The project

Memorecord is a digital public history project. It combines community participation and academic research to offer a new perspective on the history of migration in Luxembourg. The project makes use of new communication technologies to approach history in a collaborative way.

This crowdsourcing experiment relies on community participation. Why not take part? Your memories and personal accounts can help us to understand more about the historical aspects of migration in Luxembourg.

Academic background

This website is part of the PhD research project entitled “Shaping a digital memory platform on migration narratives: A public history project on migration memories in Luxembourg”, conducted by Anita Lucchesi in the Center for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, and funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund.

The aim of the project is to study migration memories and narratives in Luxembourg, combining a multifaceted cultural history framework with a systematic historical analysis of the mediated memories of migrants. Approaching the subject from the perspective of “history from below” and using an innovative methodological apparatus built on digital public history methods, this research is designed to cultivate an alternative means of storytelling through digital technology, engaging community members by acknowledging their own role as players in history. One of the main outcomes of this research project, as well as the PhD thesis itself, is the community-based development of the Memorecord platform, which is designed to harness an alternative digital approach to storytelling about migration in Luxembourg and share memories of different generations and communities online. The results of this crowdsourcing experiment will hopefully take this research beyond the standard narrative about migration in Luxembourg. What lies behind and beyond the successful story of migration in Luxembourg?

The central empirical challenge of this project is the process of building and running the platform as an example of doing public history using digital tools and technologies. The platform will serve as a space to test digital history methods (e.g. crowdsourcing, web scraping, social media analysis, distant reading and topic modelling) and to actively engage with the subjects of the study. In doing so, the project aims to contribute to Luxembourg historiography on migration and to reflect on methodological and epistemological debates in the field of digital public history/digital humanities, by evaluating the effect of digitally enabled methods and the specific characteristics of digital source criticism with regard to the historiographical process.

The original research proposal, submitted to the Luxembourg National Research Fund, can be found here.