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This issue has been created in difficult times, as the COVID-19 pandemic has kept much of the world’s population under lockdown. Research in the history of humanities has proceeded in circumstances that are far from ideal. In what we still consider as normal times, libraries, archives and universities would be open and easily accessible, but now they are not, although library staff at various universities and elsewhere have been very helpful in making material available digitally. Everybody contributing to this issue—our authors, reviewers, library staff, and the people working at the University of Chicago Press on editing, production, and communication—were restricted in many ways and yet have been able to do splendid work. We would like to express our deep gratitude to all of them.

The purpose of this article is to show how the interplay between technology and social-cultural change influenced the creation and appreciation of oral history interviews and the current status of collections of audiovisual life stories as a narrative data type that can be used for a variety of scholarly purposes. The contribution starts with a description of the change in status of oral sources in the late nineteenth century and the parallel technological innovation. The next stage presented is the early evolution of the practice of interviewing in relation to bearing witness to crises and conflict in the first half of the twentieth century. Then the emergence of the postwar social movement is described and its central role in developing a pluralist perspective on history by giving voice to minority groups through collecting life stories and making them public. The following section discusses the impact of the digital turn and the introduction of the Internet on historical culture in general and on oral history in particular. The final section deals with the potential of information and communications technology (ICT) for the accessibility and analysis of digital oral history.

Christine Borgman in Scholarship in the Digital Age. Information, Infrastructure and the Internet (2007) distinguishes between data of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. This distinction has been used as one of the arguments to explain why scholars in the humanities and social sciences make less use of digital tools and infrastructures than those in the natural sciences. This is remarkable since the roots of library and information sciences can be found in the humanities and social sciences. For instance important classifications of knowledge, such as Dewey’s Decimal Classification system are based on the philosophies of Bacon and Hegel, while Paul Otlet (1868-1944), who together with Henri La Fontaine designed its European counterpart, the Universal Decimal Classification, mentioned for instance Thomas van Aquino and Kant as sources of inspiration. Furthermore, the order of the sciences made part of discussions within the emerging disciplines of the social sciences and psychology (Comte, Spencer, Baine, Fouillée, Wundt). We will demonstrate how in library science by the end of the 19th century a more philosophical universe of knowledge based upon books, gradually made place for an order of what we nowadays would call data, based on scientific orders in physics and chemistry. While new discoveries such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics via the philosophical discussions of Russell and Whitehead also influenced theorists of knowledge organization, such as Otlet , the Indian mathematician/classificationist Ranganathan and Ted Nelson, who coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia, their multidimensional representations of knowledge were gradually translated into more pragmatic terms, such as dimension reduction to serve information retrieval. Humanities scholars (and social scientists) more and more were forced to adapt to often technology driven interpretation of the sciences. The paradigm of computational (applied) sciences has conditioned the thinking about digital approaches in the humanities and cultural heritage for a long time. Only recently e-humanities researchers have questioned reductionist approaches in collaborations with computer/ICT scientists and pleaded for the development of humanist methodologies in e-humanities research. At the same time large players in computer technology and ICT development, such as IBM, try to incorporate the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty of humanities data, methods and practices in their software designs. Both contribute to the use of digital methods in the humanities.(

In contrast to theories of poetry or rhetoric, no complete ancient theory of the figurative arts survives. Renaissance authors wishing to underpin the "rebirth" of painting therefore had to resort to a variety of strategies to invent a new genre. Literary metaphors and fragments from artists’ biographies (mainly from Pliny) were joined with scientific discoveries such as the theory of perspective and the proportions of human anatomy. Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting of 1435 was the first text to merge ancient conceptions and newfangled geometric insights into a coherent whole that professed to revive classical art theory. His efforts sparked the development of a sizeable genre in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 17th-century France, the Netherlands and (to a lesser extent) Spain and Britain developed their own traditions. These texts shared a prescriptive approach in combination with biographical information about artists. As a central tenet from Alberti onward, humanistic knowledge was tied to basic acquaintance with the artist’s studio. Only at the end of the 16th century did art theory become a topic for courtiers stylizing their texts in a literary fashion. In the 17th century, the role of learned art lovers and their symbiotic relationship to the painters became increasingly important. By comparing the figurative arts to respectable activities such as poetry, rhetoric, and antiquarianism, and by drawing humanistic interest to the painter’s workshop, these texts served an essential role in facilitating the communication between craftsmen and the lettered. Developing the ideal of the "learned painter," the textual tradition thus developed synchronously to the artist’s changing social status. Whereas in the 16th century most authors were artists or had some link to studio practice, in the 17th century amateur-connoisseurs began to replace them; simultaneously, visual art and its theory were institutionalized in the first academies of art. Implicitly or explicitly, Renaissance treatises on painting have, therefore, as their main argument the inclusion of painting among the liberal arts, the intellectual activities worthy of the universal man. Other written sources relevant for the historical reconstruction of manners of speaking about the visual arts include poems, plays, and diaries. As a topic of analysis, sculpture plays a comparatively minor role.

Het Tropenmuseum is onze toonkast voor mondiaal erfgoed.

Focusing on Rembrandt’s studio, this chapter explores the theory and practice in the depiction of the passions. It argues that the central importance alotted to portraying and evoking emotions in rhetorical theory inspired painterly experiments in the 1630s and theoretical ideals that were first written down by Franciscus Junius (1638) and elaborated by Samuel van Hoogstraten (1678). Allegedly, an image’s power to transport the viewer into a virtual reality was greatly enhanced by its emotional appeal. This view inspired the ideal of the artist as „pathopoios", capable of experiencing the passions without letting them disturb his own state of mind.