The University Library has a new service: the "Digital Humanities" service centre supports anyone interested in using digital methods in research in the humanities.
Topic modelling, distant reading or stylometry: if these terms mean anything to you, you have probably already taken a closer look at the topic of "Digital Humanities" (DH). This growing field - in German, for example: Digital Humanities - is located at the boundary between the humanities, cultural studies, linguistics and social sciences on the one hand and Computing Science and Information Science on the other. "The idea behind it is to answer questions in the humanities using digital methods and thus gain new insights," explains Jonas Kaiser. Together with Rina Martina Ferdinand and Jan Frederik Maas, the historian and academic librarian has been responsible for the university's newly founded "Digital Humanities Service Centre" at the university library for over a year. He sees his role as a "triad of counselling, training and networking."
Heike Andermann, Director of the Library and Information System (BIS), emphasises that the service point is a permanent offer. "As a rule, positions in this field are temporary. Our aim is to advise and support our researchers on a permanent basis." The main addressees are Schools I, II, III and IV.
Kaiser is available as a contact person, for example, if someone is writing a funding application and wants to know which digital humanities methods are suitable for tackling the research question. Interested parties can get advice in an open online consultation hour, and the historian also organises various short training courses several times a semester and offers an introductory course in the programming language Python.
The service centre is involved in various digital humanities research projects
Another format is a lunchtime talk, the "DH Stammtisch", which takes place once a month. "There is usually a short keynote speech at the beginning, a project is presented or a method outlined, for example, and then there is room for dialogue and networking," he reports. Interested parties can sign up to a mailing list to be informed about the programmes. After one year, BIS Director Heike Andermann draws a positive balance: "The response is encouragingly high and our service centre is already actively involved in various DH research projects."
In fact, many Oldenburg researchers are already using the new methods: for example, the German scholar PD Dr Christian Schmitt analysed the variety of topics in a collection of almost 900 so-called "fairground prints" with the help of topic modelling. The method uses machine learning to determine the predominant topics in large volumes of text. Several projects led by historian Prof. Dr Dagmar Freist are developing IT-supported methods to digitise historical documents, make information on museum collections digitally usable or create digital 3D models of collection objects. In the social sciences, Prof Dr Marius Sältzer is investigating the communication of political parties using machine learning methods. Other methods that have already been used in various ways include distant reading - a process for extracting information from large volumes of text - and stylometry. Here, stylistic features of texts are analysed using statistical methods.
DH-Lab offers new opportunities for students
Since the beginning of the year, students have had the opportunity to try out the methods of digital humanities in a specially set up "DH Lab". In room B 118 in the Haarentor Central Library, for example, there is a digital humanities reference collection with selected specialist literature and equipment for scanning documents, as well as powerful computers with special software to make the scanned documents machine-readable and analyse the data obtained.
Kaiser, who studied history, Japanese studies and digital humanities in Trier and then completed a traineeship at the Göttingen State and University Library, has found Oldenburg to be very open to the possibilities of the digital world. "There is a lot of interest and curiosity. Many researchers are keen to simply try out the new methods," he says happily. This is not a matter of course: just a few years ago, there was a certain scepticism towards digital humanities in the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences - but this is now waning. "On the one hand, there has been a generational shift, and on the other, important third-party funding bodies have launched corresponding funding programmes," reports the expert.
At the same time, the community of specialists in this field is growing. The federal association "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V." (DHd), founded in 2013, organises an annual conference, awards prizes, offers an umbrella for various specialist initiatives and provides funding opportunities. For Kaiser, the association offers an important opportunity to keep up to date with the latest trends and to network with colleagues in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He is certain that the demand for expertise in the digital humanities will continue to grow.