DHLU 2013 was co-organised by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe (CVCE), together with the Jean Monnet Chair in History of European Integration (University of Luxembourg, FLSHASE) and its research programme 'Digital Humanities Luxembourg' - DIHULUX (research unit Identités-PolitiquesSociétés-Espaces (IPSE)) as well as the University of Luxembourg's Master's in Contemporary European History. Its aim was to bring together likeminded researchers with a vested interest in the topic of “Reading historical sources in the digital age”. The contributions to the symposium in this publication are structured around the following research clusters: • Distant/close reading - Data retrieval, analysis and visualization As increasing quantities of historical data are published on the web, the prospect of making simple use of these data - i.e. reading PDFs on screen or printing them out to read on paper - is becoming increasingly less realistic and methodologically sustainable. What options are open to researchers, and what are the concomitant methodological issues? This cluster will cover various themes, including: (big) data, text mining and semantic analysis, quantitative data approaches, network analysis, data visualization (including GIS), and more generally the links between distant and close readings. • Writing history & Assessing scholarship Once researchers begin to use digital thematic collections, will it change the way they write history? This cluster includes practical papers (e.g. on how to cite digital resources) as well as more theoretical ones. It embraces issues relating to the validity and quality of data and research outputs based on digital thematic collections, as well as the evaluation of those collections as a new kind of online scholarly publication.
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Lars Wieneke (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) Catherine Jones (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) Marten Düring (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) Florentina Armaselu (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) René Leboutte (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)