According to recent literature, the idea of Europe as it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided closely with the concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’. This article examines this claim by testing the existence of modernity, civilization and Europe as a conceptual ‘trinity’ by using digital history techniques. Word frequencies, collocations and word embeddings are employed to analyze four Dutch newspapers (Algemeen Handelsblad, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, De Telegraaf, De Leeuwarder Courant) spanning the period 1840–1990. It transpires that semantic relations between the three elements are hardly visible; in so far as they appear, they hardly constitute a close-knit ‘trinity’. Alternating combinations among the three components were more significant than direct connections between all three, while ‘the West’ was more central than Europe. These findings suggest that popular media like newspapers have a different take on culturalpolitical concepts than writings by the intellectual elite.

Computing and the use of digital sources and resources is an everyday and essential practice in current academic scholarship. The present article gives a concise overview of approaches and methods within digital historical scholarship, focusing on the question ‘How have the digital humanities evolved and what has that evolution brought to historical scholarship?’ We begin by discussing techniques in which data are generated and machine searchable, such as OCR/HTR, born‐digital archives, computer vision, scholarly editions and linked data. In the second section, we provide examples of how data is made more accessible through quantitative text and network analysis. The third section considers the need for hermeneutics and data‐awareness in digital historical scholarship. The technologies described in this article have had varying degrees of effect on historical scholarship, usually in indirect ways. With this article we aim to take stock of the digital approaches and methods used in historical scholarship in order to provide starting points for scholars seeking to understand the digital turn in the field and how and when to implement such approaches in their work.

How do digital media impact the meaning of iconic photographs? Recent studies have suggested that online circulation, especially in a memeified form, might lead to the erosion, fracturing, or collapsing of the original contextual meaning of iconic pictures. Introducing a distant reading methodology to the study of iconic photographs, we apply the Google Cloud Vision Application Programming Interface (GCV API) to retrieve 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic images between 1995 and 2020. We use document embeddings, a Natural Language Processing technique, to map in what contexts iconic photographs are circulated online. The article demonstrates that constantly changing configurations of contextual imagetexts, self-referential image-texts, and non-referential image/texts shape the online live of iconic photographs: ebbs and flows of slowly disappearing, suddenly resurfacing, and newly found meanings. While iconic photographs might not need captions to speak, this article argues that a large-scale analysis of texts can help us better grasp what they say.

and iguanodon.ai, Belgium

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