This 7-day seminar in digital humanities research methods is designed to expose a new generation of scholars in Cold War history and culture to methods of analysis and discovery involving computational techniques. Designed and run by NEP4DISSENT (New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent), COST Action 16213, the inspiration for the course is built around the transfer of knowledge from technologists and data scientists to humanists. In the course of the 7-day session the participants will have hands-on experience with the entire life cycle of a digital humanities project design, leading to a single, tangible outcome in the form of a fully searchable and interactive dataset usable for art-curatorial purposes. Faculty are drawn from several disciplines and areas of specialization, in close cooperation with: the Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA); the History Department at CEU; the Department of Network and Data Science at CEU; the Department of Hungarian Literature and Cultural Studies at ELTE; the COURAGE H2020 project; the Center for Digital Humanities at the Institute of Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (CHC); CLARIN-Poland; the Center for Digital History at the University of Luxembourg (C2DH); and the LAB1100 in The Hague.

The focus of this year’s Cultures of Dissent SUN course will be conceptual mapping. In addition to our usual practice of using digital history methodologies to track events and movements of historical actors, we will conduct several thought experiments on how these methods might work with intellectual history and political thought. Some of our work towards this goal will be entirely analog, and resemble a typical seminar-style discussion, while other methods will include mining secondary literature, graphing institutional intersections, and cross-referencing different kinds of oppositional activities (academic, artistic, musical, performative, design) over time. As with all of our research in NEP4DISSENT, this training school will work across national contexts and languages, to truly reflect the diversity of cultural contexts in the region, and to push against the limits of comparative history.