Digital Humanities Research Collaboration
Completed
The Digital Humanities Research Collaboration (DHFV) is supported by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture within the programme “Niedersächsisches Vorab der Volkswagen-Stiftung” (Duration: 01.01.2012–31.03.2015). DHFV is the first project to be coordinated by the new Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH). Made up of many prominent personalities from the international DH community, the GCDH’s Advisory Board provides the project with expert guidance in the area of DH.
As a joint research project, DHFV brings together several well-known institutions from Lower Saxony that are active in fields such as digital infrastructures, research, and teaching. The overall aim they share is to refine the new and quickly evolving research area of the Digital Humanities within the three-year project duration so as to demonstrate its added value for the Arts and Humanities as a whole.
DHFV is aided in achieving this aim by the special scholarly conditions that exist on the Goettingen Research Campus, conditions that are unique in Germany. The existence of so many tightly knit scholarly networks in such a small geographical area allows the Research Campus to join together institutions both inside and outside the university. This allows the project to include as cooperating partners not only university institutions (the Institutes for Archaeology, Political Science, and Sociology, the Centre for Computational Sciences, the Goettingen State and University Library, and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities) but also external research organisations (Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and the university computing centre GWDG).
The Research Association’s objective is to implement the Digital Humanities in both the research and teaching of the individual Arts and Humanities disciplines on the Göttingen Research Campus. The pilot projects in the DHFV framework are expected to provide the starting point of the DH implementation. To this end within the Research Association the creation of digital infrastructures is combined with selected disciplines and their research questions with the intention to show what will be possible for the Arts and Humanities once computer-based research methods become common practice. The project aims to produce internationally visible research efforts that have been enhanced by computer-assisted methods.
The logical consequence of the digital turn in the Arts and Humanities is to extend these new methods into university curricula. To bring these curricular efforts of the different disciplines together, the project plans to establish a new “Digital Humanities” (M. A.) study course in the winter term 2014/15. A doctoral programme is also in planning.
The ultimate objective is to unite the “two cultures” and to finally overcome the gap between arts, humanities, and literary studies on the one hand and physical science and technology on the other.
Sub-projects:
Partners:
The Research Collaboration involves partners from across the Göttingen Research Campus. In addition to the GCDH, there are:
- Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel (HAB)
- Institute of Archaeology, University of Göttingen
- Goettingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AdW)
- Institute of Political Science, University of Göttingen
- Institute for Sociology, University of Göttingen and Sociological Research Institute (SOFI)
- Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG)
- Center for Computational Sciences, University of Göttingen
- Goettingen State and University Library (SUB)
- Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung (GWDG)
