NIA-logues: Digital Humanities – Digital History: Potentials and Pitfalls

About the lecture series:

This lecture is part of the NIA-logues lecture series launched by the Norwegian Institute at Athens in 2022. NIA-logues, a non-conventional series of discursive lectures, aspires to bring together scholars from Norwegian and Greek institutions working on similar fields, disciplines, and topics to establish an alternative pathway of communication and cooperation among the two parts by creating an environment of direct and less mediated contact.

About the lecture:

Haakon A. Ikonomou and Despoina Valatsou discuss the potentials and pitfalls of digital humanities with offset in their current projects. A dialogue across disciplines and historical periods - comparing and contrasting digital archives and crowdsourcing on the 1821 Revolution with digital research tools on international organizations - the two scholars address topics, such as: How has the “digital turn” changed the ways we work? How can digitality facilitate history from below? How does the visual aspect of digital humanities change our heuristic process and how we communicate with broader audiences?

The speakers:

Dr. Ηåkon A. Ikonomou is a Gerda Henkel Fellow and Associate Professor at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. Ikonomou is a historian of international organizations, global governance, and internationalism in the 20th century, specializing in international bureaucracy and diplomacy. He is the director of the Europe and International Cooperation research group at the Centre for Modern European Studies; head of the "Visualizing the League of Nations Secretariat" digital research project, and Book review and online media editor of "Diplomatica" (published with Brill). His most recent publication is the co-edited volume "Global Biographies. Lived History as Method" with Manchester University Press.

Dr. Despoina Valatsou is an Adjunct Lecturer of Digital Humanities at the Department of Theory & History of Art of the Athens School of Fine Arts, where she also conducts postdoctoral research on “Digital Public History and Historical Culture: Designing an Original and Innovative Crowdsourcing Project for 1821”. Valatsou is a historian with a postgraduate degree in Digital Media (University of Sussex) and a Ph.D. in History (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens). Her academic interests involve Digital Humanities, Digital History, Crowdsourcing and Public History, and Memory Studies. She has participated in numerous research projects at the Historical Archives of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. She currently works at the Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH) with academic and administrative responsibilities, and she is also a member of the academic committee of the Centre’s “1821 Digital Archive” research program.

Info:

The lecture is intended for a wide audience and will be held in English.