

However, since the quantity of stories is not equal in length for the duration of the passages , nor is it representative of the emphasis given to the subject, it was relevant to draw on close reading – or close watching/listening – of the interviews to confirm that the topic of work was indeed a Leitmotif while organising most of the life stories I heard in the framework of Racontez Votre Histoire. This is a manifestation of the main push and pull factors reported during the interviews and that, somehow, became central in the narrative of most of the participants. Given the work immigration past that is known in Luxembourg, as discussed in the previous section, this was not a surprise. In the crowdsourcing experiment, by contrast, work or career was seldom topic. On the post featured hereunder (Figure 31), a Portuguese who arrived in 2012 to work in Kirschberg gives a hint that not all the workforce coming from Portugal goes to the chantiers , however, this is one of the few posts that allude to the theme of work.

Figure 66 To #memorecord from Instagram “Man in black” | Work >> Arrival, Departure >> Work, career >> Luxembourg City. To see other stories of the Memorecord Harvest go to https://memorecord.uni.lu/stories/ 

Family, at its turn, is a common topic in both of collections, being presented in different fashions, but with similar motivations. In the interviews, for instance, we have stories of families that begin (Casseta, Del Nin, Lobo), a family that is split apart (Basha, Martins), supportive families (Coimbra, Valente), or a family that is on the background all the time (Barros). Even for those who came alone, the root family was always present in their narratives about the new life in Luxembourg, even though physically absent. In the crowdsourcing, we have families associated with episodic memories from childhood, families that motivate people to immigrate, but also to travel every summer, families that are missed and families that are growing. In both cases, family generations and nuclear families appear without hierarchisation. It just seems to follow the course of life. Apart from the immigrants that arrived early in the past century (Del Nin, 1954 and Coimbra, 1969), there seem to be no significant ruptures with the families who stayed in the country of birth (in the case of those of the first generation). Digital technology and communication seem to play an essential role in their communication.

Nevertheless, even for those who went to Luxembourg earlier, as they got settled and the travelling became more manageable, the summer holidays visiting family became a pattern. The literature on transnational families, especially for Intra European migration, indeed, highlights these patterns and the intense use of digital communication in the maintenance of their family link, both in offering as well as in receiving support (Baldassar and Merla 2014). The post below (Figure 67) suggests the existence of contemporary family reuniting processes, even if with the EU the wife could have moved to Luxembourg before, the couple experimented a distant relationship for a while, as in the past, in this case, the man went earlier to Luxembourg. Figure 68, on its turn, illustrates one of those summer trips, but in this case, from the childhood memories of the author of the post.

Figure 67: To #memorecord from Facebook: A criança e os balões | Journeys >> Family & Network >> Marriage, Family >>Turning Point >> Events & Manifestations

[EN] “As promised, let’s go, let’s participate in the project: #primeirafotonoluxemburgo #memorecord. My first photo in Luxembourg took place in July 2016. That month we came (Pedro and I, my son, ten months old at the time) to spend a vacation with Sandro, my husband, who was already here working (we later took up residence in September). The first event/activity we went to was the Post Luxembourg Balloon Trophy in Mersch. Interestingly it is about to occur (http://www.lbt.lu/wp/en/front-page/). It will be next weekend, and we will be celebrating two years of many struggles and a new beginning there, which above all made us stronger. And this time Pedro, who is almost three years old, will be able to enjoy the beautiful place and run, run, run and even try to ride a hot air balloon (two years ago he still could not walk!). The time we have spent here is also his growth time. This will always be our biggest celebration.

Congratulations Anita Lucchesi for the project. Good luck.” 

Figure 68 To #memorecord from Facebook: “Mets la musique de Portugal!” | Journeys >> Family Background >>Childhood Experience >> Humor >> Portugal, Swiss, vocabulary

[EN] “... many of us, children of emigrants, share the same experience: that trip in the summer... back and forth ... between “ our country “ and the “country of our parents “, Portugal.

How many memories of that trip populate our memory?

There were more than a dozen that I lived between Switzerland and Portugal.

Many hours spent in the back with my brother (doing jumps, of course. Once, we chewed dozens of gum and made a giant spider web that occupied the entire back seat. Until my mother turned around. We could hear screams! And laugh!).

Ahead, my father drove, my mother watched.

On the way, everything was happiness! On the way back, everything was saudade. For them.

For my brother and me, they were “just” adventures. Today, I understand... and words never serve me. It is not always easy to translate feelings; sometimes, words just get in the way. It is laughter and tears, all in the mix. A song stayed.

(In fact, there were three.) Several tapes! (I still have some... I like to save things.)

Travelling kids, we all keep a soundtrack for those hours, which we share with our brothers... “Only they understand”, we could say.

“Mets la musique de Portugal!” “Mets la musique de Portugal!” We screamed! We did not know the title; we didn’t know the lyrics; we didn’t understand the language; we just felt the happiness of singing and shouting in the car ...

My father put the tape! Maximum volume! An endless loop of “music from Portugal”.

I do not doubt that much of my love for music comes from there ... Music and travel: where does one end and the other begin?

I share with you, the one that for me (and for my brother) is the song of that trip, “la musique du Portugal”. #memorecord “ 

Another term that draws attention in these word clouds, but especially the one that was originated from the crowdsourcing, is journeys. In the coding, journeys convey the stories that embody the narrative, sometimes joyful other times not so much, of peoples’ mobility, but also their mindset as they set to their new lives in the receiving society or plan their new journeys on the way back home. As we see in the two cases above, some codings, as expected, overlap, journeys and family are not strange combinations. Talking about migration, it is expected that some journeys may appear. However, what is different on the social media, is the fact the journey narratives are not simply direct to me, as a curator of Memorecord, or to the Memorecord community of followers, it is mostly aimed at the people (family and friends) who support these participants as they go, who write comforting messages when they are homesick, or celebrate each stage of the new life with them as they share, and praise them for their courage. In the comment section for the post featured on Figure 32, for instance, a friend congratulates them for the journey and tells her “we are rich, we are citizens of the world” .

From the examples mobilised above, we can already realise that the emphasis in the stories coming from social media is significantly different from the interviews. The stories are different. Nevertheless, how are they different? It is not only about the length and depth of posts, nor even succinctness or expansiveness; as we just saw, it can vary. The main distinction, I suspect, is the nature of the digital-born egodocument. These sources are digitally mediated in a way that they feature characteristics that are still diverse from the ones resulting from the digitisation of analogue material. As the discussion on digitisation is now older than the one on born-digital, historians have been discussing broader but also specific challenges of dealing with digitised material. On the broader side of the discussion, the digital humanities encompasses debates on archiving, preservation and obsolescence; on the specifics, historians debate how to access and interpret digitised materials taking into account that the digital transformation changes not only the format but its very nature. The organoleptic properties that we know so well from analogue material – such as the colour, the brightness, the light, the odour, the texture, the softness, sound, taste, etc. – are all partially gone or altered in the digital versions, and this should not be considered an irrelevant alteration:

When a historical record - be it a manuscript, a letter, an edition of a newspaper, a photo, a book etc. - converts, through some computational process, into a digital document, there is a change that could hardly be considered trivial. Although the information contained in the source remains “the same” - in the sense that digitisation would not substantially alter the content of the historical record - we can to say that the change in the “materiality” of the historical source inevitably leads us to a new condition concerning the way we deal with the information contained therein. (Brasil and Nascimento 2020, 201, translated from Portuguese by myself) .

Similarly, when a piece of writing about the self is born-digital, it is not merely the format that changes, but the whole cultural dynamics around it, and that should also change the historians’ regard toward this particular kind of source: the digital-born egodocuments.

In Memorecord’s case, there is a further complexity added by the fact that these digital egodocuments were not unintentionally produced in respect to the research, but were created or co-created in the framework of a community project in which the researcher had a very active role, working in great proximity with the community members involved. The whole conception and design of the project was, indeed, a process of participatory design, which, as discussed earlier, involved constant negotiation and a deep exercise of shared-authority. The experiment, as I argued in the previous chapter, was an effort towards a hermeneutics of practice centred in the hands-on work to identify the digital interferences in the historical craft and how it conditions our research.

Now, therefore, is time to do some tinkering around these co-created digital egodocuments that became a delicacy among the other sources/ingredients in our kitchen to see how they interfere with our interpretation. As such, the co-creation of this very novel kind of source in this empirical study, as well as the extent to which it escapes our control was a desideratum. Hence, the lack of protocols to deal with it was not a surprise. The confrontation with uncertainties was a needed provocation to go out of the comfort zone. This pushed me to cross and combine a variety of theoretical presumptions and methods in the building of this project but, yet, it left open questions that ultimately relate to the work with the material collected: how to cook your memories? While I may not have definite answers, what I propose here is an attempt of provisory answers, that in its transitory character are timely expressions of the historian’s kitchen in the digital age. Now that the ingredients were assembled and prepared in the mise en place, which directions should I follow?

Directions

First, I tried to look at the technical metadata of the collected material and see how they could help me. Despite the time of the post and the geolocation, which was not available all the time, they are not of great aid for the contextualisation . The less technical metadata, the part that also includes the text extracted from the post and the hashtags offer a bit more content-wise. However, it would not have been possible to make sense of the posts just looking at the Google Spreadsheet with the metadata. It was necessary to access the original posts and analyse it globally: media, text, reactions, interactions and so on. Only after doing so, I could fill in a coding table with only English keywords and making assumptions, tracing a few clues.

Since the data collection was so varied (i.e. different authors, languages, types of media) elaborating a general visualisation – a word cloud – was useful for the second step of the analysis. Word clouds, or weighted lists, in visual design, are good for quickly perceiving prominent terms in a sample of text, “bigger term means greater weight” . A third step was establishing a correlation between what was gathered through crowdsourcing and the other sources I have. This step consisted of articulating a historical contextualisation within the analysis of the interviews recorded during the development of the Memorecord platform concept. Having established the context, to facilitate the comparison between the samples, I created a word cloud for the interviews as well.

Knowing that the framework of community participation was the same – migration memories – for both samples, the difference in the word clouds of interviews and crowdsourced posts intrigued me. I was, of course, expecting differences. However, such a dilution of the topic of work in the crowdsourcing collection, for instance, come up as a surprise to me. Even knowing how the media conveys the messages, I was expecting less disparity regarding the topic of work. Beyond being known as one of the top motivations for people to move to the Grand Duchy, work is also commonplace, among the immigrants, when talking about Luxembourg and its culture, the work culture (e.g. some, more in a critical way “people here only work and go home” or in a more laudative way “people here take work for serious”).

So, what does the absence of work in the digital egodocuments coding tells me? Nothing sure, but there are some glimpses. Observing the online conversations related to the Memorecord posts, beyond the format that is different in digital media, allowing different ways of presenting a specific subject (i.e. adding multimedia content, collating different media), the specific Internet medium of social media, entails a different grade of colloquialism and a spirit of community that could be, I believe, at least partially responsible for the different results.

My speculation comes from online and offline fieldwork observation. I notice, for instance, that when people would come to tell me their stories at the CDMH, even if I had already met them previously (e.g. Cassetta, Martins, Barros) when turning on the camera, they would assume a posture that was somehow different, less relaxed perhaps, and began to tell their story with greater formality than what they apply to social media posts. Sometimes interviews would have notes of a vitae presentation. Akbar Basha, for instance, brought printed notes and tables organising his talk, I could see he added other notes on the margins (Basha) . Oral history has problematised this performances in variety of ways. Since I work here with the notion of egodocuments, I believe it is relevant look into how oral historians see the “self”. Lynn Abrams discusses some “theories of the self” that verse on debates about the social construction of the self. She stresses how in the Western modernity there was a perception that “the self was an innate entity which which the individual inherited by dint of their gender, race and religious heritage” (Abrams 2010, 36) and explain how such views are problematicly charged with essentialisms. Instead, she highlights that “[t]he self is mediated through a series of discourses; for instance, women may regard themselves as possessing maternal quailties because they have absorbed dominant messages that ascribe universal maternal feeling to women” (idem). By addressing this invention of the self as a whole, essential being, Abrams offers an important key for reading the performances encountered during the Memorecord’s experiment. Is the narrative of “self-made men” and “self-made-women” immigrants, laden with hardwork tales and informed by the meritocratic expectations projected in immigrants, as in “being good enough to be there”? Beyond the pressures exerced by the others regard to the self, Abrams argues that in the oral history context a reflexivity of the self comes into play. In an interview setting, as contended by Charlotte Linde, “the narrator can observe, reflect, adjust the amount of distance, and correct the self that is being created. The very act of narrating creates the occasion for self-regard and editing” (Linde 1993, 105).

Such editing process and the intersubjectivity it entails, in the interview setting, is not simply expressed by spoken words, the whole aurality is engaged in this process, with verbal and non-verbal languages. It is, indeed, a shared impression among most oral historians that turning on the camera makes interviewees stiffen up. This has been, actually for a long time, one of the reasons why audio recording has been preferred over video. Also, for people who prefer or need to stay anonymous, the audio recording is far more comfortable . This kept audio recording and transcriptions in a privileged position in many oral historians’ taste even though videotape, and more recently the digital recording, has been available for at least five decades now. Likewise, discussions on the advantages of the visuals for the interpretation are not new, videos are good in helping historians to grasp more of the environment and the nonverbal elements, and this has been discussed since the 1980s (Charlton 1984).

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I opted for the videos aiming to value the orality and aurality of the subjects. However, observing the difference in content, but also on language and tone or accent of the posts (i.e. Figure 33: “Mets la musique de Portugal!”), I concluded that these memories, when mediated by the digital media and specifically shared in social media, may appear more spontaneous – while mirroring the world of colloquialism and orality – than when they have to be put in a more extended narrative plot, as in more traditional oral history interviews. In the interview setting, despite the apparent immediacy brought up by the use of the voice, there is not much room for spontaneity. Afterwards, sitting with someone unknown, with the camera on or off, and creating a coherent narrative, telling a life story or answering specific questions, may not be as natural as sliding the phone out of the pocket and post a picture on social media. Generally, the sort of rigidity that comes up in an interview setting can be overcome along the way, depending on how the interview partners interact with each other. It is relatively common, in oral history, that interviews are conducted in more than one meeting, and often in the house of the interviewee. This procedure not only helps historians to collect more or more extended testimonies, especially if they need to cover a long period of history, but the multiple meetings are also known for their ice-breaking effect and their importance in the building of trust among the involved subjects.

In the process of building Memorecord, as well as during Racontez Votre Histoire…, in the activities related to the promotion of crowdsourcing, I met some participants more than once. However, I found it interesting that when contacts would take place online, almost automatically the person would friend me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram (i.e. more often, in my personal accounts than in the project one). Acquiring the social media friend seal was something that opened many opportunities for me.

From the moment I started using social media more extensively, instead of formal emails, to get in touch with people and send the link to Memorecord, I noticed that we were already starting to build some trust. I cannot, however, attribute this exclusively to the use of social media because I never sent personal messages to completely unknown people. The seeding activity was rather informed by my public history militancy, so to say—my participation in public events, community soirées, festivities and so on. Anyway, after a first encounter personally, or the fact that I met someone who told me about this other person when I initiated the online conversation, the talk would flow very smoothly. I could also observe, on the other side, that some people would get to know me (i.e. form newspaper, or public talk, or through friends) and would contact me directly on Facebook, most of the time.

Somehow, this public window made me the gatekeeper of my community after a while. Interestingly, it used to happen on off-record conversations, some of the topics mentioned to me in private conversation never came up in the collection. Many of these people, despite saying they were interested, never ended up sharing anything with the hashtag of the project. I remember one participant specifically; we went for a coffee twice, we met in public events, we became friends on Facebook. We would share and comment contents related to Memorecord but, despite the demonstrated appreciation and the constant support in spreading the news about the project, many conversations were never converted in a post for the collection. I saw this as very conjunctural to Luxembourg, given the links I learned this participant has in various levels of private and associative life in the Grand Duchy. Nevertheless, the stories I heard in our encounters and the critical political pitch I grasped in those talks informed my practice.

My sample is, of course, not extensive and varied enough to be representative of the impact of all these varieties of discourse and interaction attached to specific forms of communication and storytelling can have in historical research. I can only see, from my experience in this project, that they may have a particular evidentiary value. In future research, it would be useful, for instance, to further explore the intersectionality of the use of media by people of different ages, ethnicity, gender and socio-economic background. I found Memorecord’s sample diverse in terms of nationalities, but still instead characterised by white and mostly young women. However, my case study suggests that there is more to be explored by historians in the evaluation of digital-born material, such as the mediated memories at stake here, in the bigger system of historical analysis, ideally examining them concerning other forms of historical evidence.

My fourth step, hence, was zooming into the word cloud and looking closely at the posts in light of the historical context presented above and in articulation with the interviews. Up to my conjuncture upon this crossing of information, I would say that on social media, the blurred limits of what is public and what is private grants it qualities that are both from publicity and intimacy. Why is this relevant, and how can it help in the interpretation of the material? Let us make use of one example coming from the pre-digital turn. Not so long ago, a family portrait required some pomp and circumstances. People dressed up, and there was a whole ritual around the moment of the shot and, later on, the photo developing. The delay for checking the results was radically different, even for the so-called instant cameras (e.g. Polaroid). Most of the time, the one very expensive copy of the photo remained with the family for years, it was a treasured item, first in the frames, later in the albums and finally, the photos reached the shoebox in the attic. Accumulation only became possible with the popularisation of modern photography and the availability of equipment at accessible prices. The family dynamic around the photos, hence, changed along the time as the technologies of memory were, too, in continuous development. All these family memories, however, were more or less contained to the private consumption of it by the family, and eventually, visitors. Social media networks connect this intimate universe with the public consumption of it and here seems to lie an important key to interpret the different performances encountered.

Looking closely into the danymcs brought up by the social media environment, Susan Aasman has analysed how a grandfather – Peter Oakley – became an youtuber: Geriatric1927 . After just a few days online, he reached 79.000 views and 6.500 subscriber in his YouTube channel. Aasman draws attention to the fact that it was because YouTube had a community that Oakley went on it. Becoming a “YouTube’s grandad”, Oakley also was promoted as an internet celebrity, with his own biography on Wikipedia . After Geriatric27’s dissapearence, followers left comments and paid tribute to him with R.I.P. videos, “he increasingly became associated with the early YouTube era” writes Aasman “a ‘legend’ or even ‘hero’ of that special period when it still seemed that YouTube was a community-driven platform, a social space for communication immune to processes of monetization, which would transform it into a much more commercial platform.” (2018, 164). The author notes by the interaction among Oakley and his followers that Youtube “acquired a shared collective biography, which in turn inform the history of YouTube as a platform” (idem). In my reading, with this text Aasman raises three fondamental aspects for the understanding of technologies of memory in the digital age: 1. their have a inherent historicy ; 2. their social character; and 3. their embeddedness in a larger economy and business of information. Comprehending the intersectionality betweem these three aspects, I believe, is important in the context of Memorecord to help of to problematise the non-neutrality of the technological mediation of memories that comes into play on socia media.

Bearing this in mind, it is important to consider that memory practices taking place on social media may be subordinated to specifc features of this way of going public, i.e. “the immediate experience of sharing” (Aasman, Fickers, and Wachelder 2018, 1). There are, however, a few layers of what is public on social media (i.e. the whole WWW, the whole Facebook, only your Facebook friend, only your best friends on Facebook). However, the main point for me here is how this interactivity can bring people to the same living room, virtually, of course. What I noticed from my interaction with the participants and potential participants, as well as among themselves, is the tacit agreement of trust, aprioristically, that social networks entail. “I let you enter in my circle of friends, but if you do something wrong, I can block you”, simple as that. We might keep looking at videos and pictures online yet recalling what they meant to be in another technology of memory phase. However, the digital and the Internet are changing them profoundly, due to their ability to:

Link up personal memory to public mediated materials, hence eliciting insights in the interconnection between the self and the world. For example, the diary, or the scrapbook in its analogue form, serves as a reflexive instrument in the contained universe of a person’s life. The new potential of the networked computer is not, as Bell would have it, scanning all words into the computer in order to render one’s testimony searchable via keywords. The real innovation of the computer is its ability to allow a new type of diary (for instance a lifelog), which networked materiality preconditions the linking of the private reflections to public scrutiny, opening up personal reflexivity to invite reciprocation by others (Dijck 2007, 168).

In the Memorecord case study, I saw that there is a lot for historians to learn through entering in the virtual “living room” of our community partners and benefiting from the trust shared on social media. While it can present a challenge in terms of communication and keeping the distance from the subjects we are studying (i.e. people texted me at any time in the day, or weekends, I got invited for private parties, some people were so close that they belonged to my friendship network and so on), the subjectivity running “free” in the colloquialism of social media could be, I suspect, an exciting complement to the rigidity we still find in oral history. I said “free” in quotes because even if it is a more relaxed environment and many people (think) they say what they want on the Internet, there is still a great deal of performance and social codes in friction with this freedom.

The now more, now less grade of awareness of the public scrutiny, as pointed by Dijck, is nevertheless shaping what is shared. The ubiquity of the digital here plays a vital role in diminishing the awareness around technology in general. It is right on the moments of less awareness, perhaps, that spontaneity bursts and the everyday person – with its impulses, language, beliefs etc. – gets a voice online. Here, by voice, I mean precisely a sort of orality, a way of writing/posting that is less rigid or formal, that perhaps use less punctuation and other kinds of signs (i.e. emojis, hashtags) to share – to talk in the sense of a conversation – something in a kind of enunciation that presupposes the exchange. In suggesting that some contents on social media may be shared in the orality record, I am not advocating that this orality is better or substitutes the spoken forms of orality and, as a consequence, the more long-established form of oral history. What I argue, however, is that we may find colloquial discourses on social media conversation and spontaneous exchanges, formulation of vernaculars, jokes, expressions etc. that belong to it can also be of value for historical research.

In my brief but insightful exercise of digital ethnography, what I realised, in sum, is that when doing this kind of ethnography, one may consider that “becoming friends” has real value – it may, but may not distinguish between the virtual and actual world. In Memorecord’s case, my rapprochement with the community through social media enabled me not only to become the gatekeeper of my project but to realise, in practice (as I was myself involved in the conversations and exchanges too), how much of orality there were in those written prompt forms of memories .

In the context of a study on migration memories, taking into account the variety of languages, as well as the discursive variations from generation to generation, also seemed essential to understand how memory travels through spoken and written enunciations even if not always made purposely or explicitly. How, for instance, different participants mixed language in their accounts – whole phrases, sometimes only a few words – is meaningful, it is a common trait among them that, arguably, reveals their migratory background. I believe, however, that this was only noticeable when the fluency and liberty of orality went into play, i.e. when interviewees were more at their ease or when participants felt more “at home” when sharing something online.

In this respect, the phrase “Mets la musique de Portugal!” in the story features in Figure 33, a genuine mix of French and Portuguese, a mix that frenchifies the Portuguese or vice-versa, is an interesting testimony on the hybridisation of languages as a heritage of migration. Just by this post, it would be difficult to conclude much about the history of this person, but a trained eye, knowing the context in which this childhood tale is inscribed could associate this to the immigrant paradox of being here and there, a sign of the inbetweenness aforementioned of double presence, double absence. In Luxembourg, the author Jean Portante, son of Italians from the steel universe of the South, offers some meta-reflections about it. Portante, born in 1950, from Italian parents, in Differdange, is known in the Grand Duchy for his novel Mrs Haroy ou la mémoire de la baleine (1993). The book is fictional, but informed by the first-hand experiences of the author, who converts himself in a meta-narrator of the text, commenting all the time his own text and creative process. The text is somehow hybrid, a Chronique d’une immigration, as he puts in the subtitles. The book is the first Luxembourgish literary work, written in French, on the subject of Italian immigration to the Grand Duchy. The story comes from the encounter of two main themes: the migratory background and the memory of a whale exhibited in 1953 in a railway wagon at the Luxembourg station. The narrative is animated by the metaphor that unites the whale, Mrs. Haroy, and Claudio (Portante?), who is sometimes Claude, or sometimes Clodi. Like the whale which is neither a fish while living in the sea, nor a terrestrial animal even though it needs to breathe out of the water, Claudio and the members of his family are neither Italian nor Luxembourgish. They feel in transit between two territories, they have two places, two names, two memories, two languages. While other artists with Italian background have been working mainly on the Italian language, Portante published in French, with, however, hints of the Italian heritage or Italianity here and there.

In this novel, language separates those who refuse this life of exiles and those who, on the contrary, perceive the Grand Duchy as their new homeland; speaking Luxembourgish is a powerful factor of integration if not of assimilation. This is how Fernand, Claudio’s brother, persists in replying in Luxembourgish to those who address him in Italian45. The national idiom as well as the French (felt to be easier and more acceptable than the other) penetrate quite naturally in the family environment and contaminate the Italian producing funny effects: gattone (de gâteau)[cake], plafone (de plafond)[ceiling], l(o)usina (l’usine)[the factory] (Boggiani 2004, para. 30, translated from French by myself  

Similar traces of the whale can be found both in the text of the post highlighted hereunder and in the comment section of it. While the author writes in English but refers to his grandfather in Italian, a friend is writing in Luxembourgish in the comments, and also using the Italian word to refer to his grandfather. Interestingly, though, the author reveals in the post that he did not learn the Italian language. Nevertheless, the use of the word points to remnants of that family heritage.

Figure 69. To #memorecord from Facebook: Souvenir from New York | Family >> Diasporic Connenctions >> Childhood Experience >> Family, Generations >> Vocabulary

While the choice of language for the interviews at Racontez votre Histoire was more evident (e.g. we agreed together on the language of preference prior to starting the recording), in the social media, participants were choosing their language without negotiating with me. In many cases, I found participants not using their language of heritage, but deciding to publish in English. This was another interesting fact. Only then did I realise that they were not only sharing stories with #memorecord but with their own community at first. The fact that some Portuguese and Italian participants wrote both in English and French instead of Portuguese or Italian was a first clue to this fact, which I would confirm later when navigating through the conversations taking place in the comment section. The continuum shifting from one language to another or the mixing of languages in the comments was another indicator that participants posts and comments were mostly considering their “friends” audience than the project curator or community at large.

The post highlighted hereunder, for instance, despite being written in English by a Portuguese participant, tags a friend on the post itself and shares a video containing French subtitles and letterings. The video, as the author explains in the text, is a review of her first year in Luxembourg, in 2010, under the framework of the European Voluntary Service (EVS). The recap is 14 minutes long and last time I checked (30th June 2020) it had past 750 views. EVS provides young Europeans a chance to show their commitment in a foreign country in an unpaid, full-time regime. It seeks to develop solidarity, mutual understanding and tolerance among young people and, ultimately, to encourage active citizenship. The author of the post is a psychologist and contemporary dancer from Portugal who then became a volunteer at the ONG Maison des Associations in the framework of this project. Among the activities of that year, we see the Festival des Migration, the culinary event for cooking together Cuisine du Monde, the literary meeting Les Soirées Millefeuilles, and the International Work Camp with a senior club. Were we not aware of the affluence of community organisations and activities aimed at promoting integration and conviviality this video would have given us an idea of how effervescent the associative world is in Luxembourg. What we could not grasp from the textual presentation of this context, is how diverse this environment is. The video allows us to see the faces and listen the voices of many community members involved in these activities, a valuable record of how immigrants themselves are engaged in these associations.

Figure 70. To #memorecord from Facebook: European Voluntary Service – a network | Community >> Neighborhood, Community >> Activism >> Within groups >> Institutions, Organisations

At this point, another lesson from Memorecord was that digital technology (i.e. Social networks, the Memorecord Website, YouTube and Manifold Digital Publishing Platform) can offer us a discursive and iconographic response to the challenge of academically representing the cultural heterogeneity we study. In my case, for instance, I tried not to homogenise all the original contents in transcriptions and translations, but sometimes it was inevitable due to the instrumental need of the written language in a scholarship work. By juxtaposing text and multimedia contents, however, I tried to preserve the source orality as much as I could. My strategy was simply, trying to refer, whenever possible, to the video interviews on the digital platform or to the Memorecord crowdsourced posts. In this way, I tried to pay respect to the sense of heterogeneity that is present in this small collection. Nevertheless, I know, this did not eliminate the contradiction of homogenising everything in the name of the discipline scholarly textual expression that needs, as once exposed by Ricœur, to produce a “synthesis of the heterogene”. History, according to the French philosopher, when seeking narrative intelligibility would need to find a balance in the interplay of narrative coherence and connection (or connectivity) that ultimately brings about this synthesis of the heterogene:

To speak either of the coordination between multiple events, or of that between causes, intentions and also chance in the same unit of meaning. Intrigue is the literary form of this coordination: it consists of leading a complex action from an initial situation to a terminal situation through regulated transformations that lend themselves to an appropriate formulation within the framework of narratology.(Ricœur 2007, 255, translated from Portuguese by myself) 

In other words, the process of trying to make sense of a plural, diverse situation through historical narrative may push us rather toward accommodating events, causes and intentions in a conciliatory way, for the sake of intelligibility, instead of one of narrating the difference. That phenomenon, however, may not be exclusive to history, but of written and literate traditions in general. Oralities, on the other hand, are the place where all the where the coherent(s) and the incoherent(s) meet, where the events are not necessarily narrated linearly, where linearity per se does not even matter as much. In oral registers, what organises the saying is the warmth of the moment; less to convince as narrated history, but to give something to the public, to simply give a story. Even though, as a historian, in my explanations I had to chase some intelligibility, as I explained above. I went through the scrutiny of metadata, elaboration of codes and visualisation, but I know how much this exercise for objectivity, needed for the historical criticism, can, even unintentionally, generate exclusion. What comforts me, on the other hand, in respect to the rich and diverse collaboration provided by participants, is that my research will not resume itself in a scholarly work quoting a few percentiles of what was shared and enforcing it in an intrigue. Working with co-creation of data and databases, hence, puts forward a multivocality which should be welcome by historians. However, we are still learning to deal with this heterogeneity. Nevertheless, database histories might be productive to moisturise the gears of the long standing debate between the close narratives and the opennes of history. Steve Anderson, in his Technologies of History (2011), defines database histories as:

histories comprised of not narratives that describe an experience of the past but rather collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated within categories and organized according to predetermined associations. These collections in turn offer users […] both materials and structures by which the past may be conceived as fundamentally mutable and reconfigurable. (Anderson 2011, loc. 2454)

For this reason, alongside projects built around database, whenever possible, it is welcome to offer readers direct access to the data at play. Thanks to the digital media my thesis will not simply finish as a brochure on the shelves of the university library, and this, in my view, is one of the best parts of doing digital public history, being able to return to the community; not only the crowdsourcing outcome, in the form of a digital memory platform or a separated PhD Thesis, but a whole, hybrid publication that, above all, resembles the research idea: experimental, somewhat fragmented, somehow intersectional, but a result of a project that was intended to be participatory and that, in its realization, tried, to the maximum, to make explicit the artisanal aspects that is sometimes so absent from the “final results”. This crafts(man-woman) ship is the result, justly, of the collaboration that took place through this experiment.

My research was an exercise to embrace the meta-methodological risks of dealing with diversity. Diversity in terms of tools, in terms of theoretical frameworks, in terms of types of sources, in terms of languages, in terms of temporal cohorts (different for Italian and Portuguese), in terms of possibilities of the past. For that, I consider that the biggest inspiration for my thesis, beyond everything I drew from digital and public history, is what we call in Brazil the Epistemologia da Macumba, an epistemology “that can only be thought of in the outlines, in the intersections, in the sense of dialogic and unfinished relationships” (Rufino and Simas 2018, 34, translated from Portuguese by myself) .

That being said, what did we cook together?

Tira-gostos

In my birth country, but more specifically in my family, we never use the polite forms to refer to appetizers, in Brazilian Portuguese antepasto or entrada. We rather refer to it as tira-gosto, which is the most colloquial, popular way to call it. You do not find tira-gosto written on the menu of chic restaurants, but in botecos, the simplest street bars. The noun boteco is itself a derivation of botequim, a corruption of the word “botica” coming to Brazil, in its turn, from the Portuguese of Portugal. Botica, however, derives from the Greek apothéke, which means “storehouse”, “warehouse”. When Rio de Janeiro was hosting the Portuguese Court (1808-1821), when it became the capital of the Portuguese Kingdom, boticas began to flourish in the city. It is estimated that 15.000 people have been transferred from Lisbon with the Braganza Royal Family to Rio. The boticas remain scattered in the center of the old Rio and even nowadays, some of the antique Portuguese storehouses, or armazéns, became botecos for us in Rio (i.e. the current tascas in Portugal). The best ones, they say (and I agree), are those at the crossroads. Apart from being one of the most traditional meeting places in Rio, where people from “all corners of the world” meet, nowadays botecos are also part of a resistance to the gentrification of the city that has been intensified by big international events like the World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016). For these reasons, instead of talking about appetizers, I will talk about tira-gostos because the boteco grammar seems to better incorporate the forcible synthesis of this chapter . The tira-gosto, imported from botecos to family and friend’s reunions, is nothing like a full course, but unlike chic restaurant’s appetizers, it is a popular delicacy that will not let you starve. Finally, a good tira-gosto is also known to whet your appetite, to “abrir os trabalhos” we say (as in kick off). In this sense, my conclusion from the exploration of the crowdsourced memories is rather an invitation to continue researching, than a conclusive analysis.

I believe the bigger challenge in making sense of these memories was related to grasping their context. For this, it was necessary to keep digging and making assumptions. I tried to do so, by crossing referencing participants’ posts among each other and putting it in perspective with a bigger context, informed by other sources and literature on the history of immigration in Luxembourg. Nevertheless, this further exploration was limited to the scope and time attributed to this study case. If I was to build up a contextualisation purely based on social media, the exploration could go on indeterminately. Excluding the possibility of circulating an electronic form with standard questions to all the participants, for instance, if, hypothetically, I was set out to define birth place, date of birth and migration path (i.e. information that was easier to obtain from the interviewees in Racontez Votre Histoire) of all the participants only by means of digital ethnography, I do not know how long it would take, how systematic and accurate it could be. Perhaps, instead of scanning the person’s profile, it would be easier, in this case, to send a direct message and start a one-to-one conversation (chat) in private – yet another form of interview? In any case, such a study would have a different grade of proximity and would bring up other ethical issues in terms of respecting the privacy of participants and accessing/exchanging private data on a commercial digital platform. At the end, this would require another submission to the Ethical Review Panel and, ultimately, would configure another case study.

Implicated in the problem of contextualisation, the main digital interference brought by the digital-born material in this study case is the fact that, at least for content scraped from the social media used here (Facebook and Instagram), the metadata cannot be taken for granted. One can only make assumptions, to be confirmed or not, by further exploration and crossing of information from other sources – or perhaps within the source itself (i.e. comment section) – to check whether they corroborate or contradict the data. In other words, the metadata and the content of posts from social media alone do not enable conditions for source criticism. We might always remember, however, that even in respect to the analogue format, it is virtually impossible to implement source criticism from isolated sources.

However, in contrast to what happens working on analogue sources, the close reading and confrontation of sources, might be, to the limit, never enough to confirm some basic information. For instance, considering the work with diaries, determining the author could also be a task informed by the analysis of the handwriting, for instance, while to ascertain the date it was created, chemical analysis could come in handy, helping to define the age of the diary paper. When we move to the digital realms, all these established techniques of document examination seem to be helpless. One might consider, as phrased by Kirscherbaum et al. (2010), “a digital forensics”. Digital forensics, nevertheless, is based on knowledge accumulated from forensic sciences which dates to the end of the 19th Century, coincidently, the same period to which we refer to the canons of historicism. “As probative evidence – they write – data are clearly vulnerable to being tampered with and manipulated”, moreover, “digital evidence is almost always partial or incomplete.” (Kirschenbaum et al. 2010, 06). Those are very challenging characteristics for crime investigators, especially considering cybernetic crimes that involve hacking, cracking and scouring around computers like detectives looking at thousand objects in a crime scene.

To what concerns Memorecord, no crime suspect needs to be hacked, no one’s life is at risk, so the pressure is rather soft on the digital historian. However, the value of digital methods and the work on digital-born material is at stake. With so many doubts on the table, why care about using digital methods instead of traditional? To the limits of this project, as aforementioned, the added value is in the heuristics of experimentation itself, looking into the future of digital history scholarship. The interferences I encountered in this experiment will, in no time, become the rule and not the exception for anyone studying contemporary history. I believe, therefore, that it is reasonable enough for us to argue that studying it today, despite the open questions, is a necessity (Fickers 2020).

In my attempt to produce some explanation based on the crowdsourced memories, I confronted myself with limitations that, I am convinced, cannot be eliminated, but could be mitigated by the combination of old and new forms of criticism. On social media, for example, while we can determine the user who posted the content, usernames do not always mirror the person’s real name. In addition, it is not always possible to determine the post location, for instance. Knowing those posts were created in the context of Memorecord we can arguably assume that posts were created somewhere in Luxembourg or by someone who lives in Luxembourg. But on the other hand, posts tagged in Lisbon, for instance, can contradict this assumption while still opening another question: the post with the picture of a happy couple in Lisbon was really posted from there or was it posted a posteriori using a picture taken sometime before? Hence, location and timestamps of the posts cannot really be trusted.

When it comes to identifying the nature of the source, the metadata is objective, whereas it is a video, a picture, a URL. Yet, this information is only true to a certain extent, because there is another (meta)level which may be not so explicit due to the mediated nature of the sources. For instance, the video from the EVS volunteer (preview in Figure 34), I can only tell it is about 2010, but I would not know whether it was edited in December that year, or if it was edited sometime later. I could only assume it was an old video that was not recorded to Memorecord itself, but it would be difficult to be precisely know who did the recordings and exactly when. At the same time, even for digital photos that seemed to have been posted for Memorecord, this specific information can only be guessed, because the metadata attached to the pictures, for instance, reveals the day when they were posted on Facebook and not really the exact day they were actually taken by the participant. If I was an investigator, with access to the suspect’s smartphone, perhaps, this verification would be made easier.

The motivation of a post, on the other hand, may not be that difficult to identify since the people who participated took part in the project intentionally. However, since the posts contents came up on social media and not in an interview setting, it was not possible to ask, directly, why some people have decided to share the specific contents they shared. It would have been useful, for instance, to re-involve participants in the process of interpreting the posts. How different would the community coding have been from what I did? I wish I would have had the time to do it differently.

Apparently, what happens is that we are left with the task to contextualise these sources within and outside the collection as the only way to make sense of it, although always in terms of speculations. Going back to the comparison of the word clouds then, I try to identify, instead of what is common, what is different from what we found in the interview sample. We, for instance, see that art, music and leisure is present in the cloud originated from Memorecord crowdsourcing, but absent in the interviews cloud. What could explain this? For music, I have a good guess: during the crowdsourcing, I published some “activation posts” which were contents edited and posted by myself in order to encourage people to participation. In the month of June 2018, for instance, on the occasion of the International Music Day (21st June), I published a video inviting people to share songs that were dear to them and somehow related to their migratory background. See Video 10:

Video 10. #memorecord #nowplaying Saudade | Activation post on #music & #migration by Anita Lucchesi, on Vimeo.

As a result, a few posts were shared and, to my surprise, not all the song’s lyrics were related to the topic of migration, but participants associate the memory of listening to songs which somehow connect their past experiences to their journey to Luxembourg or other migration paths. In the post below (Figure 36), for instance, the media added is the preview of a song on YouTube by the Cuban singer Celia Cruz and American musician Tito Puente, Quimbara (1974), a salsa. The author of the post is an Italian, but I can only tell that because I have met her previously. She shares that this song reminds her of a discovery of a new part of her, 32 years ago, in a Latin concert, in London. It would be difficult to understand the link of this post with her migratory background if I did not know, beforehand, that she had a relationship with a Cuban and that her passion for travelling – hence London, hence Cuba – could only blossom after she had moved to Luxembourg. Travelling, indeed, is an “advantage” of Luxembourg, many people say, due to its centrality in the “heart of Europe”. However, travelling for touristic reasons (not only going back to visit family in Portugal or Italy), as well as other leisure activities or volunteering/community work, is something very recent in the life of Luxembourg migrants. This is very connected to the existence of new socio-economic profiles, the resources to travel or to engage actively in community organisations – time and money – were not so available to the common immigrant 50, 60 years ago.

What this kind of post suggests, in light of the historical context, is that we may have a stratification of immigrant profiles that we did not have before. And this is, indeed, a fact, as I tried to demonstrate in the previous sections with the historical retrospective and some demographic data. However, these posts on leisure, art and music do not give much clue about the dynamics between these new profiles of migrants, who are they, how do they relate to each other? This, for instance, would be a great topic for further investigations. In this regard, what I could notice during the promotion of the Memorecord crowdsourcing is that the project was never really welcomed among the so-called expat community. I tried, four or five times, to post on Facebook expat groups about the project inviting people to share their memories about migrations. My posts were never even accepted by the group’s managers. Talking with a potential participant about it, a person who has worked at European Institutions in the past, told me that “they don’t like to identify themselves as immigrants”. While some posts in the collection may suggests a variety of socio-economic background, the lack of engagement, or the rejections of the expat groups in sharing the news about Memorecord could suggest a strong class bias in the collection and, at the same time, that there is a classist isolation in the Luxembourgish society whose origins could be further explored. In my guessing work, since the collection does not tell much more, what I can raise as a hypothesis is the fact that some of the more qualified and rich non-national residents in Luxembourg try to avoid links with other immigrants. However, in the end, this is all speculation. It could be the case that my posts were simply overlooked by the expat group managers or that even if it had been approved we would not have received participation from them for other subjective reasons. Again, an open question.

Another activation post example was an invitation I posted asking people to share their first picture in Luxembourg. The idea was to organise an actual workshop of portraits after that asking people to bring old photos and make a new portrait. I would have had the help of a photographer who is himself an immigrant. Due to health problems, unfortunately, I missed the timing to realise the workshop. Nevertheless, the invitation to share old pictures on Instagram mobilised a few people. One example is this digitisation of an analogue photograph hereunder (Figure 37):

Figure 72. To #memorecord from Facebook: “É estranho e familiar ao mesmo tempo.” | Education >> Community >> Childhood Experience >> Communication

[EN] “Let there then participate in this project #primeirafotonoluxemburgo #memorecord:

- It may not be the first photo, but it is the oldest one I have in Luxembourg. With my Pre-Primary class, I should have been 5 years old (back in 1978). The photo was taken in the park next to the Neiwiss Primary School in Rodange (at the time it was the “École des Garçons”). I’m still in contact with some of the people in the photo. I still remember the bombazine pants and even the white pullover.

This picture for me is not located in Luxembourg, it is kind of strange, but it is located in a world that no longer exists called the past.

It may seem like a commonplace to say it this way, but for me it’s something that I feel almost physically. When I go to the location of the photo, it is as if I am unable to be in the right place, as if that place existed only in another dimension. It is strange and familiar at the same time. “

The photo shows a group of sixteen children while text explains when the photo was taken. The author was five years old. In the text, he mentions that when he goes to the place where the picture was taken it feels strange, as if he could not be right there, like if that place was in another dimension. He shares that he is still in touch with people in the picture. In the comments, friends are guessing which boy was the author in the picture. Since the author wrote the post in Portuguese, an old class colleague asked the explanation in French (“for the Italian folk in the second range”). The author explains the content of the post and tells about Memorecord. The friend says he would try to find a photo to take part, however I did not notice any similar posts – with a first picture in Luxembourg – made by an Italian. The content of this post, per se, does not add much to what we already know, but it does add a meta-reflection about how feelings triggered by memories can become difficult to retrace. This evokes another discussion on the extent to which memories are remembrance and elaboration. While in the interview samples this debate is implicit i.e. Del Nin gets emotional telling a story about an old picture, however we never discuss the fact that he cries and what he is feeling specifically, in the crowdsourced memories, some posts are more explicit about the connection between emotions and memories, i.e. in the posts labelled Jazz pra mudar a chave do coração, Freedom is no fear or A cor do meu país emotional and sense memories are aroused by the content of the very posts – music, photo, poem, respectively.

I could go on taking other examples from the collection and exploring the investigative clues they elicit but I believe that it has become clear so far, that even if we cannot trust the metadata, by confronting these fragments of memories, these examples of prompt, digital forms of egodocuments we can still find suggestions of subjects that seem meaningful to be further investigated. My point here is that this situation may not be new to historians. The digital interferences may condition how and what we learn from these sources, but the hermeneutic approach, even if updated in terms of a style of reasoning to take the digital into account is not very far from what Carlo Ginzburg described as the conjectural or semiotic paradigm.

Talking about how the kings of France and England have cured scrofula patients or about the neologisms of Rabelais, Ginzburg explains the foundations of conjectural, or in another translation, evidential paradigm: “slender clues [that] have been adopted from time to time as indications of more general phenomena: the world view of a social class, a single writer, or an entire society” (Ginzburg 2013, 112). The basis of Ginzburg’s model lies on intuition, but not on high forms of intuitions, “of the various 19th and 20th century irrationalisms” (, 113). He argues about a low intuition that is capable of “‘on the basis of clues, to pass immediately from the unknown to the known.’’. This low intuition, he continues, “is based on the senses [...] It can be found throughout the entire world, with no limits of geography, history, ethnicity, sex, or class – and thus, it is far removed from higher forms of knowledge which are the privileged property of an elite few.” (idem, 113). I value this notion of low intuition for what we do in history too, acknowledging, as Ginzburg has put it, a “flexible rigour”, although I understand that such a claim can be disconcerting to the paladins of historical science. As I tried to stress in the introduction of this chapter, flexibility is key if we want to experience a true experiment. But I know that to some of those paladins, it is almost unbearable to approximate flexibility and history. History which, ultimately, due to this attachment to the aporia of historicist objectivism, could, itself, as the science of time, cease to allow itself to be moulded to the taste of its epoch.

In any case, I am not arguing for a universal chancelloring of any kind of guesswork. It is rather the case to instrumentalise some of this intuition, mobilising forms of tacit knowledge and augmenting the senses, in a consistent way. It is more about being self-critical about this intuition and trying to make the implicit explicit as we go. Hermeneutics of practice can only be possible if we address the need for this flexible rigour, admitting that some questions may not have answers, and that in digital scholarship the inductive reasoning inherent to the evidential paradigm may not only be helpful in the digital source criticism, as it may be indispensable in same cases. In the case in play here, as I tried to demonstrate the hands-on work in itself had a lot of intuition. But, instead of using the word intuition, that has been overused and can be misleading, I have phrased it in the lines of thinkering, as it has been articulated with Cassirer’s hermeneutic concept of grasping, as discussed in Chapter 3, but not only grasping things, as in tinkering, but grasping ideas, as in thinkering.

Confronted with the limits of a small but diverse collection such as the one of Memorecord, my attempt to produce historical knowledge from it stumbled in the problem of having to accommodate each post, each piece of the mosaic, to remember Frisch, in a coherent big picture that would make sense, as in the idea of intrigue presented by Ricœur. However, as we know, the finest mosaics are built from very diverse, but also abundant tiny pieces and I did not have them in abundance. To compensate for the lack of pieces, I dealt with the limits of the collection by trying to make inferences, to realise what the posts, in their singularity could mean and what they could suggest when put in perspective with the bigger context of migration history in Luxembourg.

In their detailed evaluation, I realised that the social media posts were somehow more ludic and pervaded by emotional and sense memories that the narratives I had contact with through longer oral history interviews. Posts were more colloquial and susceptible of manifesting the spontaneity of orality. Comparing the two samples, posts and interviews, I realised that each type of medium and, consequently, in this case, each type of source, entails different performances. And performance comprehends language, rhythm and format, but also is mutually shaped by content. Finally, paying attention to performances and contents, at the same time, I noticed some interesting correlations among the crowdsourcing experiment as a whole, and doing the oral history interviews. On the one hand, I can arguably relate, for instance, the private chat on social media to the off-record (camera and mic turned off) conversations that usually accompany interview recordings; people would talk more freely and be more casual. On the other hand, I can tell that the narratives presented in the recorded interviews were more structured, in terms of linearity, language, and rhythm, but also more oriented towards a positive portrait of the immigration experience in Luxembourg, with emphasis on the accomplishments and overall improvement of quality of life based on rather material, practical aspects (i.e. better jobs, better salaries and other pragmatic life achievements as economic stability and proper housing). While, in the posts, there were more manifestations of ambiguous feelings, saudade/nostalgia and ordinary aspects of everyday life. I finally identified a greater focus on past, distant memories in the oral history interviews while in the posts there was a subtle present-oriented inclination.

Going back and forth from my notes on the community sensitisation process and the participatory design of the project, I noticed that my expectations of making room for more sensitive stories and peripheral memories (Boesen et al. 2012) that would challenge the immigration success story discourse was frustrated. The comprehensive collection, in the end, revealed only a few scattered stories of conflicts or discrimination that could really contradict the mesmerising history of the “more than 170 nationalities living harmoniously together” (Hausemer 2008). Nevertheless, there is enough data that shows how problematic the distribution of immigrants in the job market and their inclusion in the national school system. Looking at the big picture and its blanks, I asked myself whether the absence of more critical accounts in regard to the current inequality could be a bias in my sample or if it could be more the case of a self-censoring attitude of participants who did not want to make public polemic declarations.

There were, of course, as I tried to show, hints to the critical situation of Portuguese pupils in the Luxembourgish schools (Cassetta), references to the worker’s exploitation conditions (Valente) and some hardship affronted for fitting in once moved to Luxembourg (Coimbra). However, to be fair to their narrative, those stories did not create any of the participants’ bad feelings toward Luxembourg. Valente, for instance, demonstrated that he was aware of the persistence of integration problems, but at no time did he blame one side of the story. On the contrary, he engages himself in volunteering work to try to make his contribution to improve the situation, as, for instance, trying to convince foreigners to vote in local elections, as we saw, among other things.

Anyhow, for me, the fact the first-hand accounts about discrimination like the one of Mirko being, not by chance, the type of story that people wanted to be anonymised, is suggestive that there is more to dig up in this direction. Perhaps, we are before a case in which the performative narrativity chosen by participants, as in Ihab Saloul (2009, 234), is part of a strategy of preservation and incorporation, in the inbetweenness of the immigrant self. This dynamic equilibrium has been defined by Martins as strategies of (un)belonging which she discusses under the key of deportugalisation and/or luxembourgisation101 which are part of a larger process of identity reconfiguration that also involves the relation of the self and feelings of pride and recognition, which the author relates to the question of social mobility. Although Martins’ model was built upon the study of the second generation of Portuguese immigrants, I believe it can be very insightful to tackle the silences or predominant positiveness I encountered in my sample. It helps me, for instance, to read the different performances as powerful expressions of the participants’ agency, instead of, for instance, considering that eventual silences were just related to self-censoring. Silences and unspoken elements, however, may not always be equal to absence, as we learn from Certeau. They can, otherwise, be thought-provoking and eloquent when taken critically into account.

To close on a provocative but also positive note, I end this chapter with one of the last PixStories I recorded during my participation in the Festival des Migrations of 2019. I believe Melissa Borges, from the stand “Association Filhos de Santa Catarina – Luxembourgo”, has some of the central missing puzzle pieces to the provisory big picture I leave you with.

The subjects Melissa approaches in this brief, but poignant recording are the best tira-gostos I could expect to offer, in guise of conclusion. With the same hope she closes her message, I wish that the Memorecord experiment can be a point of departure for further investigation about the deep and complex links between the education of immigrants and the migration phenomena at large. Finally, the presence of Melissa also indicates another important, yet understudied research lode: the incorporation of Cape Verdean immigrants in the Luxembourg society as one of the groups that escapes the spectrum of the desired immigration of proximity in vogue in the 1970’s: white, catholic, European.

Let the tira-gostos bring us the flavour of Cape Verde directly from (where) Melissa(’s) stands!

Co nclusion: Lessons from a 360º digital public history experiment

The conclusion of this PhD research is an invitation for us all to engage productively with experimental approaches in this critical time in which we face the transition from the analogue to the digital ways of doing history. Throughout the thesis, I tried to demonstrate how more and more it is the case of a hybridisation of the doing rather than a radical renovation of methods and theoretical assumptions descolated from the knowledge we accumulate since the foundation of the historical discipline. However, this reference to the epistemological basis of our discipline does not dispense the need for updating it to the taste of the time, as I suggested in Chapter 4. In my discussion about the tira-gostos (appetizers) resulting from the analysis of the Memorecord’s harvested memories I argue that we need to approximate flexibility and history no matter how strange or uncomfortable it may sound to the guardians of rigor. Flexibility is key if we want to experience a true experiment.

However, I understand that such flexibility does not depend exclusively on the researchers’ will. There are, indeed, a series of factors that can operate limiting or enabling a flexible posture. While it may depend considerably on the historian’s methodological idiosyncrasies as well as his/her theoretical and ideological preferences, the chance of being flexible and taking risks is, in the long run, principally dependent on the researcher’s social place, as I discussed following Michel de Certeau’s ideas in Chapter 1. The historiographical operation takes place in specific personal and institutional circumstances that imply a whole “topography of interest” (Certeau 1988, 58) that may affect the research, such as particular rules and protocols of this place or even the researcher position (i.e. professor, liberal professional, observer, etc.). In my case, as I stressed in the introductory chapter, being a PhD in a newly founded centre for Digital History such as C²DH, I was privileged to be in contact with a critical mass of researchers embedded in the spirits of the “laboratory of historical uncertainty”, willing to experiment and exchange about their work. C²DH’s thinkering philosophy that embraces the “building as a way of knowing” (Watrall 2016), was what concretely endorsed my hands-on approarch.

In addition to the experimental ethos running through C²DH, I have made it clear in Chapter 2, how reliant my project was on C²DH’s Digital Research Infrastructure. In other words, a mindset alone might not be enough if we want to create something new, with tools and techniques that at first may be estranged to us. Without the collaboration with computer experts I would have not been able to develop a whole new platform, which would lead me to a selection of a third-party Content Management System (CMS) that would not be as suitable to needs as Memorecord was, being developed in-house from scratch to screen, e.g. Wordpress, which was said to be “cold” or “institutional”. Most critically, without the expertise and support from the IT and Design colleagues at C²DH, I would have been unable to correspond to the expectations of the community members who took part in the participatory design of the platform. Ultimately, the lack of expert support and infrastructure, could have jeopardised the very idea of shaping the digital memory platform together.

Looking from the public historian point of view, what I valued the most from the process of creating the plataform in a collaborative way, by means of participatory design, was the fact that sharing the ongoing development with the interested community really created some extra room for negotiating shared-authority. Having participants engaging effectively in the design of the project from its early stages enriched my understanding of the potential participants viewpoints, something which, later on, when it was the time to interpret the memories collected through the crowdsourcing, proved to be enlightening to the unravelling of the performances encountered on social media. During the process of building the platform, as described along the Memorecord’s roadmap, I was also implementing participatory design as a way to empower the community and “some kind of empathy” (Caldas and Pihlainen 2019).

What I was not fully aware at that early stage was how constructive that approach would have been at the end of the research cycle, when I was confronting myself with the sources. In fact, after having visited all the research phases, from the conceptualisation of the very mean to collect the sources until the online publication of the thesis itself always having the public in mind, I realised how fecund this kind of 360º experiment – or 360º history, as argued in Chapter 3 (p.136) – can be for digital public history projects animated from within the academia aiming at contributting to historiography too. From departure, I did not have this idea clear in my mind, as discussed in the introduction of the case study, the objective was rather oriented towards a “history from below” perspective, inspired by the British History Workshop movement. However, at the end of the journey, I realised that by expanding the qualitative participation and authorship of the public within the different phases of the project we could enable together a somewhat 360º outlook, meaning that we – historian and community – were doing people’s history not only in terms of content, but also conceptually and methodologically wise.

There were, however, some degrees to which the project was still very much centered in my role as a researcher, of course, especially when it came to the very specific tasks of methods analysis and source criticism. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to engage the participants at least in some stages of the sources interpretations. In Memorecord, as demonstraded throughout Chapter 2, community members were involved in the project as co-designers, as interview partners and crowdsourcees, as audience to the Memorecord projetct, and, finally, were taken into account as potential readers of this thesis’ online version as much as my history peers102. Still, as I explained earlier, some detours prevented me from concluding the activities planned with this aim. Regrettably, that was a missed opportunity to investigate this enhanced form of qualitative community participation. I leave, however, the indication of the need for future research exploring these possibilities in more depth, as for instance, with an evaluation of the benefit of Extreme Citizen Science (Hacklay 2015; English et al, 2018) practice for digital public history and historical research at large.

While my contribution did not go as far as I expected with respect to this further degree of qualitative engagement of participants, which could have fostered an estimulating debate for public history, I believe my position in C²DH did provide me the crucial context to make a provocative claim for a new hermeneutics of practice in the specific realms of digital public history. In Chapter 3, I deliberatedly examine how C²DH’s research environment was determinant to the realisation of my experiment, but analysing it beyond the more immediate aspect of expert support, emphasised in Chapter 2. In the analysis of digital methods carried out as an intermediary step between the building of the platform (Chapter 2) and the interpretation of the crowdsourced memories (Chapter 4), I argue that within the emerging field of digital hermeneutics we might need a new form of it that enables us to unbox the uncertainties brought by the digital component.

As discussed in Chapter 3, the tool-oriented approach that has marked the first decades of digital humanities is slowly unfolding into a more hybrid form of engagement with new tools and methods that benefits from activities like building and modeling as true ways of thinking. I discussed this learning by doing spirit along the notion of thinkering, which draws on experimental approached in the field of media archeology, with deep philosophical roots in Cassirer’s double act of grasping, encompassing the conceptual and technical design of things; simply put, grasping as a ‘hermeneutic act’ (Hall and Ellis 2019, 125). Thinkering, somehow, already embodies the combination of these two dimensions of grasping. Actually, the term per se, literally, suggests combining two different activities that, at the end of the day, are entitled in a form that is pretty much alike, and are performed in association (to think and to tinker). Hermeneutics of practice, in its turn, is a necessary oxymoron, a constant reminder of the antithesis that we need to break.

My claim is not that historians are urged to become programmers or machine wizards, in the lines of what Ladurie wrote back in 1968 – “The historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” – but that we need to go hybrid not only in combining old and new tools and methods, as argued by Zaagsma, but also in the creative fusion of intellectual and hands-on work. In Le fin des érudits, the article subtitled the super quoted passage above by Ladurie, he specifies that: “in history, as elsewhere, what counts is not the machine, but the problem. The machine is only of interest to the extent that it makes it possible to tackle new questions, original by the methods, the contents and especially the breadth.” (Ladurie, 1968, translated from French by me)103. Indeed, computers and softwares might not be of much help if we do not grasp the problems. The same could be said about analogue archives. However, what may be distinct in the digital age is the fact that not all research begins with a problem at departure as it used to be. Clavert’s project on the First World War on Twitter, for instance, did not begin with a clear research question. As we discussed during a research seminar in 2018, it began by the interest of archiving the tweets for future exploration (Clavert 2018), and as he has developed his collection and started playing around with his digital bricolage, the problems arise.

The core point of reflection seems to be that in the digital age a great deal of problems emerge from the technological mediation itself, brought by the possibilities but also the limitations introduced by the digital component. From what I could observe from my own experiment, this new breed of problems is intrinsically related to the digital interferences in research. This is, what I addressed in Chapter 3, the conditioning of the historiographical operation by the digital component. I argued that these digital interferences bring about a series of ontological implications that affect the way we do history at methodological and interpretative level.

In this thesis I discussed a concrete case study that demonstrated how the different phases of the historiographical operation – documental, explication, representation – are intricate (Certeau 1988) and how, consequently, digital interferences that may apparently be affecting only one stage of research are, in fact, potentially conditioning the whole research. I argued that digital interferences create disturbances, enable and disable heuristic tools for historiography, and that thinking about the said operation as a whole system, in a 360º outlook so to say, help us perceive the interdependencies and resonances a particular technical detail in one point of the research may have elsewhere in the work. The hermeneutics of practice is, finally, the active posture of identifying these interferences through experimentation, even when, and perhaps above all, when we do not comprehend the tools in their completeness. Hermeneutics of practice, I believe, might be the most realistic path towards a safe navigation of the Data age for historians. Since we cannot expect that a global and evenly distributed training will allow us all to develop the multimodal literacy and criticism needed to deal with all the more or less hidden interferences, being able, hopefully, not to become captive of the machines, but apply them critically, aware of their non-neutrality.

While becoming a programmer may not be an urgence though, equipping ourselves to criticize the digital in its many facets – tool, object of study, exploratory laboratory, expressive medium, or activist venue (Svensson 2016; 2010) – is at the ordre du jour. A true digital source criticism, or data criticism, will necessarily consider all the other aspects of the digital, because, as discussed, the digital interferences are not punctual, but intersectional, transversal and iterative regarding the different layers of the digital work. The value of experimentation in such a context, should be one of rigor. As much as it could sound contradictory, taking risks in working with the unknown seem to necessary these days. In this sense, I ratify Ankersmit’s claim “the most pronounced subjectivity is the condition for the highest degree of objectivity” (Ankersmit 2005, 103). As I pointed out in several passages throughout the thesis, experiments might be different from one another, and this, has also to do with the subjective charge of the experimenter. In Chapters 2 and 3, while discussing the development and interpretation of Memorecord I tried to salient this subjectivity. I exposed that often through self-reflexive comments. I believe I made it clear that being transparent in the exposition of my methods was my way to keep my experiment inteligible and objective to other researchers. And this composed a resilient strand in the whole thesis: the importance of documenting the process of doing what we are doing with the digital is fundamental if we want our digital work to be welcome, not only by our “digital peers”, but in the broader discipline of history.

In the direction of building this all inclusive dialogue around the digital history scholarship, finally, I raised the hypothesis that we could be witnessing, among digital practitioners & thinkers the development of a specific style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history. Styles of reasoning seek objectivity, as we saw with Hacking. Digital hermeneutics, in this context, could be the amalgam to blend digital historians. It could help to establish a culture of documenting and sharing the process of doing digital history and digital public history. With clear enough, shared standards, I believe that historians from within and outside the digital history trading zones could critically engage with digital work. Having reached such a common basis, which see as a popularisation of a particular style of reasoning of/about/in/within digital and digital public history, I am convinced, it would contribute to the state of the art of the digital history scholarship, moving forward from definitional debates, and producing, critical historical research with the digital component.

Finally, based on my experience with Memorecord, I proposed an imaginative exercise about what would be the crucial contexts with short, open and flexible prompts that I consider key to enable these envisioned best practices for digital history scholarship and digital public projects. To digital history, I played around the metaphor of crossroads, bringing together openness, collaboration, infrastructuring and training & evaluation that prepare historians to do digital history research and apply hermeneutics of practice. For digital public history, I expanded the metaphor to the rather open intersection of roundabouts that would combine the same prompts of digital history with two further references that I considered fundamental for digital public history: shared authority and participatory design.

This thesis was an overlapping of these prompts, powered by the C²DH experimental ethos and my desire to experience a true hands-on approach blending the digital history competences, with its heuristic triggers and the digital public history approach, with its empathetic triggers. Throughout the chapters I described in details and reflected theoretically uopn the implementation of hermeneutics and/as practice, underscoring the need for a continuous conjugation of theory and practice, interpretation and participatory projects.

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Annex 1

Treatment dispensed to the Memorecord Interviews Resource Collection.

The Memorecord Interviews Resource Collection includes video-recorded interviews and PixStories. Most of the video recorded interviews, apart from those made on the spot with the iPhone and/or PixStori app, was done with a Sony Handycam AVCHD Progressive model, generating different files AVCHD files104*. These files have been manually assembled in one single video with the same duration of the whole interview. Once the video clips of a single interview were assembled, they were uploaded to Memorecord’s YouTube Channel. They had the original language caption added on the YouTube Studio, as well as the English translation to non-English speaking interviewees. Captions were created from the transcriptions of the interviews with the timestamps. English translations were also prepared with the timestamps and uploaded as a SubRip subtitle file to Youtube. On Youtube, video descriptions were edited to display different passages separately, according to the time stamps identified in the interview coding, added as the video summary. With the YouTube ID, videos ‘were ingested in the Manifold digital publishing platform, under the Memorecord Interviews Resource Collections including a short description of the video (with whom, where, when it was recorded), the video summary and tags imported from the interviews coding model.

A quick overview of the video publication process, step by step:

Interview → data structured in the SD Card →

Tela de celular com texto preto sobre fundo branco

Descrição gerada automaticamente

Transfer files to MacBook → AVCHD files view on Finder. →

Assembling AVCHD files →

Full video uploaded to YouTube with captions & subtitles. ↓

Preview of the video on the Memorecord Interviews – resource collection ↓

Detail of the tag navigation suspended menu →

Full view of the video inside the resource collection ↓

1 PubMemo, available on http://pubmemo.uni.lu/, using the Manifold platform for scholarly publishing https://manifoldapp.org/.

2 In this thesis I use the English translation by Tom Conley, edited by the Columbia University Press (1988).

3 My translation from Portuguese. Original Portuguese passage: “o não dito que permite e possibilita o que foi dito”.

4 I work here with the understanding of discipline as a particular branch of knowledge as a historically constructed extraordinary reality, as described by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 2004, 49), but we do not realise them because we are used to them. Since the concept of discipline may not be a straightforward one, especially considering the different nature of each discipline in relation to another, it may put some difficulties to find a concise definition. For my use of the concept, it is enough to retain the social-historical dimension pointed by the French sociologist and refer to a rather general, but eloquent outline by the Nordic philosopher of Education Torill Strand: “A discipline, is inscribed in, and upheld by, the national and international networks of research, university departments, research institutes and scientific journals that produces, certifies, rewards, and upholds that which he calls the discipline’s capital. And a discipline is characterized by a particular, unique academic and social style” (2007, 272).

5 The research proposal that generated this project was submitted to the National Research Fund, Luxembourg on March ٢٠١٥ under the title “Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives: A public history project on Italian and Portuguese migration memories in Luxembourg”, as listed on: https://www.fnr.lu/projects/shaping-a-digital-memory-platform-on-migration-narratives-a-public-history-project-on-italian-and-portuguese-migration-memories-in-luxembourg-2/, Accessed July 01, 2019. Back then, as a professor from the Institute for History, Fickers was affiliated to the Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education, under the research unit Identités. Politiques, Sociétés, Espaces (IPSE). By the end of June, 2015 the research proposal submitted to FNR was positively evaluated and I were able to start the PhD as of 01 September, 2015.

6 His profile is available on https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/people/andreas-fickers. Accessed July 01, 2019.

7 “Community of practice” is the framework mobilised by Kemman in the study above mentioned. I consider community of practice a valuable instrumentation for the study on trading zones and find it useful to be employed in other contexts throughout the thesis, especially in chapters 2 and 3 when referring to collaboration. According to Etienne Wenger (Wenger 1998, 73 as in Kemman 2019, 08) these communities presupposes: “mutual engagement (involving regular interaction); joint negotiated enterprise (mutual goal and accountability); shared repertoire of negotiable resources (such as jargon and practices).”

8 History as a discipline, that differs from history as the sequence of events happened in the past, has its foundation in the 19th Century, following the modern tendency to challenge the philosophical approach to history and the emphasis on the importance of empirical evidence (Eskildsen 2008, 431). This shift has been reinforced and further elaborated, notably, by the German historian, Leopold von Ranke, and the archival turn proposed by his work. Ranke’s ideal reconstruction of the unique periods of the past, as they actually were, left a hard-wearing contribution to the historical discipline, especially concerning the historiographical approach of historicism (Barros 2012, 401).

9 The author has made clear that in its first appearance during a THATCamp un-conference, in 2008, the term was never meant to establish a pejorative regard towards yacking. In the context of the original exchange in which the RRCHNM’s software developer, Dave Lester, said the phrase, it was rather in a connotation of less talk, more grok, emphasising the greater chance for engagement and understanding of a THATCamp. Nevertheless, as much as the opposition between doing and thinking might not have been in the roots of the phrase, I believe that the same later appropriation of the expression that persist even more than a decade to discuss the relationship between theorists and builders may not only be due to a simplistic understanding of the slogan, ignoring its specific history and resonances as pointed by Nowviskie. It may suggest that there is a perception that digital humanities are still too product oriented and that, somehow, the thinking behind the building is not getting as much attention as it deserves.

10 The C²DH website features a dedicated tab for all publications and events under the “thinkering” tag, where this definition is highlighted on the top: https://web.archive.org/web/20190218133558/https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering

11 Original passage in French: “Le C²DH est le résultat d’un processus de négociations politiques et institutionnelles, et consiste en une réflexion sur les tensions, les défis, les opportunités et les chances de la pratique historique, tenant en une hybridité entre tradition scientifique et tâtonnements heuristiques avec les nouvelles technologies.”

12 The specialised vocabulary used in general to refer to the huge concept constellation of the digital, including expressions such as digital revolution – or digital turn – and information age – or information era, or yet information society – is expansive, presenting a wide range of idioms. We also accuse an inadvertent interchangeability of some expressions as digital age and online age. For this thesis, the expressive abundance of these terminologies is very relevant as it testimonies the booming state of the debate around the digital component, as pointed by David Berry in his computational turn (2011), situating his reflections on third wave of digital humanities at the very computationality of it. I will be introducing my views on what I consider the core concepts for the present work along this chapter, although, I know that I won’t be able to cover all the variety of the changing, lively glossary around the digital as subject, as well as being able to offer a universal vocabulary with definitions fully shared by other authors.

13 Original passage in Portuguese: “Começaram, então, os grandes projetos de digitalização e disponibilização online de fontes, ao mesmo tempo em que nasciam ou eram introduzidas no meio acadêmico novas ferramentas que mudariam de forma substancial a relação dos investigadores com o mundo digital. O processador de texto, o e-mail , as bases de dados e os sistemas de informação geográfica tiveram um crescimento no número de usuários muito significativo ao longo de toda a década.”

14 A further discussion will be done about this easy-peasy kind of slogan, commonly used to refer for the wonders of the digital, as some prompt solutions that, supposedly, have the potential to solve a various range of problems with one click. I will discuss it in detail along the digital interface and tool criticisms discussion, to be done later on in Chapter 3, in dialogue with concepts such as user illusion (Kay 1984) and technological solutionism (Morozov 2013).

15 Lucchesi’s Master thesis research, pursuit at the Comparative History Program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) was a comparison about the first years of digital history developments in the 21st Century looking at two spaces of practice, the American one, led in the United States by the first founded digital history research centres in the world, and the Italian one, characterized, as an appositive, by a radical absence of institutionalised projects or programs. See Lucchesi, 2014.

16 As I began describing the process of building this case study, I want to thank the many people that, beyond my supervisors, contributed fundamentally to the results I will present along this chapter. My most sincere acknowledgments to Daniele Guido, Emmanuele Hingray and Lars Wieneke for all the work and inputs in the building of the Memorecord crowdsourcing mechanism and website. To Andy O’dwyer, head of the DH Lab, there will be not enough thanks for his support in all fronts – logistics, technological, intellectual. I also thank Mariana Menezes (student assistant) for her competent work helping me in the preparation for the launch of Memorecord. To my PhD colleagues, for their helping reviewing the translations and testing the website: Max Kemman, Fabio Spirinelli, Richard Legay and Dominique Santana, merci! Also, to Fabio and Dominique, “muito obrigadas” for the many occasions in which they drove me around or used their car to transport iPads supporters, paper boxes, posters and other utilities. I also want to thank everybody who helped me in the promotion of the project (e.g. distribution of flyers and posters, sharing Memorecord posts on their social network profiles), specially Barbara Correa de Mello Menezes, Heidi Martins, Luisa Martins, Anne Carolina Ramos and Gregório Entringer. To Heidi, big thanks too for sharing her talented crafts in the customization of the Memorecord feedback box (which accompanied me in the many events I visited for the project) and her support with the launch event. To Marinella Rinaldis and Nicolas Graf, many thanks for their time working in the postal and digital distribution of Memorecord’s flyers to the mailing list of the Centre de Documentations sur les Migrations Humanies (CDMH). To everybody else in the Centre Doc – Marcel Lorenzini, Maria Luisa Caldognetto, Dario Cieol, Denis Scutto, Jos Till, Antoinette Reuter and Narcisse Dovenon – my special thanks for their long term collaboration, for hearing me, introducing me to people, lending me books and supporting me over the years, in the realisation of Racontez Votre Histoire de Vie and in all the editions of the Festival des Migrations we went together. To Sarah Cooper, from the University Language Centre, my special thanks for her assistance with proofreading the website, poster and flyers content. Villmools Merci to Isabel Voegeli and Noëlle Schon for their steady assistance along the project preparation and diffusion.

17 A straightforward guide with all the steps to reproduce this experiment is provided in the online version of the thesis – Cf. “Memorecord Cookbook” on http://pupmemo.uni.lu/.

18 The immigration and emigration history component will be further discussed in Chapter 3 and 4. In the current chapter, migration and demographic facts are only stressed to the extent they help to understand why the selected subject was relevant to this research project and its importance in the country. A deeper reflection on the historiography of migration and on the analysis of the collected data in the crowdsourcing experiment will be provided after we describe the building of the case study in which, precisely, migration is at stake.

19 Luso-luxemburguês : recherches sur la migration portugaise au Luxembourg, 19 February 2016. https://wwwen.uni.lu/university/events/luso_luxemburgues_recherches_sur_la_migration_portugaise_au_luxembourg

20 Original passage in Portuguese: “A antropologia histórica não possui domínio próprio. Quer se trate do poder curativo dos reis de França, quer da ascensão do individualismo entre os camponeses no século XVIII ou da difusão da contracepção, todos os assuntos que ela aborda pertence m a outros setores da história. Ela é, antes de mais nada, um esforço para ligar a evolução de uma instituição, de um tipo de consumo, ou de uma técnica, à sua repercussão social e aos comportamentos que engendrou. Ela é, portanto, um método de totalização ou, antes, de relacionamento (...) dos diferentes níveis da realidade”

21 Original passage in French: “pour libérer la criativité, seule l’intuition est opératoire”.

22 Original passage in French: “voir du ‘neuf’ dans l’ancien en se défamiliarisant”.

23 Official Website https://www.museudapessoa.net/pt/home, consulted on 21 September 2019.

24 More than 200 hours recording of life stories of immigrant Jews from various regions of the world were collected in this experiment. This project - Inheritance and Souvenirs: Jewish immigrants in Rio de Janeiro - resulted in a book, an exhibition at the National Historical Museum of Rio de Janeiro, as well as a collection composed of folders with the history of each interviewee. The objective of the museum was to allow each person the right and opportunity to have their life history eternalized and recognized as a source of knowledge and understanding by society. See more on the Museum official website: https://www.museudapessoa.net/pt/entenda/historia

25 Invitation cards were sent to a mailing list of more than 700 recipients by postal service.

26 A particular case of Racontez Votre Histoire… emphasized to us the relevance of listening to others nationalities besides the specific ones we wanted to analyse closely. Akbar Basha, a young Indian migrant that reached us out at CDMH was very active and willing to share his story. He was not only sharing his life with us, but also taking part in a documentary in the RTL routwäissgro’ TV series - “a life-size documentary series, in which every episode follows a different person going about their daily life.” (available here https://today.rtl.lu/media/routwaeissgro). Basha came to Dudelange exceptionally on a Saturday morning, on 4th June 2016, so the documentary team could join him and record his participation in the workshop as well. The story he portrayed was one of success, but also one of many struggles before leaving his country and before arriving in Luxembourg, during his experience in other countries. In Luxembourg, notwithstanding, despite his happiness in sharing his trajectory and his interesting way to excel it in his migration path, Akbar faced personal challenges that we will analyse in greater detail in Chapter 4. His testimony would have as many points in common as distinct aspects from the national focus groups of Italian and Portuguese, but listening to him helped us to understand how complex it is a society of more than 170 nationalities. And, above all, how it was not possible to isolate individuals by placing them in national containers. Thus, we understood that it was necessary to welcome participants from different nationalities, observe their interaction and see how we could interpret a story in relation to another, by “reciprocal illumination”(Barros 2007), in the light of what is told similarly or differently elsewhere.

27 Apple Store app to iOS iPhone and iPad https://www.pixstori.com/, consulted on 23 September 2019.

28 I presented this idea during the XIXth International Oral History Association Conference, Bengaluru, India (27 June - 1 July 2016).

29 The whole experience with this born-digital form of short oral history recording has raised questions that deserve further attention. In Chapter 3, I contextualize the emergence of this specific type of born-digital material in the light of the development of new technologies of memory (House and Churchill 2008) and new memory practices and object as a result, such as mediated memories in the digital age (Dijck 2007).

30 Official website http://digital-inclusion.lu/, consulted on 22 September 2019.

31 Indeed, we agreed that no recording would take place during the activity, and no personal data from participant would be collected, respecting the sensible status of the subjects implied.

32 Official website http://braceroarchive.org/, consulted on 23 September 2019.

33 Official Website http://hurricanearchive.org/, consulted on 23 September 2019.

34 The CMS is software that allows non-technical users to store, organize and publish content on the web easily. A CMS separates the visual part and the content on a website, making it possible to manage it without the help of a developer, thanks to an intuitive user interface. With a CMS behind, a website that does not require frequent updates in its code or new contents to keep running, it survives on hard-coded pages. For more, see CMS definition: https://techterms.com/definition/cms

35 In Chapter 03 we offer a more in-depth analysis of digital methods and a whole section is dedicated to the work on the trading zones of digital history.

36 Kemman argues that in digital history infrastructural dependencies configure boundary practices. For him, digitalisation of infrastructures leads to boundary-crossing in deep cross-disciplinary collaborations (Kemman 2019, 185). Our experience in this boundary work will be analysed in further detail in Chapter 3.

37 See full profile at https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/people/lars-wieneke

38 See full profile at https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/people/daniele-guido

39 Official website http://writemaps.com, consulted on 21 September 2019.

40 In Chapter 3, the discussion about the combination of new techniques and criticism in the interface of practice and theory is discussed in greater detail, in light of the hands-on work presented here as an emergence of a digital stance of hermeneutics.

41 Available here: https://zapier.com/

42 Personal data, more specifically, has recently gained a status of being “a commodity as important as oil” (Dixon 2019). The monetization of data has taken up serious implication in the political realm, especially when it comes to companies the size of Google and Facebook. In Silicon Valley, early in 2019, California’s governor Gavin Newsom launched a bold “Data Dividend” proposal, whereby these companies should pay their users a fraction of their revenues derived from the user’s data (Sumagaysay 2019). While some people would disagree on the oil field metaphor for data (Martínez 2019), the commercial value it has acquired is unprecedented, however, differently than an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil, the data potential fortunes radically depend on who holds it and their power to extract commercial value of it (i.e. a collection of an individual’s favorite songs accumulated by Alexa may be very profitable Spotify or Amazon itself, but useless for a tile factory). There are several ethical deadlocks arising from this data fever. Polemics are being constantly discussed in the media and cultural industry, often in nuances of denunciation and conspiracy. Recently, for example, the documentary The Great Hack (Karim Amer & Jehane Noujaim, 2019) addressed how the data mining company Cambridge Analytica used the personal data from Facebook users to manipulate social network algorithms and influence the 2016 elections in the United States, which resulted in the election of Donald Trump.

43 Essentially, an API plays the role of intermediary, it is a gateway that allows applications/software to talk to each other. An API is a standardized communication protocol between parts of a computer program, that defines how an application can connect to the other and access the pre-existing framework. APIs also offer a layer of protection to ensure that specific actions requested by one software will not bring risks to another; for instance, a request for the software to reveal passwords. Indeed, the so-called “rise of API” in our decade has established a whole new economy in the tech market, introducing a new breed of software that transformed the world of development technique into a new business model. With APIs allowing one piece of software to plug-in in another, developers could save precious resources in redundant work to reinvent the wheel, and focus their energy in creativity in developing the best APIs, which could be seen as the Lego building blocks in a simple metaphor. APIs also open up cross-industry, cross-functional and cross-disciplinary interoperability (Murphy and Sloane n.d.; Collins and Sisk 2015). Following this loop, as APIs powers the web connectivity and also allowing the access and share of data, its use has become increasingly popular among researchers as well. The MIT Libraries offers a list of relevant APIs for scholarly purposes: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/apis-for-scholarly-resources/. The open-access digital scholarship publication Debates in the Digital Humanities (https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2019), for instance, offers an APIs that allow queries on all keywords or all sentences marked as “important” by the readers thanks to the Manifold (https://manifoldapp.org) reading interface – their platform for digital scholarship publication – where readers can interact with the text. For a demonstration of how APIs can be used by scholars, I suggest the graphs generated by the “data print” carried by Berry et al. (2015) undertaking data and algorithmic work employing APIs. The authors developed a method to map the fields of Digital Humanities and Electronic Literature based on title recommendations from Amazon, retrieving similar purchased items from the bookseller API. A gentle introduction on how to use API for getting data for Digital Humanities is shared in a tutorial on Digital Humanities @ Pratt, by Abigail Walker (2019), available here: https://studentwork.prattsi.org/dh/2019/05/13/getting-data-for-digital-humanities-with-apis/

44 . Despite the illusion of dehumanization that hovers automation processes like the one we used, even in this sort of human-computer symbiosis – as in if-then models – data and the technology we use to generate and extract it is never entirely objective or neutral.

45 A hashtag consists in a keyword preceded by a number symbol, the octothorpe symbol (#), originally used to categorize tweets. For more, see “Hashtag definition”: https://techterms.com/definition/hashtag

46 My previous experience on two collaborative photo-documentaries on Instagram – @Rio450 (http://instagram.com/rio450) and @Rio365 (http://instagram.com/rio365) – between 2013 and 2015 taught me in practice about the power of engaging crowds with hashtags. Both projects were based on a gaming mechanism for crowdsourcing photos of the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and successfully built organic engagement. In the end, each Instagram account had engaged over 6.000 participants. The @Rio450 had a greater historical grasp, as it was a commemorative project for the 450th anniversary of the city, celebrated in March 2015. It worked as a 450 days countdown to the city Anniversary with one picture selected from the community every day. At the culmination of it, the collective enterprise had more than 70.000 Instagram pictures tagged, over 100.000 likes and some 14.000 comments on its feeds, quite successful for a project that had grown with no special budget for outreach.

47 “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in [msg]?” – tweet by @chrismessina from 23 August 2007:

48 Columns for Facebook: picture / story / description / name / from__id / first_action__link / link / created_time / type id / status_type / parsed_time / ocal_url; columns for Instagram: uid / lat / lng / tags / caption / image /url / date / username / picture carousel / user_id / post_id / likes_count / local_url.

49 The University of Luxembourg Policy on Ethics in Research is available here:http://wwwen.uni.lu/content/download/55603/657601/file/University of Luxe mbourg Policy on Ethics in Research_102012.pdf For the Application for Ethics Approval submitted for this thesis, see annex 1.

50 The workshop was developed in French under the title “#Memorecord - une récolte des mémoires. Quelle est la valeur d’une histoire?, for more information, see: https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/de/events/memorecord-une-recolte-des-memoires-quelle-est-la-valeur-dune-histoire and my blog post from 22 May 2018, “Senta que lá vem história: #memorecord for a historiography closer to life” https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering/senta-que-la-vem-historia-memorecord-historiography-closer-life

51 #Memorecord – How to take part, on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/320248302

52 The <iframe> in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) represents an integrated navigation context, effectively incorporating another HTML page content into the host page, enables interactive content embedment. For more, see “Iframe definition”: https://techterms.com/definition/iframe

53 From Memorecord website, read stories: https://memorecord.uni.lu/stories/

54 Small icons that can be placed inline with text. For more, see “Emoji definition”: https://techterms.com/definition/emoji

55 Memorecord’s privacy note reads “Memorecord respects the privacy settings of the users and their original posts within Facebook and Instagram. Only posts that are open and public will be collected and displayed on this website. Memorecord will not access any kind of private posts. By adding the hashtag of the project (#memorecord) to their public posts, users are joining the #memorecord harvest. A link and a preview of the post are displayed on the #memorecord gallery under Stories (https://memorecord.uni.lu/stories/), the original post may be consulted directly on Facebook or Instagram. If at any point, a post is deleted by the users in their social media accounts, it will also be deleted on the #memorecords gallery.” Available here: https://memorecord.uni.lu/privacy/

56 The website content is translated, but posts are kept in their original language.

57 Slack is a cloud-based collaboration hub that enables teamwork through instant messages, allowing other apps integrations (i.e. Google Drive, calendars etc.). It is an alternative to email communication for tasks coordination. At C²DH different teams work on Slack workspaces. See more here: https://slack.com/

58 I started studying digital history in the second half of my Bachelor and wrote a Master dissertation on the first years of the development of digital history, comparing the state of the art and approaches of the United States and Italy (Lucchesi 2014). Back then, however, even doing most of my searches on online catalogues and websites, I would still familiarise myself with the historian’s journey as described by Arlette Farge in her seminal work from 1989, “Le goût de l’archive”; the most sophisticated piece of software I was using at the time, and I already realised was having a huge impact on my work, was Zotero (https://www.zotero.org). Today, after building Memorecord, I would have difficulties to recap, in totality, all the impactful tools and applications I have made use of. Now, I am rather identified with the ontological interrogations put by Frédéric Clavert, Caroline Múller and others in the frame of the project “Le goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique”(Clavert and Muller 2017). What are the new rites implicated in the work with digitized and born-digital sources, like those co-created in Memorecord? This question will be further explored in Chapter 4.

59 Cfr. MacGyver American action-adventure television series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver_(2016_TV_series)

60 As an illustration, see results returning for a forum search on “iframes” on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=iframes. Some questions were asked more than a decade ago and kept being visited, as answers are voted and updated.

61 Apart from the established academic publications and Wikipedia, I want to make a remark on the incalculable value of blogs, tutorials/webinars and forums. Many were the provocative readings I found on blogs such as History @ Work (https://ncph.org/history-at-work/), by NCPH, Bridging (https://ifph.hypotheses.org/category/bridging), by IFPH, and The Public History Weekly (https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/) by, DeGruyter, to what concern the emerging practices in the field of public history, scope of projects, methodological challenges and political and ethics implication of what we do. The Brazilian Café História (https://www.cafehistoria.com.br/), a portal for Scientific Dissemination in History, added interesting reflections from mostly Brazilian authors with whom I kept a strong identification, helping me to stay up to date to the debates about popularization of history, new ideas and related problems going on in the ground where I first learned what meant to be a historian. As for the oral history interviews preparation and hints on equipment, Doug Boyd’s Digital Omnium blog (https://digitalomnium.com) was a pearl. Likewise, I consulted numerous tutorials on Programming Historian (https://programminghistorian.org/), be it for open questions or curiosities. Much closer in the map, but as instructive as the scattered references around the globe were the experience reports and blog posts on the C²DH blog (https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering) by my PhD fellows and other colleagues, with highlights to the posts by the C²DH Doctoral Training Unit on Digital History and Hermeneutics (https://dhh.uni.lu/), offering a lot of insights on tools and approaches, mostly rooted on experimental projects like mine. Throughout the chapters, I quote many blog posts, along with books and scientific journals. However, as we reach the moment in which I describe the launch of the Memorecord website, I think it is worth noting that the knowledge I accumulated along this thinkering exercise was deeply informed by these readings, thanks to those who share their works in progress and aid others to find their way in the field. My practice, at the end of the day, is largely influenced by this collective effort and reflects how, in the spirits of the time, a preoccupation with processes is prominent, even if it does not seem to get quite the same attention in the more traditional scholarship publications just yet. Luckily for us, “going public” with blog posts, project ideas or whole projects today does not depend, exclusively, on publishers.

62 Original passage in Italian: “Consegue che l’attività quotidiana – alta o bassa, eccezionale od ordinária – lascia tracce di tipo informático, que saranno i documenti e le fonti della storia futura del nostro presente. Como la Storiografia di una cultura alfabetica è diversa da quella di una cultura orale, così la Storiografia di una cultura digitale sarà – ed è già – diversa da quella di una alfabética.”

63 Through the methodological approach of tertium comparationis (the third part of comparison), borrowed from legal scholars, Serge Noiret and Thomas Cauvin argues that public history has a glocal dimension, because “public history is about applying universal methods locally. As a result, the local case study becomes comparable in its methods and practices.” (Noiret and Cauvin 2017, 26).

64 I believe Martí Peran’s evaluation of this is relevant to contextualise the current debates on the crisis of humanities as the culture of project and culture of positivity that envelop life in an entrepreneurship rhetorics, plunged in references from the managerial world, with a productive motto that celebrates the “make thyself”. This means that such cultures bring value and push a perspective of life as a project (e.g. setting goals, objectives, paths etc.) and the attitude of thinking and always acting positively (e.g. internalising the constant possibility of a reset to always start from new) (Benevides 2017, 05).

65 See: http://media.obermann.uiowa.edu/archive/iowadigitalbridges/iowadigitalbridges.com/about/projects/greteman-lee-linked-reading/index.html

66 See: https://shakeosphere.lib.uiowa.edu/index.jsp

67 See: http://media.obermann.uiowa.edu/archive/iowadigitalbridges/iowadigitalbridges.com/index.html

68 The current version of Perseus Digital Library is Perseus 4.0, available here http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. Since April 2019 they have been working on a new reading environment – Scaife Viewer, available here: https://scaife.perseus.org/. The new viewer is a step toward Perseus 5.0, it is a specialised reading environment for pre-modern text collection in both their original languages and in translation.

69 The long quote is worth to illustrate these features: “In September of 1986 an “Exploratory Phase” of Perseus was funded by the Annenberg Foundation, during which Apple finally made commercially available a powerful Mac personal computer and the HyperCard software system needed for the hypermedia Perseus environment (Crane and Mylonas n.d., 18). Apple also contributed with $15,000 to the development of Perseus (19), and the interdisciplinary research team included a hypertext expert from Apple (Tim Oren) and two experts from Xerox PARC, Randy Trigg and Deborah Tatar; Tatar’s background in English literature is significant in terms of “the problems associated with a computing project in the humanities” (101). As the Editor- in- Chief of Perseus notes concerning the original direction and aim of the project: “Our initial goal was to assemble a critical mass of heterogeneous materials focused on a single, reasonably discrete subject – the classical Greek world” (Crane 1998, para. 2). However, this was soon augmented with Roman materials; a National Endowment for the Humanities grant facilitated a broadening of the scope of the library, and subsequently some of the visionary ideas that had led to Perseus began to be realised.” (Lane 2016, 36)

70 See: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/interference

71 Even when you are an expert in the field or object suffering the interference, you need to go through a bit of thinkering. It might be frustrating, sometimes – it was with me – not finding solutions right away, but for the creation of scientific knowledge, it is extremely important to try. Back in the early days of transatlantic radio, there was always a lot of static. Many sources of the problem were identified, but not always removed, electric storms were recurrent. In the 1930’s, according to Hacking, “Karl Jansky at the Bell Telephone Laboratories had located a’ hiss’ coming from the centre of the Milky Way. Thus, there were sources of radio energy in space which contributed to the familiar static.” Some years later, in 1965, radioastronomers Arno Penzias and R.W. Wilson decided to study the phenomenon with an adapted radiotelescope and the story that follows is one beautiful tale of accidental finding: “They expected to detect energy sources and that they did. But they were also very diligent. They found a small amount of energy which seemed to be everywhere in space, uniformly distributed. It would be as if everything in space, which was not an energy source were about 4°K. Since this did not make much sense, they did their best to discover instrumental errors. For example, they thought that some of this radiation might come from the pigeons that were nesting on their telescope, and they had a dreadful time trying to get rid of the pigeons. But after they had eliminated every possible source of noise, they were left with a uniform temperature of 3°K. They were loath to publish because a completely homogeneous background radiation did not make much sense. Fortunately, just as they had become certain of this meaningless phenomenon, a theoretical group, at Princeton, was circulating a preprint which suggested, in a qualitative way, that if the universe had originated in a Big Bang, there would be a uniform temperature throughout space, the residual temperature of the first explosion. Moreover this energy would be detected in the form of radio signals. The experimental work of Penzias and Wilson meshed beautifully with what would otherwise have been mere speculation. Penzias and Wilson had showed that the temperature of the universe is almost everywhere about three degrees above absolute zero; this is the residual energy of creation. It was the first truly compelling reason to believe in that Big Bang.” (Hacking 1983, 159–60)

72 A fairly neglected aspect of the lack of criticism displayed in the digital practitioners’ activities is pointed out by Domenico Fiormonte in their “more or less passive” attitude in their “engagement with the instruments they use” (2017, 17). The problem of such a passive stance is the apparent oblivion that technology is not neutral, as in the sense of Melvin Kranzberg (Kranzberg 1986). Fiormonte is surely correct to draw our attention to this fact following Alexander Galloway’s assertive: “technical is always political” (2006, 18). After all, the constant awareness around technology does not seem to be so straightforward. When working with and living around digital technology and tools everyday many of us seem to normalise it. I am far from disagreeing with Fiormente’s remarks, I instead see another issue looming in the background of these passive postures. I suspect that the passivity denounced by Fiormonte is very likely to be an unconscious response to the overwhelming stimuli of the digital, in which, I think it is plausible to say, there is a quasi-blasé attitude, mimetising the blasé outlook in the sense of Georg Simmel’s understanding, – a psychic phenomenon produced by modern metropolis, the “incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy” (Simmel 1971, 329). Johanna Drucker offers another ingredient to it, the “persuasive and seductive rhetorical force of visualisation”, she argues that it “performs such a powerful reification of information that graphics such as Google Maps are taken to be simply a presentation of ‘what is,’ as if all critical thought had been precipitously and completely jettisoned.” (2012, 86)

73 Fatalist previsions like the famous one by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie populate this deterministic imaginary: “The historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” (1968), translated from his article on the Le Nouvel Observateur, see Figure 28. Other similar aphorisms, with milder degrees of determinism could be added to the list: “The historian who refuses to use a computer as being unnecessary, ignores vast areas of historical research and will not be taken serious anymore” (1990, quoted in (Boonstra, Breure, and Doorn 2006, 4); [A]n historian trained exclusively in qualitative methods, with no grounding in numbers, in computation, would also be “woefully deficient.” And this scenario is not hypothetical. It is now a reality”, Baker (2016, 21). I thank Max Kemman for keeping an updated list of them here: https://www.maxkemman.nl/2017/10/historians-must-become-digital-now/

74 As for the consideration of communities of practice within the history discipline, I value Kemman’s observation on the existence of “nested [communities of practice] COPs for subfields interested in different periods such as ancient, pre-modern, modern, contemporary history, or in different geographical areas such as French, German, or European history.” (Kemman 2015, 08–09). And for this reason, when I think about styles of reasoning, I also consider that each of these different communities of practice may also add their particular accents when speaking new styles.

75 Kemman builds upon the original idea of “brokers” developed by Etienne Wenger’ brokers’, to describe actors that within a trading zone “are able to introduce aspects of one community of practice into another, connecting the two communities and enabling coordination” (Kemman 2019, 193). Brokers bridge the communities of practice by “processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives” (Wenger 1998, 109). To explain brokerage in digital history, Kemman also draws upon a review of Wenger’s concept that diverges two dimensions of brokerage, “bias, the extent to which the broker is closer to one community than the other. Here I found that leaders of digital history collaborations tended to come from history. The bias of brokers was thus towards history. The second dimension is cohesion, the extent to which one or both sides are cohesive groups or loose individuals. Cohesion is linked to group identity, so that [in trading zones] a cohesive community could be more likely to reject a broker as not part of their group” (Kemman 2019, 193).

76 See Chapter 1, C²DH, a laboratory of historical uncertainty.

77 Some elements of my crossroads overlap with Lisa Spiro’s proposed values for digital humanities – openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness and diversity (Spiro 2012) – my focus, however, is more concentrated in what could be the better context for favouring, specifically, digital history practices. In doing so, I base my speculations on my first-hand experience and on some critical literature I encountered in the past 12 years since I started to study the effects of digital technology in historiographical operation. My BA’s monograph, written between 2008 and 2010, was exactly about it (Lucchesi 2015).

78 For a detailed discussion on the trading zones of digital history, digital history brokers and infrastructuring, see Kemman, 2019.

79 The task of developing these guidelines, however, is a demanding one, as the constant evolving character of digital technology continuously brings up new forms of digital representation and digital objects. On this matter, Rockwell dissects the Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages, by the MLA’s Committee on Information Technology focusing on the challenges of a specific guideline that reads “Review work in the medium in which it was produced” poses challenges for the evaluation of digital work very seldomly reviewed in formal review, such as tools (Rockwell 2011). Based on literature on interdisciplinary quality assessment, Julie Thompson Klein proposes a quite useful composite of indicators also adding factors for evaluation of interdisciplinary dimensions of digital scholarship and teaching (Klein 2014, 145–46). In 2015, the American Historical Association published their Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians (AHA, 2015) developed by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians. In this document, they propose a working definition of digital history as a “scholarship that is either produced using computational tools and methods or presented using digital technologies” and see the creation of digital platforms and tools as “as alternative modalities of scholarly production”, see:

https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history/guidelines-for-the-professional-evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-by-historians.

80 During the #dhnord2017 conference, organised by C²DH and Maison européenne des sciences de l’homme et de la société held in Lille, from 27-29 November 2017, during the Q&A of the conclusive round table, the issue of training in digital history was raised, and one of the challenges on this front was identified under the dilemma of “training the trainers” in the lines of “we need to train the future generations of historians” to face the problems discussed in the conference and creating a critical mass that may also take part in the training of the yet to come generations (written note taken by myself). Speakers intervening at the roundtable: Andreas Fickers, Michael Frisch, Mareike König, James Mokhiber, Stéphane Lamassé, Serge Noiret, Sean Takats, Manfred Thaller, Gerben Zaagsma.

81 Original passage in French: “Mais les murs sont si hauts que, bien souvent, ils bouchent la vue”.

82 ‘Digital Humanities Luxembourg’ (DHLU 2012), organised by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE) and the University of Luxembourg in March 2012, as part of their joint research programme ‘DigitalHumanities Luxembourg: the future of research in humanities and social sciences’. To the programme, see: https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/the_digital_humanities_luxembourg_symposium_dhlu-en-4adc1f1d-13ba-47c8-bf84-f23c1f69c44d.html

83 As in note taken by Pascal Föhr (2017, 09).

84 Comment of the artist: “This image was made in October 2011, just as Occupy Wall Street was flowering in NYC. It is based on the movement’s Declaration, written by consensus and agreed upon by the NYC General Assembly of OWS in the first weeks of the occupation. The inner circle is the list of grievances from that document, and the outer two rings of themes were decided on through a crowd-sourced editing process that took place in Zuccotti Park. Hundreds of people contributed to this image, and it was often distributed as an outreach tool for OWS, as an answer to questions like “But what is this movement about?” See: https://justseeds.org/product/flowchart-of-the-declaration-of-the-occupation-of-nyc/

85 Forthcoming volume, the author shared the manuscript with me. – Thanks for this too, Andreas.

86 Kemman discussed this issue in his analysis of inter-languages between trading zones, observing the need for a discursive proficiency to operate between different communities of practices. See (Kemman 2019, 196)

87 After “Arguing with Digital History Workshop” (September 15–16, 2017) the group sensitised the two-day discussion on a compelling white paper. In “Digital History & Argument” they propose a greater dialogue between historians and out digital history addressing the problematic arguments made through digital collections and digital public history have not been comprehensively incorporated into larger historiography conversations featured in, so-called, traditional scholarship formats, e.g. academic books and journals. They write: “On the one hand, it aims to demonstrate to the wider historical discipline how digital history is already making arguments in different forms than analogue scholarship.

On the other hand, it aims to help digital historians weave the scholarship they produce into historiographical conversations in the discipline. The responsibility for integrating digital history with argumentation thus rests both with the digital historians who make implicit or explicit historical arguments and with the rest of the profession who must learn to recognise them.” (Arguing with Digital History working group 2017)

88 This feeling has a pre-history, and the anecdote is worthy. In 2016, a few months after beginning my PhD research at the University of Luxembourg I gave a presentation about my research project in the International Conference “Luso-Luxemburguês - Recherches sur la migration portugaise au Luxembourg” (https://wwwfr.uni.lu/research/fhse/dhum/research_areas/history/news_events/luso_luxemburgues_recherches_sur_la_migration_portugaise_au_luxembourg), in which I happen to be one of the co-organisers together with my colleague Thierry Hinger from the Institute for History. In that very first presentation, I spoke about the methodology I wanted to apply in my project and highlighted open-ended aspects of working with the digital and the need of experimenting something new. It was a rather essayistic presentation compared to what other scholars were presenting. Overall, close colleagues seemed to like my presentation and made interesting comments during the social event, at the end. However, and this was striking, in an event dinner, I was directly confronted by another woman scholar who said (1st) that it was absurd that I was giving presentations in an international conference of that level before having finished my research; and that (2nd) what I had were mostly speculations and real scientific work is not based on speculation but with objectivity and facts; finally (3rd) the critics and my appetite at the dinner ended up with the remark on my PowerPoint having “too many pictures”. That encounter led me to many thoughts on the line of impostor syndrome, especially because I was already feeling “not belonging” as I had recently arrived from Brazil, where academia has substantially different etiquettes. Along the way, when the tensions between what I projected and what was being shaped in the experiment became too high, due to frustrations on setbacks and insecurities about the lack of technical skills, that very conversation used to dance in the back of my mind. A colleague that was in the audience later told me that on the very occasion, during my presentation, she heard someone saying something in the lines that “this is not serious history”.

89 Usage statistics can always be problematic and big figures are often misleading. Nevertheless, even if we cannot be sure about the numbers, some figures about Zotero are evidence, at least, of the eminent interest the tool attracts. Sean Takats wrote about some figures, and the statistics issue, almost a decade ago. Back then, Zotero had about four million downloads, more than 620.000 accounts and, on the very day he wrote the text (21 May 2011), 275,000 instances of Zotero were run. See: http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/21/on-usage-figures/

90 The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. In the Valley’s digital archive, users can explore original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, from Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War. See:

https://valley.lib.virginia.edu/

91 See: http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/

92 See: http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/xslt/servlet/XSLTServlet?xml=/xml_docs/ahr/article.xml&xsl=/xml_docs/ahr/article.xsl&section=tools&area=record&piece=&list=&item=

93 See Chapter 4 for analysis of the harvested material, section The Memorecord’s Cooking.

94 When my PhD research proposal obtained a favourable review by the Luxembourg Research Fund evaluation committee, it included a table of ethical issues that has to be fulfilled and one specific section of the application raising concerns on ethical issues and data protection since the very beginning of the project conceptualisation in 2015. Before being allowed to launch Memorecord, I also submitted an application to the University of Luxembourg Ethics Review Panel. In that application, I referred to two main ethics guidelines, the Principles for Oral History and Best Practices for Oral History (http://www.oralhistory.org/about/principles-and-practices/) and the University of Luxembourg Policy on Ethics in Research

(http://wwwen.uni.lu/content/download/55603/657601/file/University%20of%20Luxembourg%20Policy%20on%20Ethics%20in%20Research_102012.pdf) and to other crowdsourcing projects that were references to me. Examples of other projects with similar privacy policies can be found on the American StoryCorps, which also collects people’s real stories, see: https://storycorps.org/privacy-policy/; and, in Europe, another well-known initiative that does similar crowdsourcing activities is Europeana (e.g. for instance, in the collections for Europeana 1914-1918 project, available here http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/collections/world-war-I), which Terms and Uses regulating the data usage can be seen here: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/rights.html. However, in none of these documents was the dilemma with the social media comments section covered for a situation similar to Memorecord’s.

95 For more on Herodotus and his work about “otherness”, see Hartog (2009); For the historicism turn and the birth of history as a discipline with objectivity, see Reill (1975) and Barros (2012); For the emergence of the scholarly tradition, see Grafton (1999); For the lesser scholarly and more popular kinds of historians, even before the emergence of public history as field, see Hilliard (2001) and Grele (1981); For a sense and context of applied history, see Conard (2002).

96 An example of these rehearsals could be seen at a recent exhibition curated by Azoulay, under the provocative title of Errata. In eight different projects, she makes an attempt to “intervene with the imperial grammar of photographic archives, to interfere in imperial knowledge printed in books, to unlearn imperial structures such as nation states, borders or status of “undocumented” imposed as fait accompli and to foreground the imperial origins of numerous gestures inherited by scholars, artists, photographers and curators, and used in their practices.” See: https://fundaciotapies.org/en/exposicio/ariella-aisha-azoulay-errata/ Accessed May 29, 2020.

97 The idea of digital bricolage has been introduced to me by Frédéric Clavert, in a talk he gave at C²DH about his data-mining experiment with 4 million+ tweets on First World War, which I had the pleasure to serve as a mediator and offer some comments (2018). Clavert was dealing with a massive collection of tweets that is utterly different in terms of content and scale from the one I handle at Memorecord. He started saving tweets on the First World War out of curiosity a few years ago, looking for the online echo of the commemoration of the centenary. Without institutional support, he started the bricolage to set up his collection system using 140dev, an Open Source PHP script (for Twitter Streaming API – http://140dev.com), Gephi (for visualisation – https://gephi.org/) and IRaMHuTeQ (for data analysis – http://www.iramuteq.org/) plus a home-based server (Clavert, Majerus, and Beaupré 2015). The idea of digital bricolage, however, also circulated elsewhere with other nuances, but always related to the possibility of creative playful experiments with digital assets and tools (Rüling and Duymedjian 2014).

98 As summarised on Wikipedia, “[o] ne of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients.”. Cf. Snapchat on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapchat

99 A few references on the press coverture about Memorecord: Bender, Nathalie. 2019. “Radio 100,7 - Invité am Moies-Magazin - Anita Lucchesi.” Radio 100,7 - Invité am Moies-Magazin - Anita Lucchesi. Luxembourg. https://www.100komma7.lu/podcast/235080; Correia, José Luís. 2018. Bom Dia - Entrevista com Anita Lucchesi https://www.facebook.com/grupobomdia/videos/entrevista-com-anita-lucchesi/10155872736412739/; Lëtzebuerg, Tageblatt. 2018. “Mosaik der Erinnerungen: Anita Lucchesi untersucht die Migration in Luxemburg.”; Tageblatt.lu(blog). November 23, 2018. http://www.tageblatt.lu/headlines/mosaik-der-erinnerungen-anita-lucchesi-untersucht-die-migration-in-luxemburg/.; Pairoux, Kristel. 2018. “Faire societé ensemble - Il faut construire une histoire plurielle.” CLAE, October 12, 2018.; Spigarelli, Isabel. 2018. “Coverstory: Memo - Digitalisierte Geschichte.” Revue, July 11, 2018.; Travelli, Paolo, and Fabio Bottani. n.d. “Radio ARA - Voices by PassaParola 519 10022018 – Storia Digitale.” Accessed January 10, 2019. https://podcast.ara.lu/blog/2018/02/10/voices-by-passaparola-519-10022018-storia-digitale/.

100 At least four posts were deleted during the crowdsourcing period due to the fact of Instagram participants updating their accounts to private. The posts were removed from Memorecord website.

101 Original passage in French: stratégies de (des)appurtenance, deportugalisation et/ou luxembourgisation.

102 Of course, I consider that history experts and the general public may have different styles of reading and likewise, a distinct way to engaged with the discussions of each chapter in a depth that may variate according to the preferences and interest. However, publishing the thesis online was considered to be a way to allow readers, both professional and non professional historians, to get through its contents in a free navigation flow that does not end purely in textual language, but allows the audience to engage with audiovisual material and eventual hyperlinked connections in a non linear fashion. This might, I expect, cause alluring to those not interested in an exhaustive reading, and could benefit from the layered way in which information is structured on the digital platform. See: http://pupmemo.uni.lu/

103 Originally written in French: “en histoire, comme ailleurs, ce qui compte, ce n’est pas la machine, mais le problème. La machine n’a d’intérêt que dans la mesure où elle permet d’aborder des question neuves, originales par les méthods, les contenus et sourtout l’ampleur.”

104 * AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of the high-definition video developed jointly by Sony and Panasonic. An AVCHD file is not a single video file. However, a hierarchical file structure derived from the file structure common to Blu-ray disc, capable of storing several hours of video in high-definition (HDTV 720p and 1080p). One AVCHD file contains multiple video clips. Although it is becoming a ubiquitous video format to the day, Mac OSX does not handle them very well just yet, nor its internal MTS files (short for MPEG Transport Stream, the single video saved in AVCHD format). For this reason, the manual editing of the video clips was made necessary to assemble them in one single publishable file.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Framework: theory and working concepts 21

From where I stand: a space and a time 21

Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, a laboratory of historical uncertainty 26

Doing history in a Digital Age 28

Bem-vindo ao Luxemburgo

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