Blog
Will Digital Destroy the Humanities?
15 September 2026 · christiancasey
The short answer is no, but arriving at that answer requires a bit of a journey, and there are quite a few caveats along the way. In the long run, the advent of quantitative methodologies in traditional humanistic disciplines will forever and irreversibly change scholarship, but whether this will be a net loss or gain…
Data Survives, Projects Die: Rethinking Sustainability in Digital Humanities
28 May 2026 · Joudy Sido Bozan
Over the past decade, sustainability has become a central concern across the digital humanities (DH). This debate frequently gravitates toward the question of data formats, metadata schemas, repository infrastructures, and long-term archiving practices. Within the German academic context, the most authoritative guidelines on these matters stem from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Two documents in particular—the…
Generative AI and Low-Resource Languages: The Quest for Linguistic Equity
23 October 2025 · M. Xenia Kudela
As an expat working in an international environment, I’m used to conducting nearly all my daily and professional tasks in a language that isn’t my own. As a linguist, I find that both fascinating and rewarding, yet it feels unsettling how this one particular language—English—has come to dominate almost every part of my life, distancing…
People Behind the Interface: Sustainability as a Social Process in DH
26 June 2025 · Joudy Sido Bozan
People Sustain Projects—But Who Sustains the People? In Digital Humanities (DH), sustainability is often discussed in terms of infrastructure: servers, standards, and repositories. But as I began to explore what sustains—or quietly erodes—a DH project over time, it became increasingly clear that infrastructure alone is not enough. Projects are not only built on servers, schemas,…
The Future of Our Digital Heritage?
11 April 2025 · M. Xenia Kudela
Human Heritage in the Digital Era: A Fragile Legacy In our rapidly advancing digital age, the concept of heritage—the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society passed down from previous generations—has taken on new dimensions. Traditionally, heritage encompasses tangible elements like monuments and artifacts, as well as intangible aspects such…
Essential Digital Resources for Students of Arabic Studies
13 March 2025 · aibanizalieva
In the past, studying Arabic literature meant spending hours in archives, flipping through bulky dictionaries, and deciphering various calligraphic styles in the manuscripts. While physical books in the library remain invaluable, the rise of digital humanities has given us access to powerful tools that support research, enhance analysis, and provide deep insights into Arabic literary…
23 January 2025 · christiancasey
A better way of publishing Academic publishing stands at a crossroads. The traditional system of scholarly journals, born in the age of printing presses and horse-drawn carriages, seems increasingly ill-suited to our digital world. While these venerable institutions have served scholarship well for centuries, they now represent a bottleneck in the free flow of academic…
14 November 2024 · Aibaniz Alieva, Joudy Sido Bozan, Jonas Müller-Laackman, M. Xenia Kudela
MANAGING AND ARCHIVING DIGITAL CORPORA – THEORETICAL WORKFLOWS AND PRACTICAL EXAMPLES The question of how to ensure the long-term FAIRness of our research data can never be discussed too much. The multitude of new technologies and a broad palette of tools and infrastructures make it easier to create more sustainable and interoperable solutions. However, opinions…
Optimizing Research Workflows for Students: A Software-Based Approach
4 September 2024 · elkhattabi
Note: This post is primarily directed at students. It is based on a presentation I made recently for the students of Dr. Theodore Beers at his digital humanities seminar, Digital Philological Methods, during the 2024 Summer semester. ___ Preliminary Notes Optimizing research workflows through efficient software use influences the kind of research questions one decides to…
How to Check Thousands of URLs for Broken Links
30 May 2024 · Theodore Beers
Introduction At the core of “Closing the Gap” is a database of JSON files, each containing information relating to a research project in the Multilingual/Non-Latin-Script Digital Humanities. The files look like the following (a snippet; see the full file if you’re interested): There are many places in our database schema where URLs are recorded. Projects…
Event Report: Exploratory Visualizations of Cultural Heritage. Introduction and Hands-on.
8 February 2024 · M. Xenia Kudela
Cultural heritage is much more than mere objects placed side by side for isolated viewing in a display case or their digital counterparts presented together in online collections. Their value largely lies in something not directly visible: their relations to each other, mutual influences, tangled origins, and parallel developments. In short, in the stories they…
19 January 2024 · M. Xenia Kudela
Wednesday, February 14, 9:30 – 12:30at HG154 (Vortragsraum), VMP3 Registration: forschungsdienste@sub.uni-hamburg.de In our era of vast technological developments, digital methods have unlocked a broad spectrum of new research possibilities, not only in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences and the humanities. Digital preservation, new tools for distant reading, and quantitative text analysis…
12 May 2023 · M. Xenia Kudela
With the increasing prevalence of algorithms and artificial intelligence in information and knowledge transfer, proficiency in digital research methods became an indispensable skill for most natural and social scientists. The field of humanities is also increasingly recognizing the importance of staying up-to-date with possibilities offered by digital research and overall technological developments, as demonstrated by…