"Digital Humanities" is an interdisciplinary field, combining the humanities with the natural and exact sciences. Its aim is the development and application of computational methods and techniques relevant to the questions and problems that arise in the historical and cultural sciences. These can include, inter alia, the generation of data through digitisation or measurement, the computational analysis of data so generated, the production, use, and examination of formal models and investigative methods in the humanities, as well as the archival and Open Access publication of our scholarly and scientific results and discussion of the infrastructure(s) that best support these activities.

At the University of Vienna our strengths lie primarily in two areas, "Computational Humanities" and "Digital Cultural Heritage." The first is oriented around formal models and computational analysis, to contribute to scholarly debates in the humanities as a complement to critical theory. The second area is oriented more strongly around the generation, management, archival, and analysis of scientifically measurable and georeferenced digital data, to reconstruct historical events virtually in time and space.