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What Algorithms Find in Latvian Exile Newspapers: Songs, Maps, and the Paradoxes of Digital Reading

Simon Donig, Dinara Gagarina and Timur Mitrofanov use computational analysis to gain new insights into how Latvian diaspora newspapers preserved cultural identity.

Topic modeling reveals how Latvian diaspora newspapers preserved cultural identity from the 1940s to 2000s. Our computational analysis of over 7,000 articles uncovers song festivals, Cold War geographies, and unexpected methodological lessons for digital humanities.

Topic Modeling zeigt, wie lettische Diaspora-Zeitungen von den 1940er bis 2000er Jahren kulturelle Identität bewahrten. Unsere computergestützte Analyse von über 7.000 Artikeln enthüllt Liederfeste, Geografien des Kalten Krieges und unerwartete methodische Erkenntnisse für die Digital Humanities.


How to read thousands of newspaper articles?

This was the question we faced when the National Library of Latvia granted us access to their digitized collection of Latvian exile press – 27 newspapers and journals, over 17,000 issues, and more than 780,000 articles published by diaspora communities from Australia to Canada between the 1940s and 2000s (this analysis represents a pilot study focused on English-language materials – roughly 7,000 relevant articles categorized via the Python langdetect library with a confidence level exceeding 70%). Traditional close reading would take ages. Instead, we turned to topic modeling – and specifically BERTopic – to discover what these communities wrote about and how they preserved their identity far from home.


Čikāgas Ziņas, Issue No. 25, May 1978

What Is Topic Modeling?

Topic modeling is a computational method that identifies recurring themes across large text collections. Imagine sorting thousands of documents into thematic folders. To achieve this, instead of you reading each one, an algorithm detects patterns of words that frequently appear together. A cluster containing election, vote, parliament, and party likely represents political coverage; one with church, pastor, congregation, and prayer points to religious life.

Traditional approaches like LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) have been used in digital humanities for over a decade, but often produce topics that are difficult to interpret. BERTopic, a newer technique, leverages transformer-based language models – the same technology behind ChatGPT – to better capture semantic meaning (for an accessible overview of available tools, see Egger & Yu, 2022). It understands that song festival is a single concept, not just two unrelated words. This makes it particularly suited for analysing historical newspapers, where cultural terms and multi-word expressions carry significant meaning.

The results surprised us – not because the algorithm found something entirely unexpected, but because it independently confirmed what historians have known about Baltic diaspora culture, while also revealing patterns we hadn’t anticipated.


Most popular topics (fragment of BERTopic visualization for 1-2-3-gram approach): Culture (Topic 1), Labor Camps (Topic 2), Science and Education (Topic 3), etc. Topic 0 is the largest cluster by document count, aggregating heterogeneous texts that do not fit into specialized clusters. Duplicate singular/plural forms in some topics (e.g., “law”/”citizenship law”) reflect intentionally minimal lemmatization, applied to pre-serve culturally specific vocabulary.

When the Algorithm Rediscovers Song Festivals

The largest thematic cluster in our English-language corpus – more than 200 out of 7,000 articles – centers on music, festivals, songs, opera, concerts, folk traditions, choirs, and dance. For anyone familiar with Baltic culture, this is no surprise. The Latvian Song and Dance Festival, a tradition dating back to 1873, has been a cornerstone of national identity. UNESCO recognized it as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage. But seeing the algorithm arrive at this conclusion independently, purely through statistical patterns in word co-occurrence, was a moment of validation.


Latvia. Riga. VII Latvian Song Festival. 1931. Photographer: unknown. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

When we refined our analysis from single words (unigrams) to three-word phrases (trigrams), the picture sharpened dramatically. Generic terms like “music” and “festival” became “Latvian song festival,” “Latvian community center,” and “Chicago Latvian community.” The exile press wasn’t just discussing music in the abstract – it was documenting specific community gatherings, venues, and cultural institutions that kept traditions alive thousands of miles from Riga.

Other major themes emerged with similar clarity each in its own temporal horizon within the corpus: forced labor camps and Soviet deportations, universities and academic life in exile, NATO membership of host countries and geopolitical advocacy, and church activities. These clusters tell a story of how displaced persons and communities maintained not just cultural practices, but also historical memory, educational institutions, and political engagement.

The Geography of Diaspora Memory

Beyond thematic analysis, we extracted nearly 40,000 geographic place mentions from the corpus. The spatial distribution of exile communities, it turns out, organized itself along three dimensions.

First, the lost homeland: Riga dominates with over 4,000 mentions, later followed by other Latvian cities and regions. The homeland remained central to diaspora consciousness even decades after displacement.

Second, the political adversary: Moscow appears over 2,460 times – more than any city except Riga. The Soviet capital was a constant reference point, whether in discussions of occupation, Cold War politics, or eventual independence movements.

Third, the new homes: the United States leads with mentions of Chicago, Washington, New York, and other cities totaling over 3,000 references. Australia follows (Sydney, Melbourne), then Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa). These weren’t just places where Latvians happened to live – they were sites of community building, cultural preservation, and political organizing.

What surprised us were the unexpected geographic references. Korea (both) with 621 mentions, Hungary 276, Afghanistan 241 – hot spots of Cold War confrontation. The exile press, it seems, was not merely nostalgic. It engaged actively with global politics, tracking conflicts that resonated with both their experience of Soviet occupation and the Cold War concerns of their host countries.

The Paradox of Perfect Scores

Such metrical results always carry the grain of aggregated errors. This is why digital historians control their results with various metrics. Here we must be honest about a methodological discovery that gave us pause. When we evaluated our topic models using standard coherence metrics – statistical measures of how well topic words hang together semantically, essentially asking „do these words make sense as a group?” – the highest-scoring results came from our bigram model. Good news, we thought initially.

But when we examined what these “coherent” topics actually contained, we found telephone directories, professional listings, and contact information. The algorithm had identified patterns that were indeed highly structured and internally consistent – but not the kind of information we were looking for – it identified a category of text or genre rather than for instance meaning-making.

This is a crucial lesson for computational humanities: statistical validity does not equal historical relevance. A topic capturing “Grand Rapids Mich,” “Silver Spring MD,” and “Los Angeles CA” might score perfectly on coherence metrics because these phrases always appear in the same structured format. These directory-style topics – assuming they represent address and subscription tables – reveal a lot about which exile locations were on the radar of the diaspora community. They could be used to map the geography of dispersal or reconstruct community networks. The lesson is that topic modeling is a serendipitous technology. It holds a lot of answers, if you know how to ask the right questions in relation to the algorithmic technology and the corpus.

The solution to tracing the meaning-making in the communities was combining multiple approaches. Our unigram model provided broad thematic categories with strong coherence. The trigram model captured specific cultural phrases despite lower overall scores. Together, they offered complementary perspectives that neither could provide alone (Burckhardt et al. 2019).

What Comes Next

This analysis represents a pilot study focused on English-language materials – roughly 7,000 articles from a much larger multilingual collection. The full corpus also includes Latvian, Russian, German, and Swedish texts spanning 27 periodicals and over 780,000 articles.

Our next steps involve extending the analysis to the complete multilingual archive using a multilingual transformer model such as multilingual-e5-large, comparing how identity themes manifest across languages, – specifically, how references to the homeland shifted around key political events like the 1990-1991 restoration of independence.

More broadly, we see potential for deeper temporal analysis – how was Latvian culture represented in the 1950s compared to the late 1980s? From there, we plan a comparative analysis across other exile press collections from the former Soviet space. Did Estonian, Lithuanian or Ukrainian diaspora newspapers show similar patterns of cultural preservation? The methods we developed for the Latvian corpus could be adapted for cross-cultural comparison.

The exile press represents a remarkable archive of how displaced communities maintained identity across decades and continents. Computational methods cannot replace careful historical interpretation, and they need rigid methodological and epistemological grounding – our experience with misleadingly high coherence scores illustrates that. When applied carefully, however, they can reveal patterns across thousands of documents that no individual scholar could read in a lifetime – not merely confirming what we already suspect, but generating new hypotheses and unexpected connections that would otherwise remain invisible.


References

Egger R and Yu J (2022) A Topic Modeling Comparison Between LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, and BERTopic to Demystify Twitter Posts. In: Frontiers in Sociology. Volume 7, 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.886498

Burckhardt, Daniel, Alexander Geyken, Achim Saupe, und Thomas Werneke. Distant Reading in der Zeitgeschichte. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer computergestützten Historischen Semantik am Beispiel der DDR-Presse. 2019. https://doi.org/10.14765/ZZF.DOK-1345.


Simon Donig is Head of the Research Department Digital History and Information Systems at Herder-Institut Marburg.

Dinara Gagarina and Timur Mitrofanov are research associates at the Department Digital History and Information Systems at Herder-Institut Marburg.


Title picture: European Latvian Song Festival, 1973, Cologne, Germany; from the private collection of Ilze Šakare; National Library of Latvia. Published here with kind permission of the copyright owner.

Koloniales Erbe und „Postkoloniale Angst“: Zum Stand der kolonialen Aufarbeitung vor Ort

Kim Todzi schreibt über die Aufarbeitung des kolonialen Erbes in Hamburg.

Die Aufarbeitung des kolonialen Erbes in Deutschland bleibt umkämpft: Trotz wichtiger Fortschritte erleben viele Initiativen zunehmende Gegenwehr. Kulturkämpfe, fehlende Institutionalisierung und prekäre Strukturen gefährden die bisherigen Erfolge und stellen die Erinnerungskultur vor neue Herausforderungen.

The reappraisal of Germany’s colonial heritage remains a contentious issue: despite significant progress, many initiatives are facing increasing resistance. Cultural conflicts, a lack of institutionalisation and precarious structures are jeopardising the successes achieved so far and posing new challenges for the commemorative culture.


Die aktuelle Diskussion um das neue Gedenkstättenkonzept der Bundesregierung macht deutlich, wie brüchig die bisherigen Fortschritte der kolonialen Aufarbeitung sind. Während in den vergangenen Jahren an zahlreichen Orten Initiativen entstanden sind, die koloniale Spuren in ihrer direkten Umgebung untersuchen, sichtbar machen und damit die lokale Erinnerungskultur verändern, wächst zugleich der Widerstand gegen die Aufarbeitung der Kolonialgeschichte. Ein aktuelles Beispiel dafür ist die Entscheidung von Kulturstaatsminister Wolfram Weimer, den Kolonialismus vollständig aus dem Gedenkstättenkonzept zu streichen, obwohl seine Vorgängerin Claudia Roth ihn ausdrücklich aufgenommen sehen wollte.

“Umbenennungsfest Mohrenstraße, Berlin, 18. August 2018.” Foto: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In zahlreichen Städten, Gemeinden und Regionen Deutschlands hatte in den vergangenen zehn Jahren eine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit dem materiellen und immateriellen Erbe des Kolonialismus begonnen. Postkoloniale Initiativen, Communities, Geschichtswerkstätten und Wissenschaftler:innen forderten immer vehementer eine Aufarbeitung des kolonialen Erbes. Und es begann allmählich Früchte zu tragen: Hamburg bekannte sich als erstes Bundesland bereits 2014 zur eigenen kolonialen Vergangenheit, verkündete einen „Neustart“ in der postkolonialen Erinnerungskultur, gründete 2015 die Forschungsstelle „Hamburgs (post-)koloniales Erbe“ und versprach ein stadtweites Erinnerungskonzept. Berlin richtete 2020 eine Koordinierungsstelle für Dekolonisierung ein, und Thüringen gründete 2021 die Koordinationsstelle „Koloniales Erbe“. Die Stadt Hannover begann 2023 einen Prozess zur Erarbeitung eines postkolonialen Erinnerungskonzeptes. Das Bekenntnis zur Aufarbeitung und Verantwortung für die Kolonialgeschichte fand sich zudem seit 2017 in den Koalitionsverträgen der deutschen Bundesregierungen. Neben der Erinnerung an den Nationalsozialismus und das DDR-Unrecht sollte die Auseinandersetzung mit der Kolonialgeschichte als dritte Säule das Grundverständnis der bundesrepublikanischen Erinnerungskultur prägen. Ihren Höhepunkt erreichte die gesellschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit 2020, als infolge der Black-Lives-Matter-Proteste allerorten auf Spuren der kolonialen Vergangenheit und den oftmals unkritischen Umgang damit hingewiesen und dagegen protestiert wurde.

Zugleich gibt es in den vergangenen Jahren stärkeren Gegenwind. Nicht nur in Großbritannien formieren sich reaktionäre Kräfte unter dem Banner „History Reclaimed“, auch in Deutschland haben konservative und rechte Medien und Parteien den Kolonialismus bzw. die Debatte um dessen Aufarbeitung als wichtiges erinnerungs- und identitätspolitisches Feld entdeckt und bearbeiten es intensiv. Hinzu kommt eine neue, breite Skepsis gegenüber allem, was auch nur den Anschein von „Postkolonialismus“ oder „Dekolonisierung“ im Namen trägt. Diese Entwicklung begann in Deutschland 2020 mit der Diskussion um die Ausladung des kamerunischen Historikers Achille Mbembe von der Ruhrtriennale und erreichte infolge der Attacke der Hamas auf Israel am 7. Oktober einen neuen Höhepunkt. Seitdem wird postkolonialen Ansätzen häufig vorgeworfen, den israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt einseitig in kolonialen Analogien zu deuten und damit antisemitische Muster zu verstärken. Die Folge: mehr Aufmerksamkeit für den Begriff „Postkolonialismus“ in den Medien, aber in negativem Kontext.

Das lässt sich quantitativ relativ einfach nachvollziehen. Bis 2020 wurden Begriffe im Zusammenhang mit Postkolonialismus, postkolonial etc. durchaus in den Medien erwähnt, doch eine Verdichtung der Nennungen ergab sich erst infolge der Black-Lives-Matter-Proteste einerseits und der Diskussion um Mbembes Ausladung und die Antisemitismusvorwürfe andererseits. Ihren absoluten Höhepunkt erreichte die negative Zuspitzung 2024.


DWDS-Verlaufskurve für „postkolonial“, erstellt durch das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, abgerufen am 19.9.2025.

Diese diskursive Verbindung führte zwar zu vielen Zeitungsartikeln und Meinungsbeiträgen, zugleich aber auch zu einer massiven Verkürzung. Dies ist nicht nur der Medienlogik geschuldet, die durch Simplifizierungen dazu beigetragen hat, sondern auch Ergebnis einer gezielten politischen Kampagne. Nikita Dhawan schreibt in ihrem 2024 erschienenen Buch „Die Aufklärung vor Europa retten“, dass dieser Diskurs – unabhängig von seiner geografischen und historischen Ausprägung – von der globalen Rechten instrumentalisiert werde, um eine „postkoloniale Angst“ zu schüren. Der rechtsextreme Aktivist Christopher Rufo, der zuvor erfolgreich eine Kampagne gegen die Critical Race Theory in den USA angestoßen hatte, schrieb bereits im Oktober 2023 auf Twitter, dass Konservative Begriffe wie Hamas, Black Lives Matter und Dekolonisierung bewusst miteinander verknüpfen sollten. Ziel sei es, diese Begriffe zu delegitimieren und ihre Bedeutung im gesellschaftlichen Diskurs zu untergraben.

Insofern treffen Initiativen und Projekte, die sich mit dem kolonialen Erbe befassen, auf ein gesellschaftliches Klima, das die Beschäftigung und kritische Aufarbeitung des Kolonialismus zunehmend skeptisch betrachtet. Erste Anzeichen eines Rückschlags machen sich daher an vielen Orten bemerkbar. So stellte die Stadt Hamburg 2024 die Finanzierung der Forschungsstelle „Hamburgs (post-)koloniales Erbe“ ein, Koordinierungsstellen in Thüringen und Berlin bleiben befristet, und obwohl es etwa ein politisches Versprechen in Bremen gab, das Thema anzugehen, wurde die Aufarbeitung dort nie systematisch angegangen.

Die koloniale Aufarbeitung bleibt prekär. Ein Beispiel für aktuelle Konfliktlinien zwischen Stadtentwicklung und Erinnerungskultur bietet etwa der Baakenhafen in Hamburg: Dieses 1,4 Kilometer lange Hafenbecken war integraler Bestandteil der kolonialen Infrastruktur und ab 1904 die logistische Drehscheibe des Völkermords an den Herero und Nama im heutigen Namibia. Der Baakenhafen wird heute als familienfreundliches Wohnquartier vermarktet, ohne dass seine koloniale Geschichte im Stadtraum sichtbar wäre. Gemeinsam mit Jürgen Zimmerer habe ich daher im Mai 2024 Einspruch gegen die damaligen Bebauungspläne eingelegt und die Einrichtung eines Dokumentations- und Lernorts gefordert. Zusätzliche Brisanz erhält die Debatte um eine angemessene Erinnerung vor Ort durch das 2025 vorgestellte Projekt einer von Klaus-Michael Kühne gestifteten Oper am Baakenhöft, der westlichen Spitze des Baakenhafens. Die Gefahr liegt auf der Hand: Ohne verbindliche Strukturen und dauerhaft bestehende, materielle Orte des Gedenkens drohen städtebauliche Projekte historische Verantwortung zu überdecken.

Dabei zeigt sich das zentrale Problem der postkolonialen Aufarbeitung in Deutschland – im Großen wie im Kleinen: Fast alle Vorhaben zur Aufarbeitung wurden als Projekte mit einem zeitlichen Ablaufdatum konzipiert. Sie sind damit dem Wohl und Wehe gesellschaftlicher und politischer Konjunkturen unterworfen. Schickte es sich noch vor fünf Jahren, als Politiker eine sensible Rede zu halten und für ein Pressefoto mit Aktivist:innen zu posieren, gelten angesichts eines zunehmend regressiven Zeitgeistes aktuell andere Prioritäten. Gerade deshalb braucht es eine dauerhafte Institutionalisierung der kolonialen Aufarbeitung. Denn diese kann nur nachhaltig erfolgreich sein, wenn sie auf verlässlichen Strukturen aufbaut.

Auch deshalb wäre die Aufnahme des Kolonialismus in das Gedenkstättenkonzept des Bundes notwendig gewesen: Sie hätte erstmals die Möglichkeit eröffnet, eine entsprechende bundesweite Struktur aufzubauen und dem Thema jene institutionelle Stabilität zu geben, die bislang fehlt. Stattdessen wird die fehlende Institutionalisierung nun paradoxerweise selbst zum Argument gegen die Aufnahme. Dabei handelt es sich freilich weniger um einen sachlichen als um einen taktischen Einwand, denn der inhaltliche Grund, den Kulturstaatsminister Wolfram Weimer im Sommer 2025 anführte, die Aufnahme der Erinnerung an den Kolonialismus würde die Singularität des Holocaust relativieren, wäre höchstens unter Ausblendung des DDR-Unrechts nachvollziehbar. Durch das nun jedoch erneut beschlossene Nebeneinander von Erinnerung an den Nationalsozialismus und an das DDR-Unrecht bei gleichzeitiger Ausklammerung der Kolonialgeschichte bleibt das Gedenkstättenkonzept in sich widersprüchlich.

Eigentlich sollte allen Beteiligten klar sein: Historische Aufarbeitung ist ein langer, oftmals schmerzhafter Prozess. Sie bedeutet im Falle des Kolonialismus, sich der eigenen Gewaltgeschichte an geographisch weit entfernten Orten und den anhaltenden Auswirkungen kolonialer Kontinuitäten und des strukturellen Rassismus konsequent zu stellen. Die Fragen, wer erinnert wird, wie erinnert wird und wessen Erfahrungen Anerkennung finden, sind zentral für jede demokratische Gesellschaft, die Aufklärung und Gerechtigkeit ernst nimmt. Wie kann eine Geschichtskultur aussehen, die auch die Würde derjenigen anerkennt, deren Geschichte und Leid bisher marginalisiert oder ignoriert wurden? Im Kern geht es um das Recht der Kolonisierten und ihrer Nachfahren, dass ihre Perspektiven Teil der offiziellen Gedenkkultur der ehemaligen Kolonialmächte werden.

Die koloniale Aufarbeitung in Deutschland ist keine reine Erfolgs- und Fortschrittsgeschichte. Sie ist ein dialektischer Prozess innerhalb einer fragilen deutschen Erinnerungskultur, die lange als außergewöhnlich selbstkritisch galt und die nun beweisen muss, dass sie diesem Anspruch auch in den kommenden Jahren und verschiedenen Kontexten gerecht werden kann.


Kim Todzi ist Historiker an der Universität Hamburg im Arbeitsbereich Globalgeschichte.


Titelbild: Bismarck-Denkmal in Hamburg-Altona. Es wurde im Zuge der Black-Lives-Matter Proteste mit roter Farbe beschmiert. Foto: Kim Todzi.

Beyond the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration: Navigating the Past at the Polar Museum

Mohammad Abu Al Hasan reflects on Antarctic legacies in the museum landscape.

How can museums effectively mediate the human history and heritage in Antarctica? Which curatorial strategies may help to bridge the vast geographical distance and foster public connection with the Antarctic continent?

Wie können Museen die Geschichte und das Kulturerbe der Antarktis wirkungsvoll vermitteln? Welche kuratorischen Strategien können dabei helfen, die enorme geografische Entfernung zu überbrücken und eine Verbindung der Öffentlichkeit zum antarktischen Kontinent herzustellen?


The Polar Museum of Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), University of Cambridge.

As a recipient of the 2025 Cambridge-Leibniz Museum and Collection Fellowship, I arrived at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in the University of Cambridge. My main project at the German Maritime Museum (DSM) focuses on Protecting and Managing Antarctic Heritage, so my fellowship research investigates how these far-reaching heritages are communicated in the museum space.

From the moment I walked into the Polar Museum of SPRI’s main building, I understood this was no ordinary institution. The grand entrance hall’s wall bears the final, poignant words of Captain Robert Falcon Scott: ‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale… These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…’. This is a profound act of affective curatorship. It acts as an immediate narrative plunge, utilizing the limited space of the museum to immerse the visitor in the context even before they reach the exhibition. It centers the museum’s narrative on tragic heroism, priming the visitor for a story of awe and admiration.

The Entrance and the famous quotation of Scott during his last days, providing the ground of the storytelling of the museum.

The community of the Scott Polar Research Institute truly comes to life every day at 10:30 a.m., when the original bell from Scott’s 1910 Terra Nova expedition ship is rung for tea. This ritual became a vital part of my time here, allowing me to meet other scientists and share our research. My task as a fellow was to understand how this powerful, memorial-centric narrative in the museum shapes our public understanding of Antarctica, especially in an age of urgent climate change.

Encountering the ‘Final Camp’: The Power of an Affective Past

My first week was a deep immersion. I spent days observing the museum objects and their labels, often having long discussions with Laura and Florence, two very dedicated members of the museum, who were always ready to help and discuss the exhibits.

The visitor’s path leads into the main event after the Arctic Exhibitions: the Antarctic gallery, unambiguously titled ‘Antarctic Exploration – the Heroic Age’. The title itself narrows the continent’s vast history to one mythologized period. Inside, the hierarchy is clear: the major portion of the space is for Robert Falcon Scott. A secondary focus is on Ernest Shackleton and a minor role is for Roald Amundsen, who appears mainly as the champion in the race to the pole, but Scott tragically became the ‘Second’.

The exhibition is a masterclass in narrative tension. The Scott display builds to the heartbreaking discovery of Amundsen’s tent, captured by Scott’s own despairing words: ‘Great God! This is an awful place…’.

The Display of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole.

The story culminates in the most affectively charged section, ‘The Final Camp’. This showcase functions as a secular shrine, displaying the intimate relics of the deceased men: a journal wallet, prayer books, and, in some pull-out drawers, their original, handwritten farewell letters. Opening those drawers is a transformative, private, and profoundly emotional encounter. This is a powerful storytelling tool: tangible relics of great men shaping a powerful national story.

The Present on the Periphery: The ‘Ice and Climate’ Gallery

After this immersive journey, the path concludes in the third and final gallery: ‘Ice and Climate: Exploration into Science’. This final, smallest gallery is positioned as a coda or epilogue to the main performance, tucked away by the exit. The atmosphere shifts from the dramatic and affective to the modern and moralistic. Clean, white blocks and digital screens feel more like a contemporary science center, signaling a move from storytelling to information.

This section highlights a core challenge of curating our current era, the Anthropocene. The contemporary story of climate change is abstract and lacks the narrative power of Scott’s letters. So how does the museum lend its authority? It powers the authenticity and historical weight of its most prized collections. To explain the Ozone Hole, the museum displays a telescope from the 1901 Discovery expedition. This is a deliberate strategy to leverage the museum collection by linking the historic era scientific observation with the present crisis. The implication is that the Heroic era objects are called upon as witnesses. The exhibition uses historic tools to ground climate data in a tangible lineage of polar observation.

A View from Bremerhaven: A Tale of Two Polar Narratives

My time at Cambridge went beyond just observing the objects; it involved engaging in critical dialogues with the scholars about the politics of Antarctic Heritage preservation. A dedicated discussion with the curator, Dr. David Waterhouse, offered essential insights into collection strategies, while Dr. Bryan Lintott’s guidance through the institutional archives reshaped my perspective on Antarctic Heritage Politics. These exchanges were crucial for my own research focus on how the value of the distant Antarctic Historic Sites and Monuments (HSM) can be mediated to the museum space to raise awareness and bridge the gap between the public and preservation efforts on that barren Antarctic landscape.    

Being from DSM and observing the museum exhibits of the Polar Museum gave the opportunity to do comparative analysis, which reveals two very different modes of polar curatorship. Cambridge exemplifies the memorial approach, using the affective power of relics to narrate a story of heroic sacrifice.

The Display of Sheckleton.

The German Maritime Museum (DSM) in Bremerhaven, by contrast, pioneers an experiential-scientific approach. Free from a foundational ‘Heroic Age’ legacy, its new exhibition axes the narrative squarely onto contemporary polar science, featuring an installation modeled on the modern research vessel Polarstern and using interactive media to make polar research an experience. This comparison is not about which model is better. It is about understanding how an institution’s identity shapes its narrative possibilities.

The Value of a Frozen Past

This brings me back to the core theme of the Leibniz Research Alliance: What is the ‘Value of the Past’ in our thawing, precarious present?

My time at the Polar Museum has left me reflecting on this very question. The ‘value’ here is not simple. It is also in the tensions the past reveals: the tension between a celebrated heroic narrative and an urgent climate crisis; a tension between the emotional relic in the museum and the real, threatened heritage site on the ice; and the tension between national memory and global responsibility.

The Decolonization attempt of the museum.

Addressing this, the Polar Museum in Cambridge has attempted to develop a dual strategy. The permanent gallery, with its powerful memorial focus, is not the whole story. It is complemented by a dynamic multi-platform strategy like temporary exhibitions, digital programming and educational outreach.

This seems to be the way forward: the permanent gallery fulfills the memorial duty, while the dynamic programming fulfills the contemporary one. The frozen past is not a roadblock; it is the foundation to build upon. The challenge, it seems, is not to discard these powerful, affective legacies, but to influence their power and critically connect them to the urgent, planetary responsibilities of the present.

The Display of the North-West Passage Expedition of Franklin.

Mohammad Abu Al Hasan is a Scientific Associate at the German Maritime Museum (DSM) – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History. Since April 2025, he is pursuing a PhD at the University of Bremen titled Protecting the Cultural and Scientific Heritage of Antarctica: Managing the Diversity, Ensuring Credibility for the Future.


Title picture: The Roof Painting illustrating the Arctic and the Antarctic.

All pictures in this blog post were taken by Mohammad Abu Al Hasan, 2025.

Uses of the past in post-Assad politics in Syria

Heike Liebau interviews Birgitte Holst on the role of the past in today’s politics in Syria.

In today’s Syria, various groups invoke particular versions of the past to define the nation and/or homeland. What role does the past play in the transition after the regime change in Damascus?

Im heutigen Syrien berufen sich verschiedene Gruppen auf bestimmte Versionen der Vergangenheit, um die Nation/Heimat zu definieren. Welche Rolle spielt die Vergangenheit beim Übergang nach dem Regimewechsel in Damaskus?


After the toppling of Bashar Al-Assad as President of Syria in December 2024, the issue of what directions the unfolding political transition in the country will take has been a key concern for Syrians but also for international political actors and researchers. To explore the question of what role the past plays in the transition, Birgitte Holst, an anthropologist specialised in Syria, hosted an international workshop on “The uses of the past in the political transition in Syria” at ZMO, Berlin, in October 2025. The workshop was made possible through funding from the Leibniz Research Alliance Value of the Past and after the workshop, Birgitte sat down with Heike Liebau, also of ZMO, to discuss key take-away points.


Heike Liebau: Since the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad, the political situation in Syria has developed rapidly. You suggest that the past plays a key role in these developments. Could you explain how?

Birgitte Holst: The government that has taken power in Syria is headed by Ahmad Al-Sharaa who is the long-time leader of the group HTS (Hay’a Tahrir Al-Sham). HTS also headed the coalition of Arab Sunni Islamist militant groups that executed the attack that toppled Assad. One of the things we have seen from this new government and their supporters is an emphasis on the fact that the state is now led by Sunnis. This goes against the wish of many religious minorities and secular Sunnis to have a more pluralistic state. Around 75% of Syrians are Sunni. They are mainly Arabs but Kurds, Turkmen and Circassians (who are ethnic minorities) are also predominantly Sunni. The remaining 25% of Syrians are religious minorities like Christians, Druze, Shia, Alawis and Ismailis. The divergent positions that various groups take on the question of who should lead the state invoke particular notions about the character of the Syrian nation or people (الشعب السوري) and the homeland (الوطن). These notions are based to some extent on these numbers, but various groups also invoke particular versions of the past to define the nation and/or homeland.

Map of the Umayyad Empire in 750 CE. From the Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1926, public domain.

HL: I can imagine that this would not be an easy task, as we also know from other contexts. What does that mean in practice? Can you give an example to illustrate?

BH: Government supporters have for instance invoked a reference to the Umayyad Empire as a historical precedent for the political period Syria is presently in. The Umayyad Empire (661-750) was one of the first Islamic Empires and its capital was Damascus. The reference evokes notions of Islamic greatness as the Umayyads helped spread Islam and took over lands as far away as what is now Spain[1]. The Umayyads still hold a specific significance for Damascus (which is also the present-day Syrian capital). A centre piece of that city is the Umayyad Mosque that stands proud and beautiful in the middle of the old town. When government supporters now claim that the toppling of Assad by Islamist groups amounts to a return of the Umayyads, they are thus suggesting that after decades when it was otherwise Damascus is finally being returned to its rightful rulers. The reference also holds within it a comment on the very recent past. The Umayyad Empire was a Sunni Islamic Empire, and the Shia forces from Iraq that were stationed in Damascus during the civil war (2011-2024) were said to curse the Umayyads. This caused much anguish for Sunnis, especially Sunnis from Damascus, who experienced the presence of these Shia troops as an occupation. They are now pleased that no one can curse the Umayyads in Damascus anymore.

HL: So, if I understand you correctly, this is not an official state version of current events, but the new government is indirectly sanctioning this Sunni vision. Are there counter stories for the idea of a homeland and the role of history? 

BH: Minorities and more secularly inclined Sunnis are invoking instead the past of multiethnic and multireligious conviviality. They point to the presence of Christians in Syria before the presence of Muslims. They point to the ways in which all ethnic and sectarian groups have impacted the landscape and culture of Syria. In some villages, Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, is still used. Some of the world’s oldest convents and churches are in Syria. Syria has historically been a land in which sectarian and ethnic minorities could find refuge when they fled persecution elsewhere.[2] Leading minority figures and secular intellectuals (Sunnis and otherwise) want this to be the model on which a new Syria is established.

HL: In October 2025, you hosted a workshop at ZMO, Berlin, where you discussed the issue of what renditions of the past various groups of Syrians have invoked as they have made claims about the Syrian state and homeland during the first year after the fall of Assad. What were the themes that emerged?

BH: One key theme was the question of the balance between claims about the past that are meant to address the issue of what Syria is as a whole versus claims about the past that are very particular and shape rather a group identity within the homeland. While supporters of the new government are trying to paint Syria as an Islamic country with significant religious minorities and some leading secular intellectuals are making the case that Syria is rather an ethnic and religious mosaic, some Sunni tribes in the north and some Druze in the south invoke local customs of political leadership or local histories of political conflict to formulate a particularistic political position in the present. Hence, an image of a Syria where some groups are attempting to define the nation while other groups are staking out their own claims to an equal place in the homeland emerged.

HL: What are the wider lessons we can take from this? What is the relevance for the study of other contexts?

BH: Syria is a land that has a historical experience with multiethnic and multireligious conviviality and conflict. This is bound to be an issue when the homeland – or the nation, if you want to use that term – and the state is defined anew. However, the relationship between various forms of multiplicity and the definition of the homeland and state can also be key to political contests in other contexts and a focus on them can therefore provide grounds for comparative research and for thinking across diverse settings. In Denmark we have seen an ongoing and intensifying debate over immigration that really took off in the mid-1990s. One recurrent theme has been the supposedly homogenous character of the Danish people. Some political groups claim that ethnic Danes have inhabited the land for centuries, others point to the Christian traditions that have shaped the cultural and social practices of the Danes for centuries and others again point to the struggles in the 20th century to build a welfare state and secure women’s rights as what defines the Danish nation. On the other side stand political groups that invoke a historical openness to others and a welcoming of those who needed safety as what makes Denmark Denmark. While these references to the past are meant to justify political claims, they also come to shape the political projects of various groups as the values they claim as Danish based on specific renditions of the past then become leitmotifs in their political programs. It is too early to say but it would be interesting to follow whether a similar development will unfold in Syria.

HL: That comparison could perhaps be the topic of another conversation. Thank you very much for these analyses and assessments.


[1] Hourani, Albert. 1991. A History of the Arab Peoples. London: Faber and Faber.

[2] Chatty, Dawn. 2017. Syria: The making and unmaking of a refuge nation. London: Hurst.


Title picture: The revolutionary Syrian flag adorns Al-Hijaz train station in Damascus in February 2025. The station was built in 1913 by the Ottomans but has long seized to be a functioning part of the train net in Syria. Image by Birgitte Holst.


By Heike Liebau, head of the research unit “State and Society”, and Birgitte Holst, associated researcher, both at ZMO, Berlin.

Between Sacredness and Bulldozers: The Struggle over Sulaiman-Too’s Cemeteries

Aksana Ismailbekova writes about the competing claims on Sulaiman-Too, the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyrgyzstan, and how memory and development clash in this context.

Sulaiman-Too in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, intertwines sacred space, religion, memory, and kinship. Cemeteries honor ancestors, transmit knowledge, and sustain community, yet state-led urban development threatens graves, exposing tensions between heritage, religious devotion, and modernization.

Sulaiman-Too in Osch, Kirgistan, verbindet heilige Erde, Religion, Erinnerung und Familien miteinander. Die Friedhöfe dort dienen der Ehrung der Vorfahren, sie vermitteln Wissen und stärken die Gemeinschaft, doch die staatlich gelenkte Stadtentwicklung bedroht die Gräber und offenbart Spannungen zwischen Kulturerbe, religiöser Hingabe und Modernisierung.


Sulaiman-Too (“Solomon’s Mountain”), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. For centuries it has been a pilgrimage site and sacred burial ground. Photo: Aksana Ismailbekova.

In Central Asia, as in many parts of the world, to disturb the dead is to disturb the moral order. Graves are not mere plots of land; they are nodes in a network of sacred relations. When the state burns or bulldozes cemeteries, it risks burning bridges of trust with its citizens. This intertwining of sacred space, memory, and community is not limited to cemeteries alone. It extends to other sites of devotion and pilgrimage, such as Sulaiman-Too, the sacred mountain which is located at the heart of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. The mountain is not only a geological landmark in the Fergana Valley, but also a spiritual place that has attracted pilgrims, saints, migrants, and ordinary believers for centuries. Sulaiman-Too was a site of ritual devotion. This mountain also has a reputation of being a holy place, hosting shrines, mosques, and sacred caves[1].

But Sulaiman-Too is also a place for the deceased relatives of many Osh residents. Since Soviet times, the mountain’s slopes are occupied by numerous cemeteries — the resting places of Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others who used to live in Osh and called this their home. Among the graves lie prominent Soviet-era singers, scholars, community leaders, and ordinary local people. The families of these people would get together during Ramadan to clean the graves, pray, and honour the memory of their ancestors. This commemoration is also an important family and religious ritual where all the family members within several generations would learn the importance of the remembrance of their deceased relatives, passing on oral knowledge about the names and lives of their ancestors that might otherwise be forgotten[2]. This is a key part of local kinship systems, linking past, present and future through social gatherings during Ramadan.

Yet, in recent years this sacred geography has collided with the ambitions of the current state. The recent cemeteries have been burned, graves dismantled, and bones exhumed in the name of urban development, road extension, and “green zones.” As the mayor of the city said ‘let us remove all the cemeteries in order to create a green zone to earn money from tourists’[3].

A Cemetery in Conflict

Local residents recall that during the Soviet Union, the state decided to use Sulaiman-Too for burials — partly due to a shortage of land, partly to free up fertile fields for cotton production. Between the 1960s and 1978, the southern cemetery was active; burials in the northern cemetery continued until as late as 2013. In total, more than a thousand people were laid to rest on the slopes.

By law, graves should not be reused or repurposed until at least 25–30 years have passed. Yet, according to residents, the state began pressuring families to relocate remains barely 13 years after the last burials. Bulldozers appeared. The mayor’s office spoke of re-cultivation, greening, and urban development[4].

Every year some tragic episodes occur where parts of the cemeteries are burnt in what are apparently wildfires. Official explanations point to climatic conditions and accidental fires. Some local residents, however, pin blame on a lack of water due to the state not maintaining irrigation systems, and others see it as an intentional attempt to clear space for new projects.

For many families in Osh, this was not only an outrage but a deep spiritual violation. As one elderly resident told me, “99% of those buried here are our ancestors. Some of the bones belong to people whose children and grandchildren are still alive, live nearby and visit them often. This place is sacred for Uzbeks, but also for all the peoples of Osh.”

Cemetries near the Sulaiman Mountain. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Three Days to Collect the Dead

In July 2025, the situation also escalated dramatically in other parts of Osh city, where the decision was to remove the cemeteries located near the local mahallas in order to widen the roads. Residents were told they had just three days to exhume their relatives and re-bury them elsewhere. Those who lived in Osh had to carry bones down the mountain and pay the required 3,000 som (30 Euro) fee for a new burial site[5]. But what about families who had migrated to Russia or Europe? Many could not return in time. Their ancestors’ remains were collected in heaps, with bones buried together in communal graves.

This rushed process left many residents in shock. An 88-year-old male informant, whose parents were buried on the mountain, recalled bitterly: “We have lived here for generations. How can they [the State] tell us our cemeteries must disappear? They want to make a park, a green zone. But our ancestors deserve peace. Let the deceased rest in peace, please!”

Development vs. Memory

The dispute over Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is not just about land. It is about ethnicity, such as Uzbek mahalla cemeteries versus the Kyrgyz state. It is also the clash between heritage and development, sacredness and business. The state envisions wide roads, recreational spaces, and tourist-friendly landscapes. But Osh residents envision continuity — a landscape where the living cares for the dead, where cemeteries signify communal identity, and inter-generational knowledge is transferred.

One of the most painful aspects has been the silencing of disagreement. Few locals dare to protest openly, fearing repercussions from the authorities. One man explained, “We cannot express our opinions, as this may lead to problems and pressure from the state.” Another added, “Please broaden the road on the other side of the road. But don’t disturb the graves.” Their requests, however, were ignored.

The cemetery of the Soviet deputy,Sultanov Kadyrmat, who used to be a member of national parliament. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Sacred Mountain, Global Heritage

The irony is that Sulaiman-Too is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its cultural and spiritual significance is internationally recognized. Tourists climb its trails, visiting sacred caves and shrines. Yet, the cemeteries — equally a part of its sacred landscape — are treated as obstacles to development.

For some locals, hope lies precisely in UNESCO. One community elder, Aziz, aged 76, expressed faith that international protection might shield their cemeteries: “UNESCO supported us before. They sponsored our houses. Tourists do not only come to see the mountain or the apartment blocks, but also to see the traditional houses of the people living there, their clothing, and their customs. Maybe they will protect us again.”

But UNESCO’s mandate is limited, and cultural heritage often becomes a battleground of selective preservation. Which parts of the past deserve saving? Which can be erased for the sake of “progress”?

Why Cemeteries Matter

To outsiders, it may be tempting to see cemeteries as replaceable, especially in crowded cities, such as Osh. Yet anthropology reminds us that cemeteries are not just about the dead — they are about the living. They are places where memory is protected, where families renew bonds across generations, where cultural identity is affirmed. This is the heart of the local kinship system, Islam and community.

It is precisely this deeper social and religious significance that makes current developments in Osh resonate with earlier historical struggles. There is a parallel between Soviet times and today: while burial rites were actively defended against state repression during the Soviet era, today they face new pressures—urban development and shifting social priorities—that threaten their continuity. In both cases, cemeteries symbolize a boundary for the community, marking a domain where religious identity and kinship ties must be protected. As Marianne Kamp (2010) argues, during the Soviet times death practices (i.e., performing funeral prayers) represented a kind of red line for Central Asians, and many were ready to defend them against the state at any cost, especially when other religious practices were repressed.[6]

Between Stones and Stories

The story of Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is unfinished. After the Soviet times, new state projects (i.e. between Soviet times and the current developments in Osh) threaten the graves every year. Each year, the state plans the expansion of roads against the quiet resistance of families. Meanwhile, tourists snap photos of the mountain, unaware that just beyond the trail lies a battlefield of memory.

As one local put it emotionally: “This is not only a cemetery. It is our history, our ancestors, our identity. To erase it is to erase us.”

The future of Sulaiman-Too will depend on whether development can learn to coexist with sacredness — whether roads and green zones can be built without uprooting bones. For now, the mountain stands as a reminder: heritage is not just about monuments, but about the fragile bond between the living and the dead.


[1] Liu, Morgan. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne. Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press.

[2] Ismailbekova, A. 2017 Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[4] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[5] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1101498778600604&rdid=bCohodiCTh5OaIFm

[6] Kamp, M. (2010) ‘Where did the mullahs go? Oral histories from rural Uzbekistan’, Die Welt des Islams, 50(3–4), pp. 503–531.


Aksana Ismailbekova is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. In 2025 she was a Leibniz — Newcastle University Fellow.


Title picture: Gateway to a staircase leading to a museum precinct on Sulaiman-Too mountain. Adam Harangozó, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Heritage Protection as Progressive Urbanism? Defending the Legacies of the Welfare State

John Pendlebury considers the progressive potential of the heritage of social housing.

Twentieth century workers’ and welfare state housing, often demonised, has increasingly been valorised as heritage. Does this have wider political relevance and potential in a time of housing crisis?

Die oftmals verunglimpften Arbeiter- und Sozialwohnungen des 20. Jahrhunderts erfahren eine zunehmende Wertschätzung als Kulturerbe. In Anbetracht der gegenwärtigen Wohnungskrise stellt sich die Frage, ob dies eine größere politische Relevanz und ein größeres Potenzial birgt.


Berlin Heritage

There are three World Heritage Sites in Berlin – can you guess what they are? You might expect to discover that, first, Museum Island and, second, the Palaces of Potsdam and Berlin are included on the list. But you might be more surprised by the third site – Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, six housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1933, principally from the period of the Weimar Republic. They are claimed to testify to innovative housing policies in a period when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally. Together they “contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes through novel approaches to town planning, architecture and garden design” also providing “exceptional examples of new urban and architectural typologies”, which “exercised considerable influence on the development of housing around the world” (Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, UNESCO).

A housing block in Siemensstadt by Hugo Häring, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

Housing Crisis

The heritage of social housing seems particularly important in a moment when the availability of affordable, decent housing is a crisis issue in many countries. Writing from a British perspective, twentieth century social housing before 1979 – and the election of the Thatcher government which heralded a radical break from post-war consensus politics – speaks to a period when there was a widely held political aspiration to provide decent and better housing for all. Whilst the results were mixed, the best examples, now often given heritage status, show a scale of ambition, generosity and social priority that is difficult to imagine in the contemporary world. In England the ‘Post-war listing’ programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases examples of such buildings are being formally protected as heritage. This opens-up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued within contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today?

The potential consequences of heritage protection for social housing – and its potential to contribute to more progressive urban outcomes – was the focus of my Leibniz Value of the Past Fellowship in June 2025 based at ZZF in Potsdam. The aim was to begin to extend the work we have undertaken in England (While and Pendlebury, 2025) to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare state architecture and its subsequent political positioning will show elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany are the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. And my first task, focusing on Berlin, was to try and understand something of the history and heritage status of the social housing in the city.

More Berlin Housing Heritage

Whilst Berlin’s history of innovation in social housing came to an abrupt stop under National Socialism, it returned with force in both Berlins in the 1950s. In West Berlin, this was exemplified by an international competition for the Hansa Quarter. The International Building Exhibition (INTERBAU) includes social housing blocks by eminent German architects, including the returning Walter Gropius as well as international figures such as Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, although perhaps the most famous consequence of the exhibition was built elsewhere – the Le Corbusier reworking of the Unite d’Habitation. The counterpoint in the east, with an equal level of ambition but very different architectural approach, was the monumental series of blocks aligned along Stalinallee (now Karl Marx Allee), influenced by socialist urbanism and classicism. The combined innovation of new social housing methods and typologies from east and west has led to unsuccessful attempts to be included on Germany’s tentative list of future World Heritage Sites.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall, the large-scale construction of social housing continued in new forms in both territories until the Wall’s fall. In part this took the form of large-scale peripheral estates. In the west these were pushed out to the south (Gropiusstadt) the west (Falkenhagener Feld) and most monumentally to the north (Märkisches Viertel). In the east the later peripheral estates were grouped around the areas of Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Hohenschönhausen. Although not yet generally defined as heritage, a few buildings in these estates have been given monument status. Alongside the construction of peripheral estates there were also redevelopment efforts of social housing in the inner city. The best known of these is the International Building Exhibition (IBA) which ran in West Berlin during the 1980s, using the concepts of “careful urban renewal” and “critical reconstruction.” International celebrity architects on this occasion included Rob Krier, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi, representing a distinct postmodern turn. Not surprisingly, some of these works now have heritage status.

Although German reunification and in the case of Berlin the “stitching back together” of a divided city is to be celebrated, reunification also led to the cessation of significant social housing building programmes in Berlin, albeit a decade later than with the conservative, neo-liberal political turn in the UK. The reasons for this are not simple, but initially housing demand was low, accompanied by high costs for reconnecting a city systematically severed for 45 years which led to the sell off of assets, including housing. Whilst in Berlin the provision of affordable housing today is perhaps less of a crisis issue than in many British cities, and London specifically, that there is a problem is clear. Despite its innovative and generous history of housing provision and a history of renting and protection for renters, Berlin has not been immune from global neo-liberal forces driving the commodification of housing. Do the protected legacies of earlier eras have any role to play in resisting these changes?

Heritage protection as progressive urbanism?

Historic building conservation is normally perceived as something conservative, rather than as a site of resistance in the city. However, preserved fragments of social housing stand as material testimony to periods when providing decent housing for all was a widely held political and social priority. Furthermore, protecting buildings for heritage purposes potentially challenges market hegemony, disrupting normal processes of capital accumulation. This may be part of the reason, along with a lingering antagonism to the material legacies of the welfare state (“concrete monstrosities”), why the government in England has distinctly cooled on extending protection to more postwar social housing in recent years. Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson is the most well-known casualty, making way for a high-density area regeneration programme. Furthermore, some of the estates in London that do have protection through listing have been fully gentrified through radical tenure changes. But in our article (While and Pendlebury, 2025), we argue there may be tactical possibilities for resistance, a basis for community engagement, and a more local and bespoke approach to regeneration.

The last block of Robin Hood Gardens in 2024, awaiting demolition.

And in Berlin?

It is difficult to resist the juggernaut of neo-liberal housing policies that in many countries have made our houses commodities rather than homes. However, my preliminary impression of Berlin in comparison to England is of a generous and independent approach to heritage listing, of an inspirational history of innovation and provision of social housing, of a tradition of renting and protecting renters’ rights and, importantly, of a history of civic mobilisation and resistance that cumulatively make me feel optimistic of the progressive potential of Berlin’s rich history of social housing in providing some resistance to these global forces.


John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation, Centre for Heritage, Newcastle University, UK. In June 2025 he was a Leibniz Value of the Past Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).


Title picture: A block by Wilhelm Büning in the White City Estate, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

All pictures in this contribution: John Pendlebury.

On Peformances and Playing Cards

After attending Brecht’s ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in Berlin, James Harriman-Smith reflects on what performance is today and what it used to be.

What is performance? And what was performance? I came to Berlin to think about these questions and continue that thinking here with the help of a peculiar pack of cards and a trip to the Berliner Ensemble.

Was ist „Performance“? Und was war „Performance“? Ich bin nach Berlin gekommen, um über diese Fragen nachzudenken. Diese Überlegungen führe ich hier mithilfe eines eigentümlichen Kartenspiels und eines Besuchs im Berliner Ensemble weiter.


At the start of Barrie Kosky’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper at the Berliner Ensemble, a single spotlight picks out a pale face peeking through the sparkly stage curtain. This is the face of The Moon Over Soho (played by Josefin Platt). She begins to sing: ‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne…’ Recognizing the tune, the theatregoers around me begin to hum and sway along to Kurt Weill’s music as we begin our three-hour journey through the London underworld.

I sat in this audience after a day’s work at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. My time at the ZfL was drawing to a close. I had come there to think about performance, more specifically to study different ways of thinking about performance. I’d spoken with Katrin Trüstedt about Stellvertretung, with Falko Schmieder about Koselleckian approaches to conceptual history, and had the chance to share my own ideas with the Theoriegeschichte programme area. Yet, as I watched Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper unfold, I remembered an object sitting in my hotel room that I had not had a chance to share. I’d like to use this blog contribution to share it now, and so continue electronically some of the thinking I was so fortunate to do in Berlin.

This is the object:

Playing cards and an eighteenth-century card holder.  Photo taken by the author.

This is a modern facsimile of John Bowles’s set of Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was the inspiration for Die Dreigroschenoper; it was also an enormous theatrical success from the moment of its premiere in 1728. The first editions of Bowles’s cards date from this time, although they were then reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. I bought my facsimile because I believe that answers to the question of how to read these cards offered new ways of thinking about the performance, reception, and legacy of this famous eighteenth-century work.

First of all, we might read these cards as just another manifestation of the contemporary cultural impact of The Beggar’s Opera. In the wake of the work’s record-breaking, sixty-two-night opening run, various mementos began to appear, from paintings and engravings (the first Polly Peachum). The playing cards are a similar kind of product, cashing in on the popularity of the Opera. They are different from other objects, however, because these cards offer their owners a chance to engage with Gay’s work in a particular way: they provide all the information necessary to perform many of the songs, be that Gay’s lyrics, the musical score, or the name of the tune that Gay was giving new words to.

The nine of diamonds, showing the name of the ballad tune (‘All in a misty morning’), musical score, and Gay’s lyrics. Photo taken by the author.

By providing such information, these cards thus extend beyond the theatre what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has described as a distinctly political aspect of performance of The Beggar’s Opera. Dillon argues that Gay’s audiences would recognize many of the ballad tunes he reused in the work, and perhaps even join in. Such recognition (or even participation) transformed the theatre into a shared space of common musical goods, and so resisted contemporary efforts to privatise and enclose previously public material. Bowles’s playing cards might allow such participation to continue after the performance ended, and at the very least seem to exploit the extent to which Gay’s work became an omnipresent aspect of a shared English culture.

But there are other ways of reading these cards, which extend and supplement the above interpretation. Palming through the cards, I notice that only two contain any information about plot. The ten of clubs tells us it depicts a song ‘sung by Polly and Lucy in their resentment against Macheath’. The six of clubs similarly contains a cue that explains the emotional stakes of the song.

The six of clubs, with the information that the song was sung when Polly and Lucy were ‘both claiming of’ Macheath. Photo taken by the author.

Yet even these cards do not say why Polly and Lucy are upset, or even who Macheath is. This probably testifies, again, to the popularity of the Opera. It also, though, might suggest the unimportance of the details of the work’s plot, and so a way of understanding it more as a collection of sung performances loosely connected by events. A kind of eighteenth-century jukebox musical.  Indeed, in the noisy and crowded theatres of 1720s London, where audience members would arrive late and leave early, and productions would be broken through short breaks between each act, a more fragmentary understanding of The Beggar’s Opera as a collection of memorable moments reinforced with music seems appropriate.

A translation of the theatrical work into the format of playing cards emphasises such an understanding because of the way that playing cards are used. If these cards were played with, they would, for example, have been shuffled, so that the songs they depict would be produced in a different order in every game. There would still, of course, be patterns: there are more cards with songs by Macheath than any other, as befits his lead role; Polly and Lucy are next, while Peachum only has one of his songs represented. Beyond this, the choice of cardgame might give new meanings to certain cards. The ten of diamonds was the ‘big cassino’ in games of cassino, and the player lucky enough to draw it would perhaps experience a version of the youthful joy expressed in the song by Mrs Slammekin it represents. The ace of spades (also called ‘spadille’) is a powerful card in lots of games, and here it is used for the song in which Lucy Lockit describes the power of Macheath’s kiss.

The ace of spades, or spadille. Photo taken by the author.

It is possible these choices are pure chance, but – even if they are – they are still evidence of how the transfer of Gay’s work from the stage to the cards can open it up for new meaning while exploiting the already fragmentary aesthetics of The Beggar’s Opera. Indeed, it is perhaps out of fear of gaining new meanings that one song is not depicted on the cards: Macheath’s strongest condemnation of corrupt English society, sung to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ and explaining how ‘gold from law can take out the sting’.

There is more to say about these cards, and about performance than I have space to say here. Die Dreigroschenoper, for instance, is also a work whose songs have had an independent life, and which, by drawing on the aesthetics of the music hall, reimagines the ballad opera style of Gay. To my knowledge there is no cardset inspired by Brecht and Weill, although there is a Japanese rewriting of Die Dreigroschenoper called Hanafuda Denki (literally, Playing-Card Fantasy: 花札伝奇).

And there are also those people who sat next to me humming along to ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’. We can understand those spectators’ engagement with the Berliner Ensemble production a little better with the help of John Bowles’s Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. After all, the same aspects of Gay’s work that these cards once extended – be that the collection and adaptation of pre-existing music models or, as Dillon argued, the use of such songs in the theatre as a kind of shared cultural currency, radically available to all – are also some of the things that make Die Dreigroschenoper still a blockbuster theatrical experience today.


Picture: private.

James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University, UK. He was a Newcastle University-Leibniz Research Alliance Bilateral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin.

@jharrimansmith.bsky.social


Title picture: Josefin Platt as the Moon over Soho in Die Dreigroschenoper, JR Berliner Ensemble.

Memory-making in tourism: a call for a more differentiated discussion

Alena Pfoser and Sabine Stach analyse the production and circulation of memories in the arena of tourism.

Tourism is an important arena for the production and circulation of memories in today’s societies. In their recent article in the journal Memory Studies, Alena Pfoser and Sabine Stach argue for a more systematic investigation of this tourism-memory nexus.

In unserer heutigen Gesellschaft stellt der Tourismus einen zentralen Ort der Produktion und Zirkulation von Erinnerungen dar. In ihrem kürzlich erschienenen Artikel in der Zeitschrift Memory Studies plädieren Alena Pfoser und Sabine Stach für eine systematischere Untersuchung dieses Zusammenhangs zwischen Tourismus und Erinnerung.


Tourist destinations often invite us to travel back in time, to experience a time stood still or turned back. Iconic heritage sites and museums are major tourist attractions, visited by millions of tourists each year. Alongside well-preserved old towns, iconic architecture, or ancient cultural sites, more recent and obscure pasts – such as memories of communism, recent revolutions and industrial heritage – have been incorporated into the tourism industry. Tourism is also driven by individual memories of past visits, personal and family ties that can stimulate a desire to (re)visit them. Moreover, tourism also creates new memories in the form of stories, photographs and souvenirs that are taken back home and shared with others.

Holiday mementos for sale (Source: Sunguk Kim, Unsplash, Creative Commons).

Despite the obvious (yet complex) connections between tourism and memory-making, tourism remains surprisingly underexamined in memory studies research. When we, two researchers working on guided city tours in different contexts in Eastern Europe, met for the first time in May 2019, it was quickly apparent that we had a similar view of the limitations of existing research. Tourist sites appear to be primarily the subject of heritage studies, which have long been critically concerned with questions of the construction and management of cultural heritage. Moreover, the topic of tourism has also increasingly become the focus of academic debates in history, history education and, above all, public history. Often, the term “history tourism” (in German “Geschichtstourismus”) is used to analyse the integration of memorial sites and “authentic places” into tourism industry offers. However, while these fields of study have some overlapping concerns, we thought that bringing tourism into conversation with work in memory studies offered both more focused and nuanced perspective on memory and the remembering process in tourism. Our following exchange resulted in an article that was recently published in Memory Studies. There, we not only sought to provide a critical reflection on these limitations but also put forward a vision of how an expanded examination of the “tourism-memory nexus” could look like.

A bibliometric analysis of tourism in memory research

To go beyond our own impressions of the literature, we first conducted bibliometric research of the most significant peer-reviewed journals in memory studies: Memory Studies (2008-), History & Memory (1998-), Memory, Mind and Media (2022-). We identified a total of 134 articles, out of which 19 mentioned “tourism” either in their title, keywords, or abstract. Most of the remaining 115 articles did not have tourism as their focus, but examined for example the creation of heritage sites or city branding processes and dedicated a smaller part of their analysis to tourism planning or promotion. Other articles focused on museums and memorials and discussed visitor practices and/or the reception of sites as part of the analysis but did not address questions of touristification nor explored tourists’ meaning-making in detail. Apart from confirming our impression of the limited preoccupation with tourism in memory research, the analysis also showed a narrow thematic focus on sites associated with violence and trauma. Over two thirds of articles discussed “difficult pasts / dark tourism” such as studies on battlefield tourism, concentration camps, prisons, and war memorials. The number of articles focusing on other themes were particularly small when considering only those publications that had tourism as their primary focus, with only seven articles discussing subjects beyond difficult pasts.

Themes of tourism-related articles in memory studies journals (Source: Pfoser & Stach, 2024, own calculations).

Castles, neighbourhoods and museum shops as sites of remembering

Moving beyond this narrow focus, we firstly propose to expand the range of sites examined in the literature to include those with a high tourist appeal such as ancient, medieval or early modern heritage. Despite their popularity with families, such sites are usually only discussed in terms of monument preservation and heritage management. Castles, city fortifications, rulers’ residences or townhouses seem to belong to an unproblematic, picturesque “distant past” that can be touristified in whatever way one likes (Groebner, 2013: 412–414). Alongside an examination of these sites, we should also reflect upon the “tourist component” of sites already in focus, considering them as destinations anchored in the international tourism industry. This involves an analysis of consumer infrastructures such as museum shops and of the planning and designing of sites for tourists. Finally, a broader understanding of toured sites should encompass memory processes that refer to multiple sites including the analysis of itineraries and the work of tour guides who put sites in an order and make them part of an overarching narrative, thereby producing new meanings.

Memories of joy and entertainment

Alongside the expansion of sites, we also need to expand the analysis of the variety of modes of remembering. As understandable as the focus on difficult heritage is, it is equally important to question the seemingly natural link between memory research and trauma. Scholars such as Ann Rigney (2018: 370) have argued for a “positive turn” in memory studies scholarship, which can also be built on work on memory-making in tourism. This is particularly important as tourism is closely associated with fun, relaxation and entertainment. Criticism of tourism has also underlined the notion of tourism as a hedonic, light, joyful, and somewhat superficial experience. It is reasonable to ask whether this discredits tourism as an object of research, or whether entertainment and fun should instead be brought into its focus. This includes individual, joyful, and playful but also voyeuristic, escapist, and entertainment-centred modes of remembering. We argue that tourism offers a unique opportunity to engage more fully with these modes and their interconnections with others, allowing us to move beyond a normative approach that implies a division between legitimate, i.e. empathic and reflective, and less legitimate, i.e. self-centered and hedonic, modes of remembering.

Museum shops: an understudied site of memory-making (Source: Erikk Pung, Unsplash, Creative Commons).

Multiscalar tourism memories

Finally, research on memory-making can also build on discussions of scales in memory studies research. We argue that more attention needs to go into the scale of personal and autobiographical remembering. As Sabine Marschall (2012: 2217) wrote, memory-making in tourism “does not necessarily require the presence of monuments and precious cultural objects, but relies on embodied memories that evoke emotions”. Memories are actively used by tourists to construct images of self and other. Prior to their trip, when making decisions of where to travel, and during and after their trips, tourists draw on their own past experiences as well as socially and culturally transmitted understandings of the past.

Moreover, as tourism routinely involves border crossing, tourism lends itself well to analysis of transnational remembering, allowing us to analyse both the deterritorialisation and transnationalisation of memory in tourism institutions and practices and its reterritorialisation in particular places. As our work on tour guiding shows, international tourism enables a transnational negotiation of memory that results not necessarily in the creation of cosmopolitan frameworks that replace the national ones but can also lead to pragmatic interpretative adjustments and selective silences as a response to mnemonic difference, pointing to the translations and frictions of transnational memory work.

For a more nuanced discussion of tourism memories

Tourism continues to be conceived implicitly or explicitly as diminishing memory, detaching it from the past and rendering it inauthentic and trivial. Our hope is that by expanding the study of memory-making in tourism to cover a range of sites, modes and scales we can contribute to a destigmatisation of tourism as a research subject and reach a richer and more differentiated understanding of the tourism-memory nexus. In fact, modes of remembering in tourism often are politically more ambiguous and can stand in contrast with the memories of hope that have been at the centre of a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies. Yet, memories based on direct tourist encounters can also challenge hostile conceptions of the other, and the idleness that tourism at least partly enables can act as counterweight in a world driven by the demands of speed. Instead of being dismissed, memory-making in tourism deserves a more nuanced discussion.


Bibliography

Groebner V (2013) Touristischer Geschichtsgebrauch. Über einige Merkmale neuer Vergangenheiten im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Historische Zeitschrift 296: 408–428

Marschall S (2012) Tourism and memory. Annals of Tourism Research 39(4): 2216–2219.

Pfoser A & Stach S (2024) Beyond difficult pasts: Towards a fuller understanding of memory-making in tourism. Memory Studies.

Rigney A (2018) Remembering hope: transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies 11(3): 368–380.


Sabine Stach is a researcher at GWZO Leipzig in the department “Culture and Imagination“.

Alena Pfoser is a senior lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, UK.


Title picture: Playing with heritage (Source: Jakob Owens, Unsplash, Creative Commons).

Unlocking the Past with AI: Spectral Decomposition for Image Processing in Cultural Heritage

Marco Colombo reflects on Yury Korolev’s conference presentation and shares his own perspective and insights.

This blog post is part of a series on the conference “Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections” held on December 12-13, 2024, at the Herder Institute in Marburg and presents perspectives on the coference contribution by Yury Korolev, University of Bath – written by Marco Colombo.


Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and mathematical techniques are transforming the way we approach cultural heritage preservation. These technologies provide new ways to analyze and interpret digital data, particularly in the realm of historical documents and artifacts. By applying mathematical models to imaging data, researchers can uncover hidden details, restore ancient manuscripts, and better understand the history behind archaeological findings.

In the world of cultural heritage preservation, technology plays an increasingly vital role in uncovering and understanding historical artifacts. One of the most promising advancements in this field is mathematical imaging, which has revolutionized the way we analyze historical documents. This article delves into how spectral decomposition aids in processing images for cultural heritage applications, with a focus on analyzing handmade medieval paper. This topic was treated by Assistant Professor Yury Korolev in his oral presentation at the conference.

The Power of Spectral Decomposition in Image Processing

At its core, spectral decomposition involves breaking down an image or signal into simpler components that can be interpreted and manipulated independently. A well-known example is the Fourier transformation, which decomposes a signal into sine and cosine waves of different frequencies. This method has long been used in audio processing, where equalizers modify frequencies to emphasize or dampen specific sounds.

Applying this principle to image processing allows researchers to filter images by modifying their spectral components. Similar to how equalizers can adjust bass or treble in music, spectral decomposition enables the enhancement or suppression of specific image features, revealing details otherwise hidden in noise and distortions.

A musical manuscript (Pantokratoros monastery, code 214), 1433.

Challenges in Fourier-Based Image Processing

Traditional Fourier-based filtering presents certain challenges when applied to images. One primary issue is the handling of edges and sharp transitions within an image. The Fourier transform favors smooth variations and struggles with the abrupt changes often found in historical documents, where distinguishing between textual content, illustrations, and background textures is crucial for accurate analysis.

Additionally, artifacts such as noise and dirt often share high-frequency components with vital image details, making it difficult to distinguish between essential and extraneous elements. This limitation necessitates alternative approaches that can better separate meaningful structures from irrelevant noise.

Total Variation Spectral Decomposition: A More Effective Approach

A promising solution to these challenges is total variation (TV) spectral decomposition [1, 2, 3]. Unlike Fourier methods, TV decomposition is particularly effective in processing images with sharp edges and high contrast variations, such as handwritten medieval manuscripts. This approach decomposes images based on the scale and contrast of details, allowing for a more meaningful separation of image elements.

Using TV spectral decomposition, an image is analyzed at different levels of detail, isolating high-contrast features such as text and marks while preserving background textures like paper grain and chain lines. The ability to filter images in this way is invaluable for historians and archivists, as it allows them to extract key structural elements from historical documents with remarkable precision.

Grégoire de Tours, Histoire des Francs. Initial P in the form of a fish opening the book. Late 7th century.

Applications in Medieval Paper Analysis

One particularly compelling application of TV spectral decomposition is in the study of handmade medieval paper. This type of paper was created using molds made of metal wires, which left distinctive imprints known as chain lines (vertical lines) and laid lines (horizontal lines). Additionally, many papers featured watermarks that identified their origin, providing crucial insights into historical trade networks and manuscript provenance.

By applying spectral decomposition techniques, researchers can:

  • Digitally remove overlying text and stains from historical documents to better reveal the mold imprints.
  • Enhance faint chain lines and laid lines, allowing for accurate identification of the paper’s origin.
  • Segment different elements of an image to isolate and analyze individual components more effectively.

This methodology has been successfully employed on manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library, enabling historians to trace the origins and movements of medieval texts with better accuracy.

Beyond Cultural Heritage: Broader Implications

The benefits of TV spectral decomposition extend beyond historical paper analysis. This approach has demonstrated its effectiveness in several other imaging applications, including:

  • Image Denoising: Removing unwanted noise from photographs, particularly in low-light conditions.
  • Image Segmentation: Identifying and categorizing different elements within an image, useful in medical imaging and microscopy.
  • Image Fusion: Combining multiple imaging modalities to create a more comprehensive representation of an object, especially in medical diagnostics.

Moreover, machine learning is being integrated into these spectral decomposition processes, significantly improving computational efficiency. Researchers are developing AI-driven models to automate and optimize these transformations, making them more accessible and scalable for various imaging needs.

Gemini, from the medieval Georgian manuscript of an astrological treatise, 12th century.

Future Prospects and Challenges

While TV spectral decomposition has proven to be a powerful tool, it is not without its challenges. One notable limitation is its preference for detecting rounded or disk-like structures, which may not always align with the features of certain historical documents. Future research is focused on refining these methods to accommodate a wider variety of structural elements, making them even more effective for cultural heritage applications.

Additionally, computational efficiency remains a concern. Unlike standard Fourier filtering, TV-based decomposition requires solving complex optimization problems, making it computationally intensive. However, ongoing advancements in machine learning and algorithmic optimization are expected to mitigate these challenges, paving the way for faster and more efficient implementations.

Conclusion

Spectral decomposition, particularly through total variation methods, represents a powerful technique for cultural heritage applications. By enabling clearer and more detailed analysis of historical documents, this technology offers invaluable insights into the past while preserving artifacts for future generations. As AI and machine learning continue to enhance these techniques, the potential for further breakthroughs in digital humanities and archival science remains immense.

With continued research and innovation, spectral decomposition will undoubtedly play a crucial role in unlocking the hidden secrets of our cultural heritage, bridging the gap between history and technology.


References

[1] Gilboa, G., 2014. A total variation spectral framework for scale and texture analysis. SIAM journal on Imaging Sciences, 7(4), pp. 1937-1961.

[2] Grossmann, T.G., Schönlieb, C.B. and Da Rold, O., 2023. Extracting chain lines and laid lines from digital images of medieval paper using spectral total variation decomposition. Heritage Science, 11(1), p. 180.

[3] Grossmann, T.G., Dittmer, S., Korolev, Y. and Schönlieb, C.B., 2022. Unsupervised learning of the total variation flow. arXiv:2206.04406.


Marco Colombo is a PhD student in the Materials Analysis Group at the Darmstadt Technical University. He was a participant at the conference in Marburg and was particularly interested in Yury Korolev’s work, so he decided to write down his impression and perspectives on his presentation.

The original title of Yury Korolev‘s presentation at the conference was “Image filtering based on total variation spectral decompositions: an overview of the method and an application in medieval paper analysis”. For further information on the conference see the programme.


Title picture: Book of Hours — a prayer book written in Medieval Latin (c. 15th century).

All pictures: symbolic images, public domain via Wikimedia, see also here.

Current developments in AI and what they mean for everyday use in archives

Anja Link takes a closer look at various contributions from the panels and identifies three key findings from the conference.

Insights from the Conference “Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections”

This blog post is part of a series on the conference at the Herder Institute in Marburg on 12 and 13 December 2024 and will highlight three overall findings.


AI needs to be co-created by humans – to do its work but also to supervise its ethical conduct

Questions of finding the happy medium of human and machine action were touched on by many speakers. While the call co-creation may appear self-evident—after all, AI models are developed by humans — when taking a closer look at the modelling and training phase, the issue reveals to be more complex. The complexity begins with data selection and extends through the modelling and training phases to the actual implementation of AI systems. Furthermore, it touches ethical questions of (energy) resource efficiency, bias and power. Ensuring meaningful human involvement at every stage is therefore not just a technical necessity, but an ethical imperative.

Data Selection and AI

>>> Mo von Bychelberg’s overview on „Artificial Intelligence Technology’s Influence on the Authenticity of Digital Intangible Cultural Inheritance” explored how AI introduces new dimensions of power and bias into archival practices—dimensions that, in fact, build upon long-standing issues in the field. Traditional dimensions of power and bias in archives cover questions of what is worth being archived as well as who decides what is being archived. In the era of digitisation those dimensions extend to questions of what is worth being digitised and who decides on that. The emergence of AI technologies adds yet another layer: Which archives can afford to use or even create AI? Who has the human resources and expertise to work with off-the-shelf AI solutions? Will the staff be able to handle off-the-shelf AI? Can AI potentially address broader challenges, such as preserving the tacit knowledge of retiring archivists? Von Bychelberg argued that many of these issues—power, bias, access, and sustainability—converge in the context of AI. Before archives consider adopting AI technologies, these critical questions must be openly and thoroughly addressed.

Mo von Bychelberg, Uppsala University

AI model training phase

>>> In her presentation on “Dusting Off the Unlabelled Data: Graph Semi Supervised Learning for Large-Scale Datasets” Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero shared insights from her research on efficient image procession in training phases. Regardless of the model’s ultimate goal—be it image classification, recognition, or generation—every image-based AI system begins with object detection and data labelling. Since AI models have limited generalisation capabilities, acquiring large datasets with accurate annotations is costly in terms of time, financial resources, and the need for expert knowledge. Reducing those costs requires a well-balanced combination of human expertise and machine-based interpretation of image data.  Semi-supervised learning approaches that balance since its central task is replacing data by human knowledge and thus training with less data. Aviles-Rivero’s findings indicate that SSL can lead to improved model performance by replacing parts of the training data with human insight, thereby requiring fewer labelled examples.

>>> Nicole Graaf explored the temporal, gender-based, and cultural dimensions of bias in AI-generated image metadata in her presentation „Between ritual and relief – when the computer squints: analysis if AI-based indexing in the Image Archive of the ETH Library”. From an archivist’s persepective, Graaf presented the results of a qualitative analysis of automatically tagged images. The images were labelled using Clarifai’s general model and subsequently reviewed by subject experts—not only for semantic accuracy, but also for their potential to create or reinforce bias. As it turned out, automatic tagging works best with iconic, easily recognisable images that would likely be used to teach a child. In contrast, automatic tagging struggles significantly when it comes to abstract cultural or gender-related concepts. These findings underline two key points: a) AI-generated metadata must be critically evaluated by humans, and b) the ethical dimensions of AI output are fundamentally shaped by the data used during training. Graaf suggested that one possible technological approach to mitigating bias is to address the issue at its source—by regularly reprocessing digitised archival materials with updated AI models. Another long-term solution could lie in developing institution-specific AI systems tailored to the archival context.

>>> Christopher Kermovant also explored pre-trained AI-models’ capacities and limitations in interpreting historical image material. In his presentation on “How to use controlled vocabularies to describe early Japanese photographs using deep learning models” he shared his main findings for interpreting historical image material, particularly archive documents of non-Western origin. Kermovant’s findings highlighted two central issues: a) Pre-trained AI models (in this case: CLIP, Qwen2, and ChatGPT-4o) tend to perform best in languages with strong representation in their training data—namely English, French, and German. b) These models exhibit a significant bias toward Western perspectives when interpreting non-Western imagery, often leading to distorted or overly simplified classifications. His work also underscores the need for more culturally diverse training datasets and the careful use of controlled vocabularies when applying AI to global archival materials.

Reducing time, labour and energy intensity —while also addressing ethical concerns— reveals to be a major task in the field of object detection and labelling image and text documents. On the one hand there is the question to what extend co-creation is essential for bridging the gap between machine-classifiable content and the deeper semantics of images or texts. On the other hand, it must be critically assessed which tasks necessarily have to be executed by AI and which ones humans might be better at than resource-efficient AI could ever be.

The conference took place in a hybrid format. Questions were taken directly from the audience as well as via the chat.

Picture quality matters. But in a different way than we as humans might expect

Image quality plays a crucial role in both the preprocessing and processing stages of archival image and text documents. While preprocessing can be extremely time-consuming, it is highly relevant for enabling meaningful analysis. In archival contexts, preprocessing typically involves distinguishing between the medium (e.g., paper texture, handwriting, image artifacts) and the actual content. Only after this separation can the content be decomposed and relevant information extracted effectively.

>>> Contrary to what one might assume, in the case of object detection, higher resolution does not automatically yield better results in object detection tasks during AI training. The appropriate level of image detail depends on the specific analytical goal, as Karsten Tolle, Yury Korolev and Christopher Kermovant explained in their respective presentations „Potpourri of Computer Vision in Cultural Heritage“, “Image filtering based on total variation spectral decompositions: an overview of the method and an application in medieval paper analysis“ and “How to use controlled vocabularies to describe early Japanese photographs using deep learning models“. For certain features, reducing the resolution—or even intentionally blurring the images—can improve detection performance. This approach not only facilitates the filtering of relevant information but also helps eliminate insignificant visual elements, such as scratches or artifacts, which might otherwise be misinterpreted by the model as meaningful features.

>>> Mahsa Vafaie’s insights into „Separation of machine-printed and handwritten text in archival documents” illustrated many incremental steps required to extract semantically accurate information from digitised archival documents—steps that are essential for uncovering previously unknown historical knowledge. The process begins with removing traces of the documents’ physical characteristics, such as background noise, material textures, or the representation medium itself. It may also include the distinction between relevant elements and noise. When documents contain both machine-printed and handwritten text, further complexity arises. Text-type separation must be carried out using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for print and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) for script. This involves handling heterogeneous layouts, processing both standard and non-standard fonts, recognising different handwriting styles, identifying stamps and annotations. However, Vafaie pointed out that the computational challenge does not stop at the complex procedure of accurately identifying information of every single document. Future research will have to address ways of connecting as well as embedding information into its historical context.

Mahsa Vafaie, FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure

Several contributions throughout the conference have underlined that AI forces us to examine analytical steps that the human brain implicitly takes and to adapt those steps to the technology’s requirements. Both the training of AI models and the analysis of archival material using AI are often shaped by trial-and-error processes that highly profit from creative ideas and fondness of experimenting.

Multimodal AI solutions are needed for AI to be applied across a broader range of archives

Despite growing technical capabilities, most current research projects still tend to focus on either image or text processing. The integration and simultaneous analysis of hybrid data—combining visual and textual elements—seems to remain the widest research gap.

As Erik Radisch concluded in his presentation on “A new Approach to Semi-Automated Annotations with Segment-Anything (Meta AI)” while numerous AI tools are already available, their full potential is only realised when they are combined —both to improve usability and to produce meaningful outcome. Radisch also emphasised the highly dynamic nature of the AI landscape: many models currently in use may soon be otperformed. The interim solution to that appears to lie in relying on pre-trained multimodal AI systems. When doing that, one has to bear in mind that pre-trained AI tends to fail at analysing phenomena that are not reflected in their training material for cultural or language differences or because they lack adequate historical training material.

Autor’s reflexion on the research findings and what they might mean for everyday use in archives

Practitioners attending the conference with high expectations for ready-to-use, one-size-fits-all AI solutions—comparable in performance and accessibility to chatbots like ChatGPT—may have left somewhat disappointed. At present, no such solution does exist. However, that does not mean that these ideas went unaddressed. As it is common for any conference the horizon of the panels was broadened by informal discussions during the coffee brakes where speculative ideas were explored. In this case the coffee brake discussions with practitioners from archives proved to be specifically insightful when it came to questions of integrating research findings into day-to-day archival work. While the conference contributors presented insights into the use of AI-models for different types of archival use it became even more apparent in the discussions that the path to their everyday applicability remains to be a long one. This path starts with the basic necessity of the existence of digitized material. Yet, particularly in small and understaffed archives, the proportion of digitised holdings is often very low. Ironically, these are the very institutions that could benefit most from AI-supported tools, given their limited financial and human resources. However, it is particularly that lack of resources that makes the use of AI tools unattractive at this point in time. Until AI tools can be seamlessly integrated into archival workflows in a significantly more resource-efficient manner, their use will likely remain out of reach for the average archive.

Among its many opportunities and challenges, AI has the potential to not only enhance biases. It also has the potential to widen gaps between well-resourced and under-resourced archives. Addressing these challenges requires more than just developing open-source, multimodal AI models. Equally important is ensuring maximum usability—through intuitive interfaces, cost-effectiveness, adequate server capacities, and robust data protection measures. Additionally, setting special focus on developing models in a modular system that can be used by a wide range of archives and adjoining institutions might be useful. AI might even constitute a new field of state action similar to already existing e-government or cloud infrastructures. Regardless of the specific perspective taken on AI in archives and collections in the near future, the field continues to offer ample food for thoughts, future research and discussions.


Anja Link has been working as a research assistant in the Department of Architectural Theory and Building History at Bremen University of Applied Sciences since 2019. By focussing her doctoral thesis on the history of architecture and urban planning, which is underpinned by an economic-historical perspective, her doctoral project brings together her previous research interests. She participated in the conference and is the author of this conference report.


Picture credit (all): Impressions from the conference, Claudia Junghänel, Herder Institute.