Profile

Vision

The extensive datafication and algorithmization of nearly all aspects of contemporary social coexistence and culture are fundamentally reshaping the human condition and thereby presenting unprecedented challenges and opportunities for an emergent digital paradigm in both research and learning. The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Sciences responds with a strong focus on materialities, codifications, expectations, patterns of interpretation, practices, traditions, language, and other systems of communication and representation in the contemporary digital context. 

Our research and teaching address these challenges and opportunities with a two-fold emphasis on methods for the analysis of data and data-based artefacts and their instantiations and consequences within culture and society. This approach places an integrated technical and social-theoretical focus front-and-centre in the broader digital-epistemological transformation.

The department combines profound technical-algorithmic expertise in computer science with epistemological expertise in the humanities and social sciences. The department practices close integration with existing established disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as well as with the Department Computer Science. In this respect, it explicitly sees itself as an integrator.

Mission

The department deliberately positions itself across boundaries in terms of organizational structures and profiles its professorships along interdisciplinary problem classes. It is managed collegially and works with common resources that are accessible to all scientific positions according to need; it deliberately refrains from subdivisions into “chairs”. The doctoral phase is also to be reformed as a pilot project and made more interdisciplinary.

Preliminary work

The department follows up on the successful work of the Interdisciplinary Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences: The collaboration of the actors has shown how horizontal transdisciplinary networking between the faculties and the interplay of research subjects can work. In this way, questions from the Conditio Humana can motivate application-oriented research in the technical sciences and vice versa. This joint commitment has been certified in various evaluations as having high visibility, demonstrated interconnectivity, and great potential.

Integration into the research and teaching contexts of FAU

The comprehensive university FAU is shaping a cross-disciplinary research focus on Digital Transformation and Data Analytics. Together with its HTA sister Department Data Science of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, as well as the Department of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineernig of the Faculty of Engineering the Department DHSS develops a strong nucleus in this field.