Minorities Records. Transfering cultural diversity into the digital (Weblog)

The weblog’s primary objective is to provide reliable information on the current digitization process on historical ethnical minorities in Europe. For that purpose the editorial team will write themselves papers – especially on the numerous German minorities in Eastern and Southeastern Europe – and also ask involved librarians and archivists across Europe for their contributions by presenting their institution’s digitization activities on minority heritage. A special attention is to be given to urgent desiderata for digitization, e.g. for highly endangered stocks of cultural materials which need to be digitized at the soonest; establishing, promoting and improving international collaboration for successfully conducting joint projects is therefore an important goal of the information service provided by the blog. A part of that is also the informing on technical issues like e.g. standards or new technologies and the evaluation of possibilities for the division of labour (e.g. providing Optical Character Recognition for Armenian, Gothic or Hewbrew letters or long-term digital preservation).

Secondary the blog will develop that accumulated knowledge to viable concepts for digitization strategies which are to be reviewed and debated by the community. In order to further advance such concepts the blog will also serve as Continue reading →

Joan Wallach Scott’s Keynote (1.2 Hours) at the „4. Schweizerische Geschichtstage: Formen der Macht“ (09.-11.2016, Lausanne) via infoclio.ch. Das Fachportal für die Geschichtswissenschaften der Schweiz (Web)

In her 1986 article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, J. W. Scott insisted that gender „provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction. When historians look for the ways in which the concept of gender legitimizes and constructs social relationships, they develop insight into the reciprocal nature of gender and society and into the particular and contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics.“

Since writing that article some 30 years ago, J. W. Scott has been exploring the ways in which psychoanalysis enhances those kinds of readings. In this talk she suggested that one approach to the operations of power is to look for the ways in which normative notions of sexual difference are deployed. For historians the analysis is particularly useful because the meanings of gender are, like differences of sex, impossible to ‚fix‘. Their very mutability allows us to identify change not only in the meanings of gender itself, but in the political investments of individuals, groups, races, states and nations. Read – and hear – more … (Web)