Digital Humanities laboratory

German-Czech Digital Humanities Laboratory for Cross-Border Historical Research (2014/15)

The project “Digital Humanities Laboratory for Cross-Border Historical Research” initiated cooperation between the Universities of Passau and Budweis in the European border region of Lower Bavaria/South Bohemia in the field of digital humanities.

A Digital Humanities Laboratory for research and teaching was established at both locations in Passau and Budweis. Each location received specialized technical equipment so that a wide range of digital humanities methods could be tested and further developed in practice.

In addition to the technical equipment and several thematic courses, the project also included the “Newspaper Digitization” and “Field Research on World War I” projects . In addition, there is a seminar on digitization and a seminar on computer-assisted text analysis for Czech-German student groups.

The European Union funded the project as part of the Interreg IV A Free State of Bavaria – Czech Republic program (EU project no. 359).

Project results on the web

Some of the project results are directly accessible on the web.

Digitized historical newspapers from the period of World War I (1914–1918) (German version)

Database and online exhibition of the field research project (German version)

Project team

The University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (lead) and the University of Passau carried out the project in cooperation.

Team at the University of Passau

Prof. Dr. Malte Rehbein, Chair of Digital Humanities (project management)
Oliver Gondring, M.A. (project coordination)
Maria Christoforaki, M.Sc. (project coordination)
Dr. Øyvind Eide (DH Lab Director, Seminar Director for Digitization)
Dorothee Ahlers, M.A. (Scientific Director of Field Research)
Annette Diegel, Florence Ertel, Karen Hennig, Judith Ittner, Adrian Malzer, Stefanie Maurer, Florian Pfeiffer, Olga Scheiermann (Scanning, OCR, Correction, Article Segmentation)

Team at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice

RNDr. Libor Dostálek (project management, head of DH Lab)
Ing. Miroslav Skokan (project management)
doc. PhDr. Marie Ryantová, CSc. (scientific consulting for archival materials and seminars)
Petr Němec (head of IT consulting)
Luděk Rašek (IT consulting) Marta Vohnoutová (project coordination, DH Lab employee)

We would like to sincerely thank Dr. Markus Wennerhold and the employees of the Passau State Library for their support in providing the materials and the digitization infrastructure.