The Digital Humanities Interface – An Introduction

Abstract

It is hard, if not impossible, to define Digital Humanites (DH) as a whole. The term can be used to characterize a set of innovative research methods and tools that link qualitative and quantitative methods. It can be employed as an umbrella term to describe any technological advances in scholarship. For a long time, DH was characterized as a “field of research” that connects humanities, social sciences and computer sciences. This broad range of associations that come to mind when DH is mentioned hints at its position “in between”: between computer sciences and humanities, between understanding the past with research methods firmly rooted in present technology, and between academia and general audiences.

Biographical Note

Ninja Steinbach- Hüther (SFB 1199 & Leibniz-Insititut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, Germany)

Ninja Steinbach-Hüther earned a PhD in Global studies from Leipzig University and the École normale supérieure, Paris, with a study on the “Circulation of African knowledge. Presence and reception of African academic literature in France and Germany”. Before, she studied French culture studies and Intercultural communication, English literature (Transcultural anglophone studies) and German as a foreign language at the University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken, as well as European studies during a semester abroad at Cardiff University, Wales. For several years, she worked as a research assistant, then as the project coordinator of a German-Greek bilateral research project at the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University. Her academic interests include the circulation of knowledge in a globalizing world, cultural transfers, the theoretical and methodological approaches for the investigation of spatial formats and spatial orders and the actors within these processes. She particularly interested in Digital Humanities-driven approaches combined with conventional research perspectives to these topics and their applicability in an interdisciplinary research environment.

Thomas Efer (Automatische Sprachverarbeitung Leipzig University, Germany)

Thomas Efer works at the Department of Automatic Speech Processing at the Institute of Computer Science at Leipzig University. Since 2018, he has been a research assistant in the project Bibliotheca Arabica of the Saxon Academy of Sciences Leipzig. Since 2011, he has been a member of the program committee of the “Student Conference Computer Science” (SKILL). He is a reviewer for “Digital Humanities Quarterly” (DHQ) since 2016, for the Data Science Journal (DSJ) of the International Science Council’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology since 2016, and for the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (JDMDH) since 2017.