Digitizing Cultural Assets: Digitally Accessing and Researching Analog Documents

• Type of event: Seminars
• Institution: Faculty of Humanities
• Funding period: 01.04.2022 to 31.03.2023
• Short title: Digitisation of cultural assets

Extract from the funding application: "The framework for the teaching project is provided by the increasing digitization of culturally and historically relevant documents, the changing usage scenarios for digitized cultural assets and the overall increased relevance of digitization in today's societies."

The cultural heritage digitization project

The project aimed to teach students the work processes involved in converting analog written artifacts into digital formats. On the one hand, practical skills in text and image digitization were taught and, on the other hand, the necessary translation processes, possible uses and legal aspects, such as copyright issues, were reflected upon. This critical reflection focused on the question of which characteristics of analogue documents are lost during digitization, which characteristics can be (better) represented digitally and which added value and opportunities, but also challenges, this entails for use in scientific research and museum exhibitions.

The teaching project was implemented in cooperation with the Hamburg State and University Library. Using handwritten letters from around 1900 from the Dehmel Archive and printed multilingual foreign language textbooks from the early modern period, different requirements and the resulting procedures for digitization were discussed. The students worked with the analogue artefacts in the archive and went through the entire workflow from cultural digitization to digital representation in a virtual environment.

Review and results

As part of the course, students became familiar with various methods from the broad field of digital humanities. In addition to the practical application, the focus was on developing a critical awareness of the effects of digitization on the form, function and use of objects and procedures used in the humanities for the full-text indexing of text documents relevant to the history of culture and science. Students have learned to use digital methods in a reflective manner with regard to the specific requirements of processing historical cultural assets.

Tips from lecturers for lecturers

The project was designed as a cooperative project between different institutions and disciplines (digital literary studies, linguistics, information science) and with several teaching staff. In the context of the interdisciplinary orientation of the seminar, co-teaching proved to be a profitable teaching scenario, as technical applications in particular require microteaching and close supervision of the students, which is difficult to guarantee by a single teacher. In addition, according to the students, the exchange and discourse that accompanied all sessions between academics with different research focuses proved to be an authentic and beneficial insight into the academic world. The interdisciplinary exchange was also perceived as stimulating by the teachers themselves.

Persons involved

Prof. Dr. Natalia Filatkina

Linguistics of German with a focus on digital historical linguistics

Specialisations:

• Historical linguistics of German
• Digital and cultural-historically orientated corpus linguistics
• Language change and theories of language change
• formulaicity/patternicity
• (historical and diachronic) multilingualism
• Language and conversation culture, language history of communication culture
• (diachronic) text and discourse linguistics
• Standardisation and codification processes (synchronous and diachronic)
• Cultural history of emotions

Contact

Marie Flüh, M. Ed.

Comparative Annotation to Explore and Explain Text Similarities – CompAnno

Specialisations:

• Digital Humanities / Computational Literary Studies
• School literature and media didactics
• Literature of the 20th and 19th centuries
• Emotions and gender aspects in literary texts

Contact

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Nantke

Modern German literary studies with a focus on digital humanities for written artefacts

Specialisations:

• Digital literary studies and digital literature
• Literary theory
• Materiality and mediality of literature
• Writing-image relationships
• Edition studies
• Avant-garde research

Contact

Tanja Stevanović

Research assistant

Specialisations:

• (Historical) gender linguistics
• Old and Middle High German
• Phenomena of language change
• morphology
• Corpus linguistics

Contact

Sandra Bläß, M.A.

Former project employee

Specialisations:

• German-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially epic poetry
• Digital literary studies
• (Narrative) concepts of identity
• Cultural studies of literature

Contact