Submitted Abstract
This book collects the proceedings of the 2009 international conference “Contemporary history in the digital age”, that took place in Luxembourg. Until now, contemporary history has tended to remain somewhat on the sidelines with regard to the use of digital resources.With the digitisation of existing archives and the advent of huge quantities of ‘born-digital’ primary sources, contemporary history have to start using new tools. Ten or twenty years from now, it is conceivable that some of our work will rely solely on digital sources. Ideally, if we are to be ready in time, the tools we will have to use then need to be designed now.The first objective of this book is – through contributions which describe positive and negative experiences, set people thinking about the job of the historian in the digital age and take stock of new tools available to historians and the ways they can be used – firstly to serve as an introduction to historians wondering about digital technology, and, for our more experienced colleagues, to share experiences that they will find useful.The second object of the book is to be part of the digital humanities and digital history movement. Digital humanities, which is a highly structured discipline in English-speaking countries, is also to be found in Europe. These proceedings seem to us today to be part of a rising tide of awareness of digital humanities in Europe which has led to the emergence of national associations for digital humanities, as, for example, in Italy in May 2011. The symposium on ‘Contemporary history in the digital age’ set itself the goal of identifying those factors, new ones if possible, that would give contemporary historians a better understanding of such digital tools and methods as would be useful to them now and in the future, and help them find their place in a digital environment which is increasingly becoming a feature of their work but which often leaves them highly mistrustful, not to say downright hostile.1 Digital processes have already taken over a great swathe of our lives as researchers: for example, the whole scholarly publishing chain — apart from its end-product, an actual book or journal — is now systematically computerised. Magazines and journals are nowadays often available in digital form, and sometimes only in that form.This goal was succinctly expressed in a question included in the call for contributions: ‘Will the Web provide us with a better understanding of history?’ A simple, perhaps naive question, but one which, for the whole two days of the symposium, helped us draw out a number of major themes which, we hope, will attract the attention of those of our colleagues, historians or otherwise, who give thought to where their profession is heading in the digital era.