Paul Perschke
Research Associate | Contemporary History and Archive

Paul Perschke has been employed at the IRS as a research assistant in the BMWK/IGP project CitizenArchives since December 2021. Within the framework of this project, a knowledge and indexing platform and processes are to be developed, taking into account Citizen Science approaches, which will enable small archives such as the Scientific Collections of the IRS to involve interested users in the digitization and indexing of their holdings. Paul Perschke is responsible for the conception, moderation and control of the processes in the development phase and the selection of exemplary collection holdings and pilot users. Previously, Paul Perschke was a student assistant and later a research assistant in the Scientific Collections of the IRS between 2018 and 2021.

After completing his bachelor's degree in political science and public law at the University of Trier, Paul Perschke went on to earn a Master of Arts in Historical Urban Studies at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin. In the urban history program, his focus was on urban planning and architectural issues as well as topics of art history and the question of how historical, social and political upheavals manifest themselves in urban space and how visible and invisible traces of the past are dealt with today. Paul wrote his master's thesis on the topic of "Ernst Thälmann Park: A Project between Social Policy and Socialist Identity Creation". He also curated and organized an exhibition on the development of the Ernst Thälmann Park settlement at the end of 2020 together with the IRS Scientific Collections.

Projects

Ongoing Third-party Funded Projects

In this project, processes and a product for the simple digitalisation, indexing and publication of the holdings of smaller, specialised archives are to be developed on the basis of the scientific collections' own holdings and with the help of various pilot users, whose personnel and financial resources rarely permit comprehensive digitalisation. In combination with Citizen Science approaches and Semantic Web technologies, free resources such as knowledge, commitment and time of interested and expert users are to be gained and included in the indexing, especially the description and indexing of collection holdings. In this way, hitherto inaccessible cultural treasures are to be lifted and made usable for education, research and the public in the early stages of cataloguing. The result should be an unbureaucratically accessible open source product in the form of a central knowledge and communication platform with various additional modules, which enables both indexing work and moderation and quality control of acquired data and content.<br/> more info

Selected Publications by Year

2023
Perschke, P. (2023, Jul 4). Bürger*innen erschließen Architektur und Alltag der DDR – Citizen-Science-Ansätze für Archivalien der Wissenschaftlichen Sammlungen am Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung. Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden. https://saxorum.hypotheses.org/9343
2020
Perschke, P. (2020, Dec). Gaswerk-Fotos aus dem Bestand Manfred Prasser: Fund des Monats Nr. 8 vom Dezember 2020. Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung. http://ddr-planungsgeschichte.de/gaswerk-fotos/

Selected Publications by Type

Contribution to Forum or Blog
Perschke, P. (2023, Jul 4). Bürger*innen erschließen Architektur und Alltag der DDR – Citizen-Science-Ansätze für Archivalien der Wissenschaftlichen Sammlungen am Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung. Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden. https://saxorum.hypotheses.org/9343
Perschke, P. (2020, Dec). Gaswerk-Fotos aus dem Bestand Manfred Prasser: Fund des Monats Nr. 8 vom Dezember 2020. Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung. http://ddr-planungsgeschichte.de/gaswerk-fotos/

Talks

2022
BürgerInnen erschließen Archivalien - CitizenScience-Ansätze im Archiv

Citizen Science in der Stadtgeschichte

November/11/2022
Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH), Hamburg, Germany

Paul Perschke in the Media

35 Jahre Ernst-Thälmann-Park
(Die Kulturfritzen - Kulturpodcast aus Berlin, 03/28/2021)