Research project
Ongoing
Documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine
The challenges of living archives for historical knowledge production (LivArch)
Duration
2024 - 2026
To date, historical scholarship has paid very little attention to this new type of archive in terms of theory and methodology—nor has it addressed the new participatory dimension that digital media and the Internet bring to this process. New challenges, such as the ethical handling of data from such archives, their sheer size, or their potential incompleteness, are compounded by familiar questions about access, power asymmetries between users and curators of archives, and the potentially re-traumatizing nature of such archives in war contexts.
The LivArch project supports the further development of methods and theories for capturing, storing, and enriching these sources and addresses complex ethical questions of responsible representation, publication, reuse, and long-term archiving. The focus is on empowering projects and individuals who create and curate such sources. With the help of scholarships and exchange formats, cooperation on an equal footing is promoted across national borders, professional denominations, classical research, and participatory approaches.
The strength of the project lies in its transnational collaboration, which focuses on Ukrainian experiences. In this way, the project contributes to the digital advancement of historical research and generates insights that can be applied to similar conflict situations in the 21st century. The duty to care for the sources and the integrity of their creators is always at the forefront.
“Documenting Russia's War Against Ukraine” (LivArch) is a joint project involving the following institutes in addition to the Herder Institute:
IEG – Leibniz Institute for European History Mainz,
the Center for Urban History L'viv,
the C2DH – Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History,
the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media,
the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,
the Marburg Center for Digital Culture and Infrastructure (University of Marburg), and
the Justus Liebig University Giessen.
IEG – Leibniz Institute for European History Mainz,
the Center for Urban History L'viv,
the C2DH – Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History,
the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media,
the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,
the Marburg Center for Digital Culture and Infrastructure (University of Marburg), and
the Justus Liebig University Giessen.
