Heidelberg Research Architecture Digital Humanities in Heidelberg
Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities (HCDH)
The HCDH was founded in December 2022 as the central infrastructure for the field of DH at Heidelberg University. It primarily pursues a steadily advancing networking of DH research from Heidelberg with external (inter)national cooperation partners and project groups as well as central infrastructures. At the location itself, initiatives in the area of further education, research and services are in constant development. Collaborative projects and new DH projects are initiated with the help of an established DH funding format. The range of supported projects and topics goes from digital editions, natural language processing to linked open data, semantic web technologies and machine learning.
The HCDH focuses on three main topics.
I) Digital Linguistics: Digital research of linguistic historical documents as well as processing and analysis of multimedia data collected in empirical linguistics.
II) Digital Heritage: Digital preservation, mediation and transmission of cultural heritage as well as research into this heritage using digital methods.
III) Digitality: research of and reflection on the role of media change and the transformation processes associated with it
(e.g. AI, ethics and game studies)
Heidelberg Research Service – Advisory Service and Project Management
For more general consulting regarding third-party funding applications see the Heidelberg Research Service, offered by the Central Administration Dept. 6.2.
Research data
Organising, re-using and archiving digital research data is becoming more and more relevant for planning research projects and publishing research output in all scientific disciplines. A good starting point to learn more about this large subject is Forschungsdaten.info, the German language research data management portal. It also contains a section "E-Science in Baden-Württemberg" about state-level initiatives.
Competence Centre for Research Data
The University's Computing Centre and the University Library together host the Competence Centre for Research Data. The Centre offers consulting for all researchers who plan to create or are already producing research data as part of their academic projects. The Centre hosts the Data Hour, a monthly series of short webinars on various aspects of research data management.
heiDAta
A core service is heiDATA, a professional repository based on the Dataverse software. Individual researchers, research groups, or institutions can publish and sustain their research data here. The curated service offers detailed metadata descriptions, data set versioning, and DOI numbers for citing your data. The centre, together with the University's Computing Centre and the University Library are currently developing the heiARCHIVE service for long-term preservation.
Activities in Heidelberg related to the NFDI initiative
The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) is a digital, distributed infrastructure that will provide the scientific community in Germany with services and consulting related to the management of research data. Heidelberg University Library is actively engaged in NFDI4Culture - Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage. NFDI4Culture addresses research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets. They “aim to establish a needs-based infrastructure for research data that serves our community of interest, ranging from architecture, art history and musicology to theatre, dance film and media studies.” The Heidelberg team is member of the Task Area 4 “Data publication and data availability”.
Other initiatives related to DH at Heidelberg (mostly in german)
- The “Interdisciplinary Forum of Digital Textual Sciences” (InFoDiTex), an initiative by students/researchers at the Department of Thology, provides an interesting collection of resources and tools
- Hosted at the History Department, The HGIS-Club is an interdisciplinary forum for Digital Spatial Humanities with a hands-on focus on application of Historical GIS