Opening Keynote
Medievalist in the Loop: Putting the Humanities back into the Digital Humanities
The digital turn of the past century transformed the methods of collecting, storing, and analysing information. This transformation is evident not only in the natural sciences but also in the humanities. The emergence of digital humanities has successfully integrated digital technologies with humanities disciplines, including medieval studies. The capability to aggregate data from various sources enables the formulation of novel research questions, and the application of digital tools and methods facilitates their exploration on an unprecedented scale. In my lecture, I will demonstrate that the primary limitation for digital medieval studies today lies in the quality and granularity of the data available for digital analysis. There is an urgent need to produce high-quality datasets to unlock new research avenues. Consequently, I will argue for the increasing significance of comprehensive training in both the humanities disciplines and digital methodologies. Students of medieval studies have to learn how to think about manuscripts or literary texts as data sources, how to systematically collect and manage information, and how to make their research reusable and reproducible. More importantly, they also need to gain a solid understanding of traditional disciplines such as linguistics, codicology, and textual criticism to produce datasets that enable conducting innovative research, as there is no future of digital humanities without the humanities.
Katarzyna Kapitan
Dr Katarzyna Anna Kapitan is a manuscript scholar and digital humanist specialising in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. Currently, she is Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College and Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship at the University of Oxford. She is incoming Junior Chair in Computational Analysis of Written Cultures in Western Space at the École Nationale des Chartes, PSL Université. Her most recent research project involves a digital reconstruction and book-archaeological exploration of a dispersed manuscript library.
Closing Keynote
The Future of Digital Humanities – Beyond Humanities?
The natural sciences embraced computational tools and methods early on, primarily because of the extensive processing of large quantities of experimental data. More recently, the digital humanities (DH) have also started to incorporate these methods into their research agenda, driven by a significant increase in digitally available texts, images, audio and video files. However, I believe that this is not all that the natural sciences have to offer. In this talk I argue that DH can learn far more from the natural sciences than just adopting their statistical and computational methods. I look forward to explore the potential of adding theoretical frameworks and genuine research topics from the natural sciences to DH and reflect on how this might change the DH as a discipline in the future. Will there even be such a thing as DH in twenty years, or will digital methods and interdisciplinary collaborations just be the norm in a future world of “Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences”?
Manuel Burghardt
Manuel Burghardt is Full Professor of Computational Humanities at the Institute for Computer Science at Leipzig University. He is also leading the “Digital Lab” at the Research Centre Global Dynamics in Leipzig. With his research group, Manuel is exploring how computational methods can bring new interdisciplinary perspectives of knowledge to the humanities. In doing so, he is investigating all kinds of socio-cultural artifacts, ranging from text to audio-visual media and even video games. His current research focus is on computational game studies and digital environmental humanities.