Project

Cofunding core facility - Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH)

Acronym
GhentCDH
Code
BOF/COR/2022/005
Duration
01 July 2022 → 30 June 2026
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Promotor-spokesperson
Research disciplines
  • Humanities
    • Literary studies not elsewhere classified
    • History and historiography of linguistics
  • Social sciences
    • History of law
Keywords
Linked Open Data geospatial analysis public humanities collaborative databases digital humanities digital text and image analysis
 
Project description

The increasing digitisation of society and thus also of research sources and heritage means that researchers have to develop workflows and use software to manage, organise and analyse an incalculable amount of different types of documents and information/data. Thus, the increasing availability of archival and library collections as data (information in 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 a significant gap that needs to be filled in order to provide services that facilitate this research. This requires expertise in various aspects of the digital research cycle, from the compilation of corpora to analysis, virtual exhibitions and the 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 human sciences. A team of computer scientists, linguists, data scientists, interdisciplinary 'digital humanists' and public historians is clustered in four focus areas: 1. Collaborative databases and Linked Open Data 2. Digitisation, (pre)processing and digital text and image analysis 3. Digital heritage, participation and virtual exhibitions Within these four focus areas, cooperation takes place with other actors inside and outside UGent, respectively within UGent with LT3, IDLab, MICT, the Quetelet Center and the Institute for Public History. The GhentCDH is involved in various infrastructure projects on a national and international level, mainly through the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities - DARIAH network and the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure - CLARIN network, and the Flemish contribution to the European research infrastructures DARIAH and CLARIN - 'CLARIAH-VL Open Humanities Service Infrastructure' project (FWO International Research Infrastructure), which is coordinated by the GhentCDH. In the context of this project, the GhentCDH also cooperates with HPC UGent, the Central Library and the Faculty Library of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. A number of generic services and software packages, offered by the faculty, are used, as well as project-specific development, for which a financial contribution is requested.