TRACE - Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960

In September 2019, I joined the NWO-funded project TRACE (PI: Carolyn Birdsall) as a postdoc in charge of subproject 2, the digital humanities component of the project.

Coming from a background in Jewish cultural and media studies as well as digital humanities, my task is to explore the data collected as part of our research. I will also be investigating the whereabouts of the protagonists of National Socialist radio politics after 1945.

In subproject 2 of TRACE, I aim to critically assess and test the possibilities of combining tools and techniques for the project’s multi-component, comparative analysis of conflict heritage. Previous research on related topics mainly used archaeology-based tools to examine historical layers in the built environment, whereas historical research about cultural looting during World War II has rarely deployed digital tools to help in mapping geospatial flows or valorisation processes. My design and development of the team’s online repository will provide further scope for presenting digital tool criticism results, as well as the development of linked-data approaches for presenting how factors of time, space and movement connect to objects, people and structures in transnational conflict heritage. In a first pilot study, I will therefore focus on surveying and testing appropriate tools for structured data, using a select corpus of historical catalogues for radio collections (1931-1960), which will allow me to generate initial findings on how to use historical metadata about cultural objects/collections to track time, space and relationships. In this first phase of the subproject, I will also formalise the research data management plan agreed upon by the project team, particularly in relation to archival research (e.g. note-keeping, source collection) and related workflows.