Foundation and Hightech Agenda Bayern

The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies was founded in January 2021 with funding from Hightech Agenda Bayern.

The department was developed and proposed by

• Prof. Dr. Peter Bell, Digital Humanities focus on Art History (Phil)
• Prof. Dr. Stephanie Evert, Computational Corpus Linguistics (Phil)
• Prof. Dr. Georg Glasze, Cultural Geography (Nat)
• Prof. Dr. Svenja Hagenhoff, Book Studies, esp. e-publishing and digital markets (Phil)
• Prof. Dr. Michael Kohlhase, Knowledge Representation and Processing (Tech)
• Prof. Dr. Andreas Maier, Machine Intelligence (Tech)
• Prof. Dr. Heidrun Stein-Kecks, Art History (Phil)

Cross-disciplinary problem areas for the new HTA professorships

Research-oriented Data Management in the Humanities

Data sets in the humanities are highly complex because they are divergent in their formal nature (text, images, sound, digits, geo references, entire models) and ambiguous in their semantics; storage in relations and analysis via SQL statements is usually unsuitable. What is needed are concepts for dealing with these data sets along the entire data life cycle.

Computing Images & Objects in Cultural Heritage

Image media and objects are entities with a highly complex attribute structure, which as real-world objects materialize and bind culture and create social structures through their nature and symbolic capital. Their computer-assisted analyzability, digital representation/reconstruction, and image-scientific reflection are fields of work with interdisciplinary benefits.

Computing Text and Language

AI and computational linguistics are making impressive progress in automatic language processing using highly complex neural networks, but these are opaque end-to-end systems. Such methods must be interpretable in order to make them useful for the humanities. Automatic and semi-automatic methods for hermeneutic text interpretation and connections between statistical neural methods of language processing and formal knowledge representations are innovative fields with broad application potential.

Held by Prof. Dr. Michaela Mahlberg since 01.04.2024.

Analyzing Geo- and Social Data

More and more social processes are being datafied. This new “social data” is available in real time, activities and people can be spatially localized. The resulting possibilities for insight into spatial structures and social dynamics go far beyond established statistics: the new forms of controlling social processes need to be understood and assessed in terms of their power to change society.

Human Computer Interaction

The German Informatics Society has identified ubiquitous HCI as one of the major challenges for the Digital Age: the usability of systems decisively determines people’s success and participation in social subsystems, and people’s behavior is influenced by the fact that more and more communication with applications takes place. The adequate design of user interfaces in the process of system development is thus becoming increasingly important.

Governing of Data Economies

Data and data-based digital artifacts are resources that form the basis of interests and business models (“data opec”) of very different actors. The result is a field of tension between the design of exploitation opportunities, protection interests and sovereignty goals, both at the level of organizations and citizens and with regard to the geopolitical-economic-legal framework.