First World War; Digital historical exhibition; Public History
Abstract :
[en] The digital exhibition Éischte Weltkrich: Remembering the Great War in Luxembourg is a project developed by the C2DH, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, with the aim of addressing an important but neglected and understudied period in the country’s history, the First World War. Supported by the Ministry of State and drawing on the collections and expertise of some of the major Luxembourg museums, archives and cultural institutions, the project has progressively deepened and widened its scope, aspiring to become a long-term digital resource. The website is designed to engage a broad base of users with varying interests and degrees of expertise. It offers four independent but interconnected modes of navigation: a thematic, story-driven mode; a digital archive; an interactive geo-referenced map and a timeline. Additional sections of the website contain educational pages for schools and downloadable academic articles. The overall structure of the exhibition remains flexible and open so that it can be constantly enriched with new material, whether provided by institutions or crowdsourced.
Research center :
- Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) > Contemporary History of Luxembourg (LHI)
Disciplines :
History
Editor :
Camarda, Sandra ; University of Luxembourg > Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
Publishing director :
Scuto, Denis ; University of Luxembourg > Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
Fickers, Andreas ; University of Luxembourg > Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
Language :
English
Title :
Eischte Weltkrich
Alternative titles :
[en] Eischte Weltkrich: Remembering the Great War in Luxembourg [fr] Eischte Weltkrich: La Grande Guerre au Luxembourg [de] Eischte Weltkrich: Erinnerungen an den Ersten Weltkrieg in Luxemburg
Publication date :
19 April 2018
Creation date :
2018-04-19
Publisher :
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Technical description :
The online digital exhibition is based on our open-source platform Miller, which was initially developed in the context of RESuME, an Erasmus+ Programme funded project (http://resume.uni.lu) to provide researchers with a simple, customised content management system.
Built on top of Django and the Django REST framework, Miller deploys a RESTful API to search, access and edit multi-language contents through a story-centric data model: authored narratives (Story objects) which contain resources (other Story or Document objects). Both Story and Document objects support metadata providing multilingual properties for titles, abstract, contents, references and copyrights and narratives. The Story contents are delivered as markdown plain text through the API, shipped with a versioning feature so that previously saved contents can be easily recovered. Links to other stories and documents are expressed as markdown links pointing to the target element identifier.
The external design studio Calibro (http://calib.ro) is responsible for the design and visual identity of the exhibition as well as for the development of the front end and custom visual editor. The latter relies on a client-side web application build with React.js that uses the data provided by the Miller API. The front end is developed with some of the most advanced technologies for cross-browser and cross-device web development such as the React.js framework, Bootstrap for layout and as grid system, and MapboxGL.js for displaying geographical data served by the back end.
