My name is Johanna Jaschik and I am Digital Historian, Political Enthusiast and Teacher. I hold a PhD in History from the Luxembourg Centre of Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg (October 2024), a Master of Education from the University of Hamburg and a Bachelor of Arts from RWTH Aachen University. Though from Germany, I currently live and work in Zurich, Switzerland.
My Academic Journey
Following my graduation from the University of Hamburg, I was on my way to becoming a teacher at secondary schools, teaching English and History. However, throughout my studies in Hamburg and Aachen, I learned over time that I had a passion for historical inquiry that went beyond a teaching position. This realization led me to pursue a PhD in History, which eventually brought me to the C2DH at the University of Luxembourg in March 2020. My PhD project was intended to explore the fields of Central and Eastern European History, Border Studies, Citizen Science, and the digital.
My initial enthusiasm, however, was quickly crushed by the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, which put most of Europe and the rest of the world into lockdown. Two weeks after I had begun my PhD journey, I found myself isolated in a 20sqm flat in the south of Luxembourg.
Beginning my PhD life isolated from colleagues, libraries, and archives, I tried to figure out how I could turn my PhD project into a success story. After two years of back and forth, and with many more obstacles to come, such as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, I decided to focus on a synergistic approach to analyze a limited corpus of Ukrainian newspapers retrieved from archives in the US and online. I deployed a mixed-methods design that included a computational analysis of Ukrainian newspapers, followed by a qualitative historical content analysis.
In the two years that followed, I learned what a shell is, how to read and interpret code, how to utilize LLMs to write code for me, and how to create visualizations with Plotly, Matplotlib, and R. I also learned about Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including its opportunities and limitations for historical inquiry. I applied NLP to my historical sources and explored the realm of data humanism. Eventually, I successfully defended my PhD in October 2024 with a thesis titled “Digitally Reconstructing Mental Maps from L’viv, 1989 – 1995.”
Purpose of this Website
This website represents my past and future academic journey. Its purpose is to share my ideas, knowledge, and past experiences as a historian who transitioned into a digital historian. Here, I write about my past research, share new insights from the field of text mining in historical and political research, and offer step-by-step tutorials for historians who want to utilize digital tools for their research without prior computational knowledge. Enjoy!
Johanna
