Monthly Archives: July 2019

Digital Humanities in 2040: Four Scenarios

It’s the year 2040, are the Digital Humanities still around? In general, I see four possible scenarios: DH replaces the Humanities, DH becomes its own discipline, DH turns into IT assistance and DH fades away. According to a short survey on Twitter, the second scenario is considered most likely. Whatever the outcome, I argue, the future of DH will depend on what results they deliver and what lasting contribution they can make to the Humanities as a whole.

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A Changing Giant: The Impact of Time on Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1731-54)

The Universal Lexicon is not the Universal Lexicon, that is the central finding of the following paper that I presented at ISECS2019 in Edinburgh. By analysing metadata of this 68-volume lexicon and taking a stratified random sample of 680 biographical articles, I could show how the lexicon changed  considerably during the 23 years of its production period. When using the Universal-Lexicon as a historical source, we cannot simply compare articles from “A” and “Z”. Instead, we must be careful to consider the different contents and contexts of its early, middle and late phase.
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MAXQDA or ATLAS.ti? How software shapes research

On the surface MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti seem almost identical. Yet when we look under the hood, we see strong differences: one follows the logic of a relational data base and sorts everything into neat categories and the other operates like a graph data base that links different entities to form a large network. The implicit potentials and constrains of each (and any) software commonly drive our research because we too often follow the road that we already know best. 

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