Digital Humanities Research Network Lower Saxony (DHFV)

The Göttingen Academy was a partner in the joint project Digital Humanities Research Network in Lower Saxony (DHFV), which was based at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) from January 2012 to June 2015. The aim of the research network was to strengthen the digital humanities and social sciences across southern Lower Saxony in all their facets and to establish them more firmly at the University of Göttingen through research projects and the development of academic programmes.

By focusing on selected disciplines and their specific research questions, the project examined which computer-assisted research methods could serve as internationally recognised standards. The network has contributed, among other outcomes, to the establishment of a professorship in Digital Humanities at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Göttingen. It has furthermore explored both the digital transformation of society, such as internet censorship and the use of digital media, and the digitalisation of the work of the Academy itself, as seen in projects on digital libraries and virtual museums.

One Academy project within the network focused on the semantic modelling of links between texts and objects associated with the Göttingen scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). Its results highlighted the crucial role of computational linguistics in automated semantic word disambiguation, as well as the need for standardised data formats to ensure the long-term, open accessibility of research data and findings in distributed digital repositories.