Digital Humanities

Research projects which are currently being carried out and accompanied at the Junior Professorship for Digital Humanities.

Digital Humanities at the University of Rostock

Research, teaching, continuing education, and services for the application and development of digital methods in the humanities are conducted and offered in several areas at the University of Rostock:

  • In research and teaching, the Digital Humanities are represented by the Academy Junior Professorship for Digital Humanities, through which there is an interdisciplinary teaching offer for students of various disciplines. In addition, DH research projects are carried out and supervised at the junior professorship
  • At the University Library, digitalization projects are carried out and scientific online and data services for interdisciplinary networking and subsequent use of digital cultural data in research are offered and developed
  • In the Department of Knowledge – Culture – Transformation (WKT)  (in german: "Wissen – Kultur – Transformation") of the Interdisciplinary Faculty (INF), there is a research focus on "Digital Hermeneutics", in which workshops and training courses on digital methods are offered for researchers. Also in the scope of the research focus group, the transformation of the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences through digitalization are discussed
  • The interdisciplinary research network IuK ("Development, Application and Consequences of Modern Information and Communication Technologies") focuses on the thematic field of "Digital Humanities"

What are the Digital Humanities?

Digital Humanities (DH) – in german also called: Digitale Geisteswissenschaften – is an interdisciplinary field of research and a subject in which information technologies are applied to the scope of the humanities, which means to all areas of human works and their transmission in the form of language, literature, historical sources, images, music, architecture, geography, objects in other media, as well as religious, political, and social phenomena.

Areas of work in the Digital Humanities are:

  • the creation of digital humanities resources through digitization processes or as born-digital, i.e., materials that were originally created in digital form,
  • the modeling of data in the humanities, using data standards appropriate to the subject matter, such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard,
  • the organization and publication of digital humanities objects, for example as digital editions, digital text corpora, databases, image or object archives, and their networking,
  • the development and use of computer-assisted methods for enriching digital resources with further information for their further indexing as well as for analyzing the objects and answering research questions in the humanities,
  • Issues of sustainable creation and long-term availability and storage of digital humanities resources,
  • reflection on new technologies and the consequences of the digital transformation of society for the humanities.

The Digital Humanities can be viewed as an applied field of informatics if the emphasis is on humanities-related topics and how they might be addressed and answered. As an independent field, the DH also conducts theoretical and methodological basic research on the use of computer-aided technologies in humanities disciplines.
 

Contact

Digital Humanities
Institute for German Studies
Gertrudenstraße 11, Torhaus
18057 Rostock

E-Mail: phf.dhuni-rostockde