With so many different digital humanities out there, it is important to define what we are particularly about.
In its core, our digital humanities is about applying modern data processing to solve humanities research questions. From this however stem multiple consequences.
First, we feel that digital humanities as defined above works best when done in collaboration – between the humanities scholars who have the questions, between the computer scientists who deeply understand the methods and between the cultural heritage institutions who own and best understand the materials used.
At its best, digital humanities also has something unique to offer each of these groups inside their own field of study: scholars in the humanities are able to tackle questions too labour-intensive for manual study, computer scientists encounter new and challenging use cases for their tools and algorithms, and cultural heritage institutions gain valuable insight into, and feedback on their own collections and the way they present them.
As a practical matter, to ignite as many of such fruitful collaborations as possible, we try to foster as much concrete interaction between people of these different fields as we can, and on all levels, from students to professionals.
We also feel a close connection to the open science movement. This is based purely on the fact that in our experience, adhering to open science principles has clear practical benefits to digital humanities projects by fostering the reuse of both data sets as well as methods, in addition to increased verifiability.
While the core of what digital humanities means for us is well defined, we also welcome collaboration with the many closely related fields, such as studies in data management, library science, multimodal/augmented reality/VR studies and digital culture studies.