“Digital Humanities” sees itself as an interdisciplinary subject that combines the humanities with natural and formal sciences and aims at the development and application of computational methods and techniques with regard to questions and problems in historical and cultural studies. These include, among other things, the generation of data through digitization or measurement, the computational analysis of the generated data, the creation and processing of formal models and investigative methods in the humanities, as well as the archiving and open access distribution of our scientific results and the discussion about which infrastructure this is best supported.

At the University of Vienna, our primary focus is on the two areas of “Computational Humanities” and “Digital Cultural Heritage.” The first is focused on the use of formal models and computational analysis in conjunction with critical theory to intervene in humanities debates. The second area is more oriented towards the generation, processing, archiving and analysis of scientifically measurable and georeferenced digital data in order to virtually reconstruct historical processes in space and time.