Digital Humanities

Currently, Digital Humanities are at the center of a series of debates on the future of humanities in general. Great expectations and promises meet equally great defenses and fears. On closer inspection, Digital Humanities seem to be a highly complex and heterogeneous field, ranging from large digitalization-of-sources projects, quantitative analyses, and digital editions to online publications. One subject of discussion was the status of the digital techniques in these projects: Are they simply tools, do they open up new research fields, or could they even realize a paradigm shift? Will humanities follow the research logic of sciences, or even of big data, or will they gain access to new questions? And what does this mean for their classical methods and objects? Are they left behind, or, on the contrary, enriched, and therefore perhaps recognizable in their specificity? Will the integration of different procedures in the future prove to be particularly successful? The working group discussed these and other questions. It explored existing projects, topics, and tools and asked for prospects to future research questions and projects of the ZfL.