The Department of Digital Humanities conducts basic and applied research in a wide range of areas of the digital humanities with a focus on:
Digital Scholarly Edition
Together with scholars from various disciplines, we work on questions related to the digital representation and analysis of humanities source materials. In this research area we focus on the "classical" digital scholarly edition, meaning the accurate representation of texts and their accompanying metadata. At the same time, we explore the application, benefits, and impact of digital methods on the editorial process. In national and international editorial projects, we support our project partners in developing standardized data models, implementing Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), semantically enriching electronic texts using various machine-learning methods, and representing complex data in ontologies within the Semantic Web and Web of Data. Members of our research group are actively involved in international research networks and organizations, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE).
Research Data Management
The Department of Digital Humanities has been developing and operating the Humanities Asset Management System [GAMS] for the creation, storage, provision and long-term archiving of digital resources since 2003. Based on this, we are dedicated to questions of technical infrastructure, subject-specific curation of humanities research data, including its enrichment, representation and open provision (data stewardship).
Digital Museology
This research area examines the impact of digital transformation on museums and their audiences and experiments with digital methods in the study of museological and cultural heritage.
Digital History
Historical research using digital methods and digital sources has a long tradition at the University of Graz, having been established early on at the Institute of History under the term Historische Fachinformatik (HFI). We work with data from a broad range of historical sources, including medieval charters and account books, records of the Imperial Diet from the 16th century, British tax records from the 17th century, prosopographical databases, and sites of remembrance related to Nazi persecution. Our research is conducted in interdisciplinary collaborations with national and international partners and the global dimension of this research field is also reflected in the active involvement of our staff in international organizations such as the Data for History Consortium.