Chair of Computational Humanities (Malte Rehbein) • University of Passau

Teaching

Our courses are part of various Bachelor's degree programmes. As of now, we are offering a specialisation in "Digital History / Historical Informatics" as a Master's degree. Digital Humanities can also be studied as part of a certificate programme.

Research

We focus on research in the areas of historical data science, data modelling, coding and visualisation of complex text structures and digitisation of cultural assets. We also critically engage with many questions of digitisation.

Team

[Translate to Englisch:] Prof. Dr. Malte Rehbein

The team members around Malte Rehbein are your contact persons. Here you can find out about the contact details, office hours and research focus of the individual members of staff.

The chair of Digital Humanities researches computer-based methods for the humanities. The starting point is often the digitization of cultural heritage (the sources of humanities research) in the form of text, images or objects. The created data is computer-modelled, analyzed and made accessible for interpretation. Computer-based methods, tools and infrastructures for solving questions in the humanities and cultural studies are theoretically founded, designed, developed, applied and critically reflected upon in the Digital Humanities in harmony with the specialist sciences.

The Chair of Digital Humanities was established as part of the 'Technik Plus' program. Digital Humanities combine cultural studies disciplines with computer technology and new media. The aim is to bring together the various skills from both areas. On the one hand, the chair promotes the development and application of computer-aided research methods in cultural studies; on the other, it makes cultural studies approaches and issues accessible to computer science.

As a partner and know-how provider, the chair supports cultural institutions such as museums and archives in the implementation of digital projects. The Chair strives to act as a competent partner in the field of eHumanities beyond Passau and the Lower Bavaria region.

An overview incl. an article of introduction by Prof. Rehbein can be found in this issue of "Akademie Aktuell" in april 2016.

In the past few years, the Chair of Digital Humanities has created a number of online offerings:

Research data of the chair on Zenodo
Ongoing new digitized material in the context of the Laboratory for the Digitization of Cultural Heritage: https://dh.uni-passau.de/kulturgut/
The virtual museum "ViSIT-Schaufenster": https://visit.uni-passau.de/ (in cooperation with the Oberhaus, among others)
The digital university museum: https://museum.uni-passau.de/
The Bavarian Forest/Bohemian Forest project (with an online exhibition and database): https://ersterweltkrieg-bayern-boehmen.uni-passau.de/ (bilingual German/Czech)
Historical daily newspapers of the region: https://dhz.uni-passau.de/, https://dz1914.uni-passau.de/ and http://www.bistumsblatt.bistum-passau.de

The Chair offers special courses on Digital History in the Master's program of 'History and Society'.