Wer: Manuel Burghardt (Universität Leipzig)

Wann: 17. November 2025, 17:00 CET

Abstract

This talk explores how environmental issues can benefit from computational approaches in the humanities. I will begin with a brief introduction to Environmental Humanities (EH), a field that seeks to understand nature-culture entanglements and address environmental challenges such as climate change by drawing on humanistic perspectives, narratives, and histories. I will also outline the core ideas of Digital Humanities (DH) and highlight existing work at the intersection of EH and DH. A central point of my argumentation will be that the DH is often described as a "big tent," ranging from tool-based scholarship to interpretive digital media studies to more computational, data-driven approaches. While this latter strand – often called Computational Humanities (CH) – has developed rapidly in recent years, it has not received a lot of attention within EH. The second part of the talk therefore argues for a Computational Environmental Humanities (CEH): an approach that uses computational methods to study environmental discourse, cultural imagination, and human-nature entanglements at scale. Drawing on recent examples and emerging techniques, including large-scale language models and multimodal information extraction frameworks, the talk will outline research opportunities and illustrate how computational methods can extend rather than replace interpretive traditions in the environmental humanities.