Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts

Under the heading “Digital Humanities” (DH) a new interdisciplinary field is currently emerging in humanities research departments; a field devoted to utilizing, exploring and developing the epistemological potentials of computational tools and procedures. Among the manifold competences, which DH methods bring to digital humanities scholarship are skills and requirements that are also of ample need in the modern working world:

• a general digital and data literacy,
• skills in handling and using computer-aided architectures,
• as well as in digital project organizations and interdisciplinary teamwork.

Building on the successful work of the »Network: Digital Humanities«, at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Potsdam (UP) we develop new cross-cutting DH modules suitable for various MA programs at the University. Our team of researchers design, plan and implement a digital concept for such a module in higher education.

We thereby seek to close a major gap in university didactics: while a number of fully-fledged "Digital Humanities" courses have recently been established, there is still a profound and systemic lack of concepts of how-to bring DH competencies into regular philological curricular and university courses.
Based on technological infrastructures that have already been built at the University of Potsdam such as Campus.UP, Media.UP, Box.UP - and other collaborative learning and working environments such as Moodle.UP etc., we develop a concept to teach digital skills to master students in various philological subjects.
The innovative course formats that we invent are inspired by output-oriented digital project work, interdisciplinary teamwork, rapid prototyping, agile project development as well as by digital methods in the narrower sense of digital humanities (in particular: annotations (TEI / XML), quantitative text analysis, text mining, network analysis, sentiment analysis, stylometry, information visualization, geotagging and mapping (GIS)).