Research Unit

Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities

Acronym
GhentCDH
Duration
01 July 2022 → Ongoing
Scientific supervisor
Core Facilities manager
Other information
Research disciplines
  • Humanities
    • Humanities and the arts not elsewhere classified
Keywords
digital humanities collaborative databases digital text and image analysis linked open data geospatial analysis
Description
The increasing digitisation of society and hence the increasing digitisation of research resources and heritage means that researchers have to develop workflows and use software to manage, organise and analyse an incalculable amount of diverse types of documents and information/data. For example, the increasing availability of archival and library collections as data (information in a machine-readable format) enables the use of new approaches and thus digital tools. This is both a challenge and an opportunity, since the majority of researchers in the humanities are not proficient in computer science, computational linguistics, statistics, etc.. Thus, there is an important gap that needs to be filled to provide services that facilitate this research. This requires expertise on various aspects of the digital research cycle, from the composition of corpora to analysis, virtual exhibitions and archiving of research data. The GhentCDH is an interdisciplinary research and service centre that facilitates and reflects on the use of these digital research methods in the humanities. A team of computer scientists, linguists, data scientists, interdisciplinary 'digital humanists' and public historians is clustered in four focus areas: collaborative databases and Linked Open Data - digitisation, (pre)processing and digital text and image analysis - geospatial analysis and visualisation - digital heritage, participation and virtual exhibitions.