CEDHAR

Center for Digital History Aarhus

The purpose of CEDHAR is to bring researchers together in order to improve and to develop knowledge of all four key dimensions of digital history. This is crucial in order to uphold the quality in scholarly work at a time where digital processes are influencing everything from information retrieval and data collection, to methods, publication, and outreach in historical research. CEDHAR provides scholars at ARTS with a clearly defined and highly visible arena for exploring and supporting work in all four dimensions:

1. Digital methods focuses on the use of digital approaches and supporting IT skills for research purposes.

2. Digital archives focuses on how the increased production and use of digital archives influence the nature of archival institutions and every-day research practices.

3. Digital history communication focuses on what the democratization of historical knowledge and uses of the past online means to historical research and outreach strategies.

4. New digital sources focuses on the new types of born-digital sources that historians increasingly need to handle, for instance the archived Web.

CEDHAR affiliated projects

Modeling everyday life in Cold War Aarhus (MELICA) is a project that aims to suggest new ways of thinking about the local impact of the Cold War and advance state of the art Cold War history by conducting a study of civil defence built structures in Aarhus. We combine computerised tools and methods such as distant reading and agent-based modeling with close analysis of historical sources to examine how many shelters were built, when, where and why, how the shelters shaped urban space as well as testing the shelter system in a simulated emergency situation. MELICA creates a publicly accessible, enriched digital archive that facilitates future research and teaching and makes a highly pertinent topic of science available to the public. The project is funded by Augustinus Fonden and runs 2024-2026.

Voices of the People is a digitization and transcription project aimed at making the autocracy’s petition protocols (1699-1799) accessible and searchable. This enables, among other things, systematic digital analyses of the extensive text corpus of approximately 200,000 pages. The content of the petition protocols is broad, and an important secondary goal of making the project accessible is therefore to highlight the value of the petition protocols as a source for understanding multiple aspects of 18th-century history across all social strata.

WEB CHILD combines the history of childhood and the Web to investigate how the emergence of the Web as a new interactive and connected medium with little adult oversight impacted childhood at the turn of the millennium (c. 1995-2005). To study the Web’s wide-ranging influence, three countries have been selected for comparison: the United States, Denmark, and South Korea. These were all digital pioneers, but had very different cultures of childhood. WEB CHILD project is supported by ERC and runs from 1 April 2025 to 30 March 2030.

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