Digital Humanities

Digitisation can be regarded as one of the most significant developments of recent decades even in the humanities and social sciences. More and more digital sources and the tools for linking and evaluating them are available, regardless of time or place. And they are revolutionizing interdisciplinary research.

Laptop zwischen Büchern in Bibliothek

AdobeStock/Chinnapong

From the creation of digital editions of works and the modelling of migratory movements of people to the computer-aided reconstruction of historical buildings and installations, the combining of the humanities and computer science is opening up unprecedented, far-reaching possibilities.

The rather young scientific approach of "digital humanities" is interdisciplinary per se. It is developing new methods for the analysis and visualisation of research data and, with its constantly evolving methods, is opening up completely new, fascinating approaches to diverse issues.

But what does this meeting of the humanities, social sciences, computer science and engineering lead to? What are the implications of working with new digital sources and methods? How does this impact on the way we conduct research, and use and disseminate results?

With the funding guideline (Federal Gazette of July 22, 2019), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) supports the theoretical, methodological and technical development of the digital humanities. These are interdisciplinary research projects dealing with concrete, challenging areas of research in the humanities with the help of approaches from the digital humanities and, in the process, reflecting on how insights are acquired in the humanities. In order to do justice to the wide range of humanities source material which are not texts, the BMBF especially supports research on non-text-focused and multimodal objects such as combinations of images, sound and text.

Since January 2021, thirteen collaborative projects have received funding totalling around 12 million euros. With interdisciplinary approaches from the humanities, digital humanities, computer science and engineering, the projects research a wide variety of issues from the fields of history, archaeology, cultural anthropology, film, music, language and literature.

Overview of the funded projects:

HistKI

ClaReNet

ChronBMM

Diskos

eTaRDiS (in German language)

D-WISE

textklang

Φως 4D

DAVIF

Exzerpt-Portal

InsightsNet

ModelSEN

MPJ