Open MA colloquiums

Opening event and welcoming of the students.

(Jun.-Prof. Dr. Mareike Schumacher, Universität Stuttgart)

(Students of Digital Humanities, University of Regensburg)

Environmental Humanities is a highly interdisciplinary field that deals with the interrelationship between humans and the environment. At its core is the question of how socio-cultural, historical, philosophical and aesthetic factors influence our perception of and interaction with the environment. The lecture will explore the potential of current methods of computational humanities to investigate novel questions in environmental humanities. These potentials will be discussed on the basis of concrete examples and the limits and possibilities of a new field of research called “Computational Environmental Humanities” will be demonstrated.

(Prof. Dr. Manuel Burghardt, Universität Leipzig)

The lecture is dedicated to the diverse areas of overlap between game, text, media and digital humanities. It deals with questions of games and playing in digital media as well as with questions of versioning, multimodality, procedurality, variability and multilinearity that are central to text analysis. Using selected case studies in the field of video game corpora, questions of textuality and language in and around video games, the development of ortho- and paragame corpora and especially the applicability of quantitative-qualitative analysis methods to critical gender issues in the digital humanities will be discussed. 

(Prof. Dr. Astrid Ensslin, Universität Regensburg)

The lecture examines the role and development of theory formation in the digital humanities. Current discussions and controversies on theory formation in the digital humanities will be highlighted. A particular focus is on the analysis of different contexts of use of the concept of theory, which originate from the humanities as well as from computer science, computational linguistics and statistics. Case studies are used to discuss the interplay of different theoretical concepts in specific research settings. How do matrix addition and hermeneutic understanding actually fit together? What epistemic premises are associated with Bayes' theorem? And how do theoretical assumptions materialize in software and code?  The lecture not only invites us to think about theory formation in the DH, but also to reimagine our idea of participatory and collaborative theory work.

(Jun.-Prof. Dr. Rabea Kleymann, Universität Chemnitz)

The development of tools for the computer-aided analysis of audiovisual content has been increasing in recent years and has thus also influenced the methods and objects of investigation in film studies. The lecture Digital Film Analysis: History, Methods and Trends provides insights into the historical development of (digital) film and video analysis, proven approaches and current trends. Using the concrete example of the analysis of color in film, it is explained how such complex aesthetic phenomena can be approached with computational methods in a qualitative and quantitative way.

(Prof. Dr. Josephine Diecke, Universität Zürich)

Digital methods are (slowly) increasingly being used by historians. In the lecture, a number of methods will be presented using concrete examples, including network analysis, geo-visualization and topic modelling.

(Prof. Dr. Mark Spoerer, Universität Regensburg)

Sounds are omnipresent in our everyday lives and they are also represented in literary texts. Whether howling wind, babbling brook, screaming girls or rattling trains - their explicit representation is manifold and enriches the scene setting with information about the soundscapes of fictional worlds. The lecture is dedicated to the operationalization of sounds as event units in literary prose, which can be manually but also automatically annotated and relationally divided into different levels of loudness, opening up new possibilities for the computational analysis of fictional soundscapes.

(Svenja Guhr, Technische Universiät Darmstadt)

The research project “Digitalization of the Army Horse Park 551” as part of the Digital Humanities Master's degree course deals with the digitization of private images from the Second World War. The aim is to make these sources more accessible. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary cooperation between the archive and the university. Two private source collections were reviewed, structured in databases and encoded using TEI. An HTML gallery enables the user-friendly presentation of the images. The extracted locations were converted into a KML file to enable geovisualization of the route of the army horse park. The poster of the project visualizes the process and shows applied methods and results. It highlights the challenges and solutions in digitizing these private sources.

(Larissa Fritz, Universität Stuttgart)

Inventar Colombia: una mirada desde el Orinoco is a digital research project that seeks to reconstruct aspects of the geographic imagination, forms of relationship with nature, and its resources, of at least fifteen indigenous groups that inhabited the Orinoco region between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Responding to the limits to what we can know in the archive about how various indigenous groups inhabited and conceived the territory, we carried out a process of curation and extraction of geospatial data from historical and archaeological sources. We identified some patterns of territorial occupation and exchange networks of the multiplicity of indigenous communities that inhabited the Orinoco region. From iterations for the construction of maps with QGIS and typical GIS conventions, we explored other forms of visualization and narrative construction to deploy the arguments of the research on the web. We proposed a CSM-free web interface developed with JavaScript and open-source libraries and developed a set of cartographic narratives.

https://inventarcolombia.uniandes.edu.co/

(Prof. Dr. Maria José Afanador, Universidad de los Andes, Columbia)

Network analysis of theoretical references in Bundestag speeches

(MA Projekt, Universität Stuttgart)

Children, kitchen, career? The role of women in German-language novels

(MA Projekt, Universität Stuttgart)