Research and development

The Digital humanities – research and development (DH) department is the point of contact for humanities project researchers at the Academy seeking advice and support on the digital aspects of their work. It also investigates and develops new digital methods and tools for the humanities.

Development

The DH team creates digital process flows for the Academy’s projects and develops the required software tools. These software developments are usually available for general use. Even though many of the solutions are project-specific, they are based on a framework that makes them suitable for use in other projects.

Research

The DH department is actively engaged in the development of digital methods, often also in cooperation with external partners, including initiating research proposals.

Long-term availability

DH ensures that the projects’ digital publications and research data are available on a permanent basis. This is made possible using the server infrastructure of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Digital sustainability is an important criterion when selecting the most suitable technologies.

Advice and application support

The DH team advises Academy project researchers on their digital strategy and develops digitalisation concepts for external applications. External partners seeking a digitalisation support partner for their research proposals can also contact DH. 

Training and further education

DH supports the Academy’s scientists with further training on digital technologies in the humanities.

Research projects (selection)

• Development of digital methods for localisation and dating of Church Slavonic manuscripts and the acquisition of relevant digital skills, in cooperation with the Slavic Studies Department at the University of Freiburg
• Optical character recognition for digitalisation of slip collections in dictionary projects, in cooperation with the Department of Statistics at LMU Munich
• Lemmatization (stemming / radicalisation) of Arabic inflected forms
• Grouping of textural witnesses by pictorial themes
• Usability and readability

• Data structuring and markup languages

  Software (selection)

• DHParser – parser framework, which can be used to:
  • translate domain-specific notations to XML, e.g. in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin
  • retrodigitalise or structure text data
  • reconcile data types from different programming languages, e.g. from   , z. B. von TypeScript to Python
• Geist, – a framework for the online provisioning of humanities research data. Examples:
  • schelling.badw.de
  • geschichtsquellen.de
  • kdih.badw.de/datenbank
  • ptolemaeus.badw.de with catalogue, transcriptions, facsimiles and text
  • jordanus.badw.de
  • publikationen.badw.de (examples: CGLO, F1, RLA)
• Heureka-HTML (PDF), – a lightweight, modern HTML-based alternative to TEI-XML
• LexHelfer – a dictionary editing tool

Contact

Dr. Eckhart Arnold (department head)
arnold@badw.de oder digitalisierung[at]badw.de