Funded Measures Digital Humanities

The Research Council in Field of Focus 3 has been supporting the establishment and further development of digital humanities at Heidelberg University since its inception in 2011. It brings together numerous initiatives and areas of expertise. With the establishment of the coordination office in 2020, general DH funding was directed toward the areas of digital heritage and digital linguistics, which are particularly prominent at Heidelberg University. Since 2023, the connection to the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) has been greatly expanded as a third pillar for the field of computational humanities and AI development and application. The funds from the DH Fund are used for further expansion in the three areas as well as for networking digital research nationally and internationally.

HCDH Event Series “AI in application”

Generative AI is revolutionizing education systems worldwide. The potential of large language models to support individualized knowledge transfer is enormous, as are the risks involved. And yet this development is still in its infancy—with the next generation of GPT assistants already in the starting blocks! The event series brings together the Heidelberg School of Education (HSE) and the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH) to develop and test use cases for AI in higher education (with a focus on teacher training, among other things) in collaboration with researchers and teachers from Heidelberg University and Heidelberg University of Education. 

Project lead: Dr. Florian Nieser florian.nieser@uni-heidelberg.de

RAGE – Roman and Greek Emotions. Digital approach to emotions in classical philology

The joint project between computational linguistics and classics (Greek studies) aims to bring together philological and computational-linguistic research on emotions. A key outcome will be a computer-generated database on emotions in Latin and Greek literature, which will serve as a resource for future research. In order to optimize the time-consuming manual annotation process, the project develops methods that provide annotators with machine-generated suggestions. In addition, a system based on modern large language models (LLMs) is  developed and trained that will be able to automatically annotate previously unprocessed texts with regard to their emotional aspects at the semantic level.

Project lead Prof. Dr. Anette Frank frank@cl.uni-heidelberg.de, PD Dr. Thomas Kuhn-Treichel tkuhntr@uni-heidelberg.de, Dr. Jonathan Geiger jonathan.geiger@skph.uni-heidelberg.de, Frederik Riemenschneider riemenschneider@cl.uni-heidelberg.de
Contact: Frederik Riemenschneider riemenschneider@cl.uni-heidelberg.de

Exploring Digital Coptic Papyrology

The project aims to use methods from the digital humanities to promote interdisciplinary collaboration. By integrating various disciplines such as papyrology, computer science, and Coptic studies, the group developed new digital approaches to improve the existing papyri.info platform. Building on the extensive experience gained with papyri.info, the coding of Coptic texts was further developed in a workshop in September 2024 in collaboration with experts.

Funding: 2024
Project lead and Contact: Dr. James Cowey james.cowey@urz.uni-heidelberg.de, Dr. Loreleï Vanderheyden lorelei.vanderheyden@uni-heidelberg.de

Writing after the letter culture:  Emails – Dynamics of norming and standardization

For over 50 years, email has been used as a means of personal and professional communication. The heterogeneity of writing situations and the degree of formality in emails, as well as their current development towards an often distant form of communication used in professional contexts, raise questions about standardization and language use in emails. The measure implemented with the SSC uses data donations to compile an email corpus (French, Spanish, Portuguese), which will be examined linguistically in terms of morphology, syntax, and information structure and made available for follow-up research. 

Funding: 2024-2025
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Sybille Große sybille.grosse@rose.uni-heidelberg.de

heiEDITION – Heidelberg Editions networked: Development of an interface (API) for heiEDITIONS according to the standard  “Distributed Text Services (DTS)”

In cooperation with university, national, and international partners, Heidelberg University Library uses its digital edition infrastructure, heiEDITIONS, to provide online editions of a wide variety of text corpora. With the DWork3 digitization workflow and Heidelberg HTML viewer heiVIEWER 4, heiEDITIONS supports TEI markup and the visualization of TEI data in various modes (source, read, synopsis, index, etc.). The reuse of data, which is always provided in open access, has not been optimal to date because there was no local data provision interface (API) to enable transfer to larger corpora. The measure implements an API according to the Distributed Text Services Standard (DTS) , which enables machine access to texts in particular.

Funding: 2024
Project leadt: Dr. Jochen Apel jochen.apel@ub.uni-heidelberg.de

Computational Theology. Methods – Practices – Perspectives

In German-speaking countries, the TheoLab Heidelberg joint project is a central location for the development of computational theology. Together with scientists from theology and digital humanities, computational theology was further developed and deepened in terms of discipline at a workshop (September 2023). As a result, the state-of-the-art digital research in theology will be made available to the reference disciplines in the form of a compendium (Compendium Computational Humanities, Vol. 1 Research in Digital Humanities, Vol. 2 Potential of Digital Research in Theology).  

Funding: 2023
Project lead: PD Dr. Frederike van Oorschot frederike.vanoorschot@oek.uni-heidelberg.de, Dr. Christopher Nunn christopher.nunn@theologie.uni-heidelberg.de

Hans Fehr Collection of Juridical Archaeology

The legal archaeology collection of Prof. Dr. Hans Fehr (1874-1961) has been kept at the Institute for Historical Jurisprudence at Heidelberg University since the 1950s. It comprises 645 historical image documents that express abstract legal concepts or bear witness to juridically significant events from antiquity to the 1950s. In cooperation with the HCDH and Heidelberg University Library, the collection has now been comprehensively digitized via the HeidICON platform. Written image content as well as Fehr's handwritten descriptions and annotations have been extensively transcribed so that they are fully searchable. In addition, the documents have been indexed according to the GND. The collection is thus accessible to a broad academic audience for the first time.

Funding: 2022
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Christian Hattenhauer christian.hattenhauer@igruni-heidelberg.de
Contact: Adrian Koslowski adrian.koslowski@igr.uni-heidelberg.de

CoReTo Computational Modeling of Complex Research Topics from the Humanities (CoReTo)

Research approaches and cultures focused on linguistics, humanities, computational linguistics, and computer science for investigating linguistic phenomena in large data sets (big data) are not readily compatible due to differing interests, approaches, and objectives: While the former focuses on the detailed characterization and modeling of a complex subject of investigation, the latter focuses on the development of complex models and algorithms for the operationalization of research topics. The project pursued the convergence of both research cultures within the framework of the concrete application scenario of moralization, a linguistic act that is difficult to grasp using computational methods. 

Funding: 2022-2023
Project lead: Dr. Maria Becker maria.becker@gs.uni-heidelberg.de, Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder ekkehard.felder@gs.uni-heidelberg.de
Collaboration with: Prof. Dr. Marcus Müller (TU Darmstadt) marcus.mueller@tu-darmstadt.de 

Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)

ECPO was developed by Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA), a former Heidelberg Digital Humanities Unit, in collaboration with Academia Sinica in Taiwan. It brings together several important digital collections of early Chinese press and makes them accessible to academic communities around the world. It differs from all existing databases of Chinese periodicals in that it not only provides image scans, but also preserves materials that are often not included in reprints, microfilms, or digital (even full-text) editions, such as advertisements and illustrations. The project was supported in order to develop a ground truth for texts printed in irregular typefaces.

Funding: 2022
Project lead: Matthias Arnold arnold@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

Annotation of Moralization Practices

In the project “Annotation of Moralization Practices,” a dataset was created with texts from various fields of knowledge in which moralizing speech acts are annotated. Moralizing speech acts are discursive strategies in which the description of controversial issues and necessary actions are closely linked to moral concepts. Vocabulary referring to moral values (such as “freedom,” “security,” or “credibility”) is used to enforce a demand that thus appears unavoidable and requires no further explanation or justification. The resulting dataset can be used for automated research into the phenomenon of moralization.

Funding: 2021-2022
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder und Dr. Maria Becker maria.becker@gs.uni-heidelberg.de

OCR-Technologies in Comparison: From manuscripts and old prints to database structures and HTR models

The project, which is rooted in digital linguistics, aimed to develop a basis for the computer-assisted study of pre-modern lexicographical works and historical language contacts in the field of lexicography and conceptual history. In order to expand the technical infrastructure for the digital recording of multilingual dictionaries (manuscripts and old prints), the lexicographical data was prepared for linking in a database. For this purpose, a lemmatizer was further developed and implemented for each of the languages in question (Greek, Church Slavonic, Latin). At the same time, the data set to be examined was expanded with the help of the HTR tools Transkribus and eScriptorium. In this context, HTR models were trained, applied for further automatic transcriptions, and subsequently published. In parallel, various OCR engines (CITlab HTR+, PyLaia, kraken) were evaluated and their advantages and disadvantages weighed upn. 

Funding: 2021-2022
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Irina Podtergera epolyglott@slav.uni-heidelberg.de

Web Applications for  Heritage Walks (DANAM-Project)

The project developed a web-based application for cultural heritage walks using data and materials from the freely accessible and free Digital Archive of Nepalese Art and Monuments (DANAM). DANAM was created as part of the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP) and is the first database of its kind to comprehensively document Nepal's tangible and intangible heritage in digital form. It houses and publishes detailed information on the architectural, anthropological, historical, and geophysical status of predominantly endangered monuments and related objects. To date, it has already documented over 600 monuments, 2,700 objects, and 1,200 inscriptions in the Kathmandu Valley and western Nepal. DANAM data is also regularly transmitted to heidICON at Heidelberg University Library and made future-proof by heiDOC. 

Funding: 2021-2022
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius brosius@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

Interdisciplinary Forum for Digital Textual Studies InFoDiTex 

The Interdisciplinary Forum for Digital Textual Studies was conceived as a meeting platform for young researchers to regularly discuss the theory and practice of digital textual studies. Its objectives were to facilitate networking among young researchers, to reflect on and learn about DH methods, and to present and discuss ongoing DH projects. The forum is now based at TU Darmstadt and is a close partner of Digital Theology in Heidelberg.

Funding: 2020
Project lead: Dr. Christopher Nunn christopher.nunn@theologie.uni-heidelberg.de