This website, including the pages on the subdomains, is a collaborative effort of the following divisions at the Computer Science Department of the University of Leipzig, and is dedicated to documenting the e-Humanities-related activities:
- Natural Language Processing
(Chair: Gerhard Heyer)
- Image and Signal Processing
(Chair: Gerik Scheuermann)
- Computational Humanities
(newly established chair, NN)
- Digital Humanities
(Humboldt Professor Gregory Crane)
Various efforts in digitization helped making available a wealth of resources on a global scale. But mostly, the sheer amount of data collected is extremely hard to handle. For the researchers it is naturally difficult to stay focused on a complex research question while manually working with the data employing conventional query mechanisms. The value of the data is clearly restricted by the existing means of browsing and processing it.
What lies ahead is a future of vastly growing collections of digital artifacts available to researchers in the Humanities. The gathered resources will aim to cover more niches and get more complete in the popular areas. They therefore yield answers to questions that currently cannot even be foreseen.
The e-Humanities aim to bridge the gap between specialist scientists, digital resources and data analysis methods from the computer science. They employ techniques such as Data and Information Visualization in the context of scientific inquiry to craft immerse systems for an Explorative Search within the data bases. They extend Text Mining and Information Retrieval to work on historical texts, uncovering hidden links through a re-use analysis. They build tools for working with ontologies and metadata repositories, specifically with the Humanities in mind.
In that manner they lead from a quantitative view on the data to a qualitative assessment of the underlying facts. While automatic data analysis can never replace or surpass qualified human expertise, it is the perfect augmentation for researchers' digital workflows and an invaluable means of navigation through huge resource collections. The e-Humanities are not going to change the subject of research in the Humanities and are in many cases not even touching the general methodology. What they can achieve, nevertheless, is a whole new level of effectiveness and statistical reliability as well as a whole new way to approach digitized resources.