The Digital Humanities (DH) Lab at the University of Oldenburg has been available to students since 2026 – an innovative space that promotes research, learning and discovery in the field of digital humanities and social sciences. The previously underused scanner room in room B 118 was reimagined following a needs assessment and comprehensively refurbished with funding from the Study Quality Fund (SQM).

The new DH Lab is more than just a technical workspace: it is an experimental learning space that encourages students to familiarise themselves with digital humanities methods independently and through exploration. With six modern PCs, six book scanners, a scanning tent and specialised software such as Adobe Creative Cloud, ABBYY FineReader (for text recognition) and the Oxygen XML Editor (for structured text markup), it offers a low-threshold introduction to the digitisation of texts and images – the foundation for students’ own research projects.

Particular emphasis is placed on the reference library for the Digital Humanities, which, in addition to introductory literature on the Digital Humanities, programming and markup languages, also offers specialist literature on key topics such as text analysis, data annotation, digital editions, digital literary studies and digital history.

The DH Lab sees itself as a Library Lab – a place for creativity, exchange and further education. Short training sessions, workshops and regular evaluations are designed to ensure the continued development of the space. Users are actively involved in shaping the space to ensure the lab remains fit for the future and aligned with the needs of the campus.

• Research at full steam, in: University InfoPortal. News, 20 January 2026, https://uol.de/aktuelles/artikel/forschen-mit-voller-kraft-12759.
• Kaiser, Jonas; Ferdinand, Rina, Martina; Düster, Jana: The DH Lab at BIS Oldenburg as an example of the (re)design of ‘dead learning spaces’ in the context of new learning space requirements, in: Analogue Meets Algorithm. 114th BiblioCon 2026, 19–22 May 2026, Berlin, https://bibliocon2026.abstractserver.com/program/#/details/presentations/747.