Starting grants awarded by the Rhine-Main University Alliance

2016/11/24 by Johannes Daxenberger

CEDIFOR-Partners TU Darmstadt and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, together with the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, receive two starting grants by the Rhine-Main University (RMU) Alliance

The proposals “Digital Humanities in the RMU-Network”, and “Textuality and Digital Nature: New, Multi-modal Hermeneutics” both address Digital Humanities and will be funded in 2017 and 2018 as part of the new starting grants (“Initiativfonds”) of the RMU-Network. The goal of both proposals is to explore the potential of digital methods and data for research in Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as Computer Science. The selection process was very competitive, and only four out of 14 applications have been selected in the first round. The universities consider Digital Humanities as one of the most promising and visible research areas within the network and expect significant progress in this discipline over the next years. The RMU-Network funding line wants to further concentrate the expertise distributed across the three universities.

“Digital Humanities in the RMU-Network” aims to deal with multimedia data, i.e. text, audio, video and 3D-objects, and apply state-of-the-art methodology from Computer Science to create and explore this data, in particular, artificial intelligence. Since the data needs to come from multiple sources and domains, the new network will closely interact with existing initiatives in this area, e.g. the graduate school AIPHES (Adaptive Preparation of Information from Heterogeneous Sources) of the TU Darmstadt.

Coordinators:

Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt

Prof. Dr. Jost Gippert, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Prof. Dr. Kai-Christian Bruhn, Mainzer Zentrum für Digitalität in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften

“Textuality and Digital Nature: New, Multi-modal Hermeneutics” focuses on textual data and in particular on the change of this medium during the history of humanity, including the change through digitalization. It will assess the effect of different forms of text on its reception and the conflation of textual media. All kind of hermeneutic activity will be leveraged by the usage of digital methods and multi-modal corpora. The proposal furthermore aims to extend the notion of “text” to include multi-dimensional aspects spanning across disciplines.

Coordinators:

Prof. Dr. Andrea Rapp, TU Darmstadt

Prof. Dr. Petra Gehring, TU Darmstadt

Prof. Dr. Ursula Verhoeven-van Elsbergen, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz