Digital Humanities Research – serie

Philological practices have served to secure and transmit textual sources for centuries. However – this volume contends –, it is only in the light of the current radical media change labeled ›digital turn‹ that the material and technological prerequisites of the theory and practice of philology become fully visible. The seventeen studies by scholars from the universities of Budapest and Cologne assembled here investigate these recent transformations of our techniques of writing and reading by critically examining core approaches to the history and epistemology of the humanities. Thus, a broad praxeological overview of basic cultural techniques of collective memory is unfolded.

Digital Humanities is a transformational endeavor that not only changes the perception, storage, and interpretation of information but also of research processes and questions. It also prompts new ways of interdisciplinary communication between humanities scholars and computer scientists.This volume offers a unique perspective on digital methods for and in the humanities. It comprises case studies from various fields to illustrate the challenge of matching existing textual research practices and digital tools. Problems and solutions with and for training tools as well as the adjustment of research practices are presented and discussed with an interdisciplinary focus.

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, José Calvo Tello combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches.

Religious studies have long discussed the comparative notion of »holy« beyond religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. In this book, Thomas Jurczyk conducts a diachronic comparison of the meaning and application of two notions and their related word fields that are commonly associated with a broader comparative notion of holy, namely the Ancient Armenian term »surb« and its related words and the English word field associated with »holy«. To compare these two semantic fields, his methodological approach operates on the principle of distributional semantics and applies, among others, tools and methods from the field of corpus linguistics.

Historical research can be enhanced by methods and resources from various disciplines, ranging from psychology to computer linguistics. With a creative and innovative perspective on ?things we think we know?, Milan van Lange presents a computer-assisted historical investigation into the role of emotions in dealing with consequences of World War II in the Netherlands. By ?emotion mining? digitised sources, van Lange shows where emotions were present and how they were expressed and discussed in the political engagement with people who experienced long-term effects of the war, such as former collaborators and war criminals, the resistance, and war victims.

The digital transformation is accompanied by two simultaneous processes: digital humanities challenging the humanities, their theories, methodologies and disciplinary identities and pushing computer science to get involved in new fields. But how can qualitative and quantitative methods be usefully combined in one research project? What are the theoretical and methodological principles across all disciplinary digital approaches? This volume focusses on driving innovation and conceptualising the humanities in the 21st century. Building on the results of 10 research projects, it serves as a useful tool for designing cutting-edge research that goes beyond conventional strategies.