Algorithmen und Daten in kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschung: Digital Humanities in Anwendung und Reflexion

Abstract

This article outlines a research programme for the specific perspective of empirical cultural studies in the digital humanities. As six areas of digital humanities in application, it elaborates computational methods and algorithms, digital and digitised data, infrastructures, resources, digital handcraft and basic digital skills. These are combined with perspectives of reflection, especially in relation to algorithmic assemblages, practices in the community of practice, infrastructures and resources as power structures, and data in its changeability and incompleteness. Due to researchers’ fear of algorithms and data, these areas have so far only been realised in rudimentary form. However, it is precisely with the expertise of empirical cultural studies that uncertainties and misunderstandings can be used productively to further develop existing approaches, expand them to meet the needs of cultural studies and iteratively connect them with cultural analytical concepts. Possibilities and implications cannot be explored with tools and scripts as a transfer of existing methods into digital procedures. These change approaches to knowledge that can be realised in close human-technology relations combined with computational thinking.