Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Digital History

Profile

Digital History Overview

 

The Chair of Digital History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin focuses on the further development of digital methods, techniques and standards for the historical sciences as well as the analysis and critical monitoring of the digital transformation process of the discipline. Since the professorship is primarily method-oriented, it is open to all epochs and sub-disciplines of the historical sciences and can also be connected to the digital humanities as well as to computer science in general.
 

forschung In research, the main focus is on the evaluation, application and further development of digital methods and techniques for the indexing and analysis of historical sources and the formalized processing of questions in the historical sciences. Closely connected to this is the in-depth examination of the properties of historical data and, above all, the effects of digitalization on the process of historical knowledge, since sources and methods in the digital always require a special digital critique of sources and methods. Connected to computational history, the focus is primarily on the semantic web as well as on image-, text- and data-based analysis methods in general, especially based on machine learning. 
Lehre_1

These research focuses are also reflected in the teaching, which is characterized above all by a clear practical orientation. This means that techniques and methods of digital historical sciences are taught in their concrete contexts of use, while at the same time students are always instructed in the necessary digital source and method criticism. The firm anchoring of practice in teaching is supported by cooperation with various research institutions such as the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Berlin State Library (SBB). 

The Chair is committed to the principles of Open Sciences. This means, in particular, that the data generated in projects is published as open data as far as possible in compliance with the FAIR principles, the code generated for its processing and analysis is published in open source, and the research work based on it is published in open access. Sustainable Research Software Engineering (RSE) is also of particular importance in the humanities.