University of Hamburg - to research, to teach, to educate and form, to homepage
Faculty of Humanities
Facultyof Humanities

Photo: DH-Lab

Digital Humanities in Hamburg

The Digital Humanities at the University of Hamburg encompass the diverse theoretical and critical reflections and practical applications of digital processes in university teaching and research at the Faculty of Humanities. Initiatives, projects and events on the generation of machine-readable data, the computer-aided analysis of cultural artifacts and the digital representation of the results of humanities research and teaching take into account the methodological and technical possibilities and challenges of a digital society.

A central element of the Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary cooperation both within the humanities and with computer science. This is reflected in many interdisciplinary initiatives and projects.

The Digital Humanities see themselves as a building block for the implementation of the University's overarching digital strategy, including the challenges and new opportunities arising from the digitalization of administration.

Dimensions of the digital humanities

Digital Humanities (DH) is established as a methodological paradigm in research and teaching at the Faculty of Humanities. Digitalization and digitality in the sense of scientific, social and cultural practices are realized on four dimensions:

  • through the use of digital communication channels, teaching and learning spaces,
  • through the establishment of digital and data literacy among researchers, teachers and students,
  • through the training of critical digital competence (knowledge of legal issues, data security, etc.)
  • and finally through the use of digital tools and methods in research projects.

History of Digital Humanities in Hamburg

Since the mid-1990s, the Faculty of Humanities has been actively involved in a number of initiatives and projects for the digitalization of research and teaching, both thematically and methodologically. The following should be highlighted:

  • the development and support of the desktop software EXMARaLDA (transcription, annotation, analysis of language corpora; since 2000),
  • the development and support of the web-based open access platform CATMA (collaborative digital text analysis; since 2008)
  • the founding of the Hamburg Center for Language Corpora (HZSK; 2011),
  • the founding of the central umbrella organization of the Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries at the DH conference in Hamburg (2012),
  • the founding of the Hamburg KorpusLab (2017) and the Cross Disciplinary Lab Digital Humanities (CDL-DH; 2021),
  • the work in the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts, for example in Research Field F "Data Linking",
  • and the establishment of an Institute for Humanities-Centered Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) (since 2024) with an associate professorship for Artificial Intelligence in Humanities at the Department of Philosophy.

The Digital Humanities Lab (DH Lab) serves interdisciplinary networking in the field of digital humanities at the University of Hamburg in cooperation with computer science and non-university institutions such as the SUB. Since the end of 2021, it has been part of the newly founded Hub of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) as part of UHH's digitalization strategy.