Objectives and Activities

One of the project’s objectives is the creation of a virtual collection of postcards from Lower Styria (POLOS). The collection will incorporate material from different institutional and private stocks. A shared platform will be developed within the framework of the Visual Archive of Southeastern Europe by the Center for Information Modelling in the Humanities. Our aim is to provide researchers and students with a tool to explore the shared history of Slovenes and Germans in this region. It will allow for complex inquiries based on the textual and visual components of the postcards.

2018 marks the 100^th anniversary of the collapse of the multi-ethnic and multilingual Habsburg Empire and the consequential separation of Styria into two parts, which represents an opportunity to make the history of Lower Styria and the results of the project visible to the public. To this end, an exhibition will be organized together with Pavelhaus in Laafeld near Radkersburg . After its initial opening, the exhibition will be put on display at other locations in Austria and in Slovenia, with the objective of raising awareness of Styria’s multicultural and multilingual heritage. Our aim is to reach out to a broader, non-academic audience and to stimulate public debate on the topic of a common Styrian history.

In the final year of the project an international workshop will be held in Graz. The project team will present their work as well as their intermediate results; external experts will be invited to provide contributions on issues related to the topic, which will be collected in/result in a scholarly publication. As a result, an academic anthology will be published.