Mosa Historia

Humanities projects, and especially historians, work with large amounts of data that come from various sources and are often unstructured. Ingesting these data into an easy-to-use database that permits complex data queries or even data visualisations is often unattainable. The blog post addresses this challenge and presents workflows in which relational or graph databases are optional end-products rather than the starting points of the research process. The DigiKAR geohumanities project which analyses spatial relations in Electoral Mainz and Electoral Saxony of the early modern period uses a combination of spreadsheets, scripts, and sample databases. These experiences can inspire other humanities projects to find low-maintenance alternatives to expensive multi-user databases with graphic user interfaces.

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Recently, Ferenc Laczó (Assistant Professor in History at FASoS) has co-edited a large collective volume titled A Global History of Hungary, 1869-2022 (in the Hungarian original: Magyarország globális története, 1869-2022). In this blog, Laczó sketches the overarching concept of this volume and discusses how it came to fruition.

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Lea Beiermann, PhD candidate at FASoS, works in the History Department and is a member of the MUSTS research group. Her NWO-funded PhD project looks at the history of microscopy in the mid-nineteenth century. In her blog, Lea deals with how microscope-using scientists started to share and preserve their slides during the mid-nineteenth century, and the kind of work that went into that.

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Why do historians like to write alone? In this blog article, Camilo Erlichman reflects on the reluctance of historians to engage in collaborative forms of writing, tracing the reasons to the development of the discipline in the 19th century. In doing so, he argues that while mono-authorship will remain a key pillar of the discipline, historians need to embrace more emphatically collective forms of writing: not to succumb to the logics of marketisation, but to diversify their sources and widen their intellectual horizons.

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Dr Monica Vasile, PhD Candidate

Scholars warn we are currently facing a mass extinction event. To support this claim, they estimate catastrophic extinction rates. By comparison, the number of documented extinctions validated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List is tiny. Documenting the fact that a species is no more, or that it draws near the brink, proves to be a difficult task, prone to contention. Even for conspicuous species living in wide-open spaces, such as the Przewalski’s horse in the Mongolian steppes, expeditions and sightings were shrouded in controversy. How does one prove that a species has disappeared from the wild? This blog gives a glimpse into what it means to survey the wilderness and document the elusive existence of endangered species. It offers a snapshot into how humans have encountered and argued over the last surviving free-living Przewalski’s horses in the 1960s.

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Dr Ferenc Laczó recently authored a blog on the East-West divide within the European Union from a historical perspective. This was published on the website of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. Please find his contribution here: https://recet.at/blog/november-30-2020/.

Prof Dr Raf de Bont holds the chair History of Science at FASoS, and currently runs the research project Moving Animals: a History of Science, Media and Policy in the Twentieth Century, funded through a VICI grant of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The project seeks to break new ground in studying the changing relationship between humans and ‘wild’ animals. He is the recipient of the 2019 Dr. Hendrik Muller Prize for his contributions to environmental history and history of science.

In March 2020, in the midst of the Covid crisis, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte gave a press conference. He called upon his compatriots to stop hoarding canned food, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. The word he used to describe such behaviour was ‘hamstering’ (in Dutch: ‘hamsteren’) – a term that refers to the habit of hamsters to collect grain stocks in their underground burrows. Rutte explicitly denounced such hoarding as ‘unnecessary’, ‘unkind’, and ‘nasty’, and his sign language interpreter reinforced the image by impersonating a particularly ghastly-looking animal. This mobilization of hamster images might surprise, given the fact that, today, the animal seems particularly associated with cuteness.  Yet, in order to understand the morally charged meaning of the term ‘hamstering’, we need to move beyond the hamster’s current reputation and explore human engagements with the animal over the long term.

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