The Digital Humanities apply these methods to the study of culture, language and history – ranging from the AI-assisted recording and analysis of objects and artefacts, through their visualisation and making them accessible (including geovisualisation, spatial AI, interactive, curated web portals) to AI-assisted proposals for their historical and cultural-historical contextualisation, which are verified and validated by specialised experts in a ‘human-in-the-loop’ process. It is precisely this end-to-end, AI-supported yet specialised chain – from the object or document to its interpretation – that represents one of the initiative’s central perspectives.

The digital or computational social sciences utilise corresponding research practices (with the aid of, amongst other things, sensors, databases, language models, reverse engineering and statistics) to address questions concerning society, including education and politics. Fundamentally, these methods serve to measure, convert into data and quantitatively analyse social and cultural characteristics and processes.

The centre is therefore on research in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Oldenburg – and on the question of how culture, language, history, education and society can be explored anew through the means of digitalisation, machine learning and AI. To this end, the University integrates these disciplines across schools into a structured, university-wide transformation process: interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary within the participating schools, and transdisciplinary beyond them.

Digital, AI-supported research, together with its critical reflection, is being permanently embedded in research and teaching – based on the premise that its methods are not so much objective as normative and socio-culturally embedded, and are therefore context-dependent. The University of Oldenburg brings this process together under the name Digital Social Sciences and Humanities (DSSH).

Given the inherent impossibility of objectivity in standard DSSH processes, these must be subject to ethical, social and cultural reflection. The initiative is therefore further developing the application, analysis and reflection on new digital technologies within the context of the humanities and social sciences, and building bridges between the various disciplines. To this end, researchers are developing shared tools for the critical adaptation and ethical, epistemological and political contextualisation of computer-assisted methods for DSSH. At the same time, the initiative supports the technical development of these methods by providing context-specific training and validation data spanning text, images and objects, which are tailored to a specialised understanding of the respective domains.