Disseminating historical research of Copenhagen
The newly launched app Hidden Copenhagen takes you on an innovative living history trail through Copenhagen. The trail tells a powerful story of murder, execution and anatomical dissection in the seventeenth century.
Hidden Copenhagen, the seventh app in the Hidden Cities collection, is developed as a collaboration between the University of Exeter’s Hidden Cities team and historians and archaeologists from the Centre for Privacy Studies and The Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen City Archives, and Museum of Copenhagen.
From University of Copenhagen, Professor of History Ulrik Langen from the Saxo Institute and postdoctoral researcher from Centre for Privacy Studies Jesper Jakobsen played pivotal roles in the production of the Hidden Copenhagen App. Read more about their roles and the collaboration in the interview below.
The Hidden Copenhagen team, from left: Professor Ulrik Langen, archivist and historian Peter Wessel Hansen, museum archaeologist Rikke Simonsen, and researcher Jesper Jakobsen.
First, could you explain what your roles in the Hidden Copenhagen Project are?
Ulrik: “My job has been to lead and coordinate the project, but from the beginning, I was very committed to contributing to the content on an equal footing with everyone involved. It soon turned out that there were so many undertakings that everyone needed to contribute to the preparing of texts, finding archival material and historical illustrations, translating, and much more. In addition, there were practical tasks such as photographing the places in the urban space included in the app's guided tour and preparing and recording the Danish audio, which I also contributed to.”
Jesper: “I have been involved in all parts of the project, but particularly in the development of the fictional character Nils, the story's secondary character, and, not least, the contextualizing research of the parts of 17th-century Copenhagen that he moves through. The final app consists of seven stops tied together by Nils' story, but there was a careful selection work beforehand, and the story took many different forms before it reached its final shape. I also translated many of the texts, added the content to the digital CMS system, and was responsible for a large part of the coordination of tasks between the team in Copenhagen and our partners in Exeter.”
Can you describe the process and collaboration of researching and developing the Hidden Copenhagen App?
Ulrik: “Our Danish team comprised Jesper and I as university historians, archivist and historian Peter Wessel Hansen from Copenhagen City Archives, and museum archaeologist Rikke Simonsen from Museum of Copenhagen. Our main task was to create a story with a solid factual basis that could be used for a guided tour of 17th-century public space in Copenhagen. In addition, we had to produce expert commentary explaining different aspects of the historical texts used in the app so that users can delve deeper into the themes presented in the app. All of this had to go through an extensive editing process. Getting the story in place so that it was coherent and made sense to 21st-century users took many versions until we were happy. Then there was the entire adaptation process, where all parts had to be customized to the framework set by the digital media. The latter has been a long process.”
What role has interdisciplinarity played in this project? Moreover, has there been any learnings or challenges in this regard?
Ulrik: “Every step of the way, we have been in close contact with the UK team – both historical research staff and technical app developers. At times, it has been quite intensive, but we have learned a lot about making different teams from different fields work together. I do not think it is wrong to say that in the last two months before finalization, we were in daily contact with the UK team about an incredible number of details.”
How has it been for you as historians and researchers to conduct research for an App as the final product?
Jesper: “I don't think it has been much different from the public dissemination of historical knowledge, which we as historians also engage in. The story is presented through a fictional character, but everything is based on solid historical research and, as far as possible, on archival materials. Perhaps the visual and audio element of the communication has been most foreign to me, because researchers often do not have much practical experience with this from their professional environments. In a way, I think this form of communication that the app represents is somewhat similar to the historical communication you encounter in cultural history museums, and so it was good that we had Rikke, who is a museum curator and archaeologist, as part of our team.”
Are there any unexpected outcomes or findings of your involvement with this project?
Ulrik: “After providing the historical material and organizing the content for the app, we were invited to write a research article for a special issue of the prestigious journal Urban History. While dissemination usually follows the research process, this was the other way around. We wrote the article while still developing the app content.”
Jesper: “I agree with Ulrik. But I would also like to highlight a specific unexpected finding that emerged from the project. Our fictional character is a medical student, and a focal point of the story is the dissection of a female corpse performed by the physician Niels Stensen in Copenhagen in 1673. Until now, this woman has been unidentified, but quite early on in the project, our colleague Peter managed to identify her via the preserved receipts for the costs of the woman's execution. Once she was identified as Gertrud Nielsdatter, it became possible to unfold her tragic story as an important element of Nils' narration of 17th-century Copenhagen. Moreover, her story was so compelling that we decided to unfold it in the research article that Ulrik just mentioned.”
We hope you want to explore the urban spaces of Copenhagen with the Hidden Copenhagen App. The fictive character Nils will guide you to seven city-centre sites, some famous, others off the beaten track to tell the story of unmarried pregnant women facing social stigma, isolation and in worst case death penalty for crimes of infanticide and abortion.