Digital Humanities (DH) is an innovative field of research that connects humanities, social sciences and computer sciences, and utilizes qualitative and quantitative methods. The central aim of the TRAFO series “The Digital Humanities Interface” is to give voice to people who are involved in the highly interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary field of DH from both the humanities and the informatics side of the field, thus bridging the divide between those who conceptualize and those who program. This series sheds light on those working at this interface, and we ask what these new techniques and forms of cooperation mean for transregional research. The series is edited by Ninja Steinbach-Hüther (Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography (IFL) and SFB 1199, Leipzig University) and Thomas Efer (Leipzig University and Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (SAW)).
If you are interested in contributing to this series, please contact Ninja Steinbach-Hüther or Thomas Efer.
By Kathleen Schlütter and Eva Ommert (Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University). Report on the Roundtable “The Future of the Archive(s): Digital Infrastructures Across Regions”
(17.11.2023 at the University of Regensburg (Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies) & Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) and online, NFDI4Memory in cooperation with CrossArea e.V.)
By Julius Wilm. Quantitative approaches have fallen out of fashion in the discipline of history. If one goes back a few decades, this is a surprise. In the 1960s to 1990s, quantification was hailed as a key to the renewal of the discipline, which would finally satisfy scholarly criteria in representing historical reality on a large scale instead of relying on anecdotes.
By Katarina Ristić and Nikola Ristić. Digital archives have created a number of opportunities for researchers, from accessing files and material collections irrespective of the archive’s location, to the possibility to search and obtain large amounts of material in a short time. At the same time, digital collections might be overwhelming, amounting to hundreds or even thousands of files which might be of interest for the research.
By Elton Barker. Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia wrote the Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece). Representing a unique deep dive into ancient Greece’s built environment to the level of individual statues and paintings, this text projects a tour of the Greek mainland in ten books, from Attica (I) to Phocis (X), in a clockwise circuit around the Peloponnese.
By Diana Roig-Sanz. The idea that the digital humanities enjoy a global scope remains utopian. Most of the departments and research institutions that house postgraduate studies, summer schools, international conferences, and scientific journals on the matter remain anchored in the Global North, especially in certain countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
By Susan Grunewald, Ruth Mostern, and Karl Grossner. As digital projects become increasingly popular for the humanities, linked open data (LOD) is a means to combine the efforts of many individual researchers and research teams to enable truly transregional research.
By Thorben Pelzer. The idea of the Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD) is to provide a pool of digitized and cross-referenced data that researchers can then analyze to answer their own specific research questions. These questions concern the ways in which engineers operated under, but also shaped, formats and visions of space.
By Ninja Steinbach-Hüther and Thomas Efer. It is hard, if not impossible, to define Digital Humanites as a whole. The term can be used to characterize a set of innovative research methods and tools that link qualitative and quantitative methods.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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