Ranke.2 - A Teaching Platform for Digital Source Criticism

Professional historians have always questioned the origin, meaning and credibility of a historical source. Now that more and more historical sources are being digitised and published online, our traditional methods of source criticism need to be updated for the digital age. For this purpose the teaching resource
Ranke.2 – Source criticism in the digital age – has been created at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History in Luxembourg. The platform offers a series of lessons on
how to critically assess and work with historical sources in digital form. This refers to both analogue sources that have been digitised (e.g. a newspaper or a manuscript) as to born-digital sources (e.g. an email or a YouTube clip).

By engaging with lessons on the Ranke.2 platform, students will learn:

How digital objects are created (retro-digitised, born-digital and converted documents).

What changes when an analogue source is turned into a digital representation.

How to question the concept of the “original”.

How information is added to a digital object (metadata).

How data is published online and made searchable.

What impact search engines have on finding and selecting sources.

The properties of different types of data (text, images, objects and audio-visual material).

By problematizing the reliability of digital sources we aim to introduce students and scholars to a new form of digital hermeneutics.

The poster that will be presented about Ranke.2 explains the relevance of digital source criticism, listing the key questions that should be posed to both analogue and digital sources. It also elaborates on the core Ranke2 pedagogical principles:
1. Differentiation in complexity and time required, to connect to different teaching contexts. This means lecturers can choose between the modules SMALL (an animation and/or a quiz), MEDIUM (a series of assignments) or LARGE (a tutorial for a hands on workshop).
2. Offering teaching content in a variety of attractive interactive formats: colorful animations, quizzes, assignments for web research and tutorials for a hands-on workshop.

Bibliography

Andreas Fickers
(2012) Towards A New Digital Historicism? Doing History in the Age of Abundance, in:
VIEW, Journal of Europan History and Culture
, Vol 1,1.

Stefania Scagliola,
(2017), personal blog on C
2
DH website:
Digital Source Criticism in the 21st century: reconsidering Ranke’s principles in the digital age
, May 9.

Stefania Scagliola (2018)
personal blog on C
2
DH website:
To Google or not to Google, have a look at Ranke.2
, October 8.

Stefania Scagliola (2019) personal blog
on C
2
DH website:
Integrating the digital into the academic curriculum of history - How to engage your audience
, 13 February.