Lectures that Link

Lecture Series as Nodes of Interaction in the Digital Humanities

Lecture series are a widespread format within higher education institutions, often used to facilitate scholarly communication in a particular field of research but also to involve researchers from neighboring disciplines, students, and the general public. As a historically rooted format, emerging from the very nature of university culture and lecturing itself, they nowadays appear in nearly every academic discipline. In the Digital Humanities (DH), for instance, one finds a rich array of interdisciplinary series, such as the UCLDH Seminar Series at University College London, the Seminars in Digital and Public Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the Digital Humanities – Aktuelle Forschungsthemen colloquium at the University of Cologne. This trend, partly driven by the rise of online and hybrid delivery modes, has accelerated since the late 2010s.

The project is part of the research at the Junior Professorship for Digital Humanities and is conducted by the RosDH members Ulrike Henny-Krahmer, Erik Renz, and the associated member Fernanda Alvares Freire. Work on the project started in November 2024.

The project Lectures that Link proposes a systematic framework for the collection and analysis of lecture formats, particularly lecture series, within the field of Digital Humanities. According to our hypothesis, lecture series occupy a unique position as nodes of interdisciplinary exchange, similar to contributions to DH conferences and journals, offering insights into thematic developments, institutional networks, and the evolution of scholarly discourse. Yet, despite their centrality, these events have rarely been treated as structured research data. Lectures that Link seeks to close this gap by transforming lecture-series metadata into a machine-readable format, thereby creating a sustainable, open data collection for the DH community.

To achieve this goal, the project has developed an XML schema based on the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This schema captures essential metadata for each talk, including title, date, speaker's name and affiliation, and presentation mode (in-person, hybrid, or online), and organizes it into a hierarchical structure that enables detailed representations of each talk and its context. By encoding host and host institutions, along with their names and geographic locations, as well as abstracts, research fields, and specific topics, the model supports multi-layered analyses of how lecture series articulate and disseminate DH research agendas.

In its initial phase, the project has assembled a corpus spanning 2014 to 2025 and focusing on European lecture series delivered in English, German, Italian, French, and Spanish. This living corpus is continuously expanded, preserving event information that is often ephemeral or dispersed across disparate websites. Through quantitative analysis of the aggregated data, Lectures that Link will illuminate the ways in which DH lecture series interweave institutions, researchers, disciplines, and topics, establishing these events as enduring, data-rich resources for humanities research.

Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike, Fernanda Alvares Freire and Erik Renz. 2025. Lectures that Link. Version 0.5. Software and data. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15769951.
Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike, Fernanda Alvares Freire and Erik Renz. 2025. "Lectures that Link: Analyzing European Lecture Series as Nodes of Interaction in the Digital Humanities." magazén: International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities 6 (1). [Forthcoming.]
Renz, Erik. 2025. "Aus dem Off: Ringvorlesungen und ihr Nutzen als Forschungsdatenquelle in den Digital Humanities." FORGE 2025: Daten neu denken. Book of Abstracts. [Forthcoming.]