What are digital cultural studies and humanities?

The comprehensive digitization of society does not stop at the humanities. Cultural artifacts such as texts, images, and audiovisual media are increasingly available in digital form, and digital methods are being used more and more frequently in cultural studies and humanities research. 

Digital humanities is a new field of research that has emerged during this period of media transformation. It deals with the application of digital methods in the humanities and cultural studies, as well as with the consequences of media change for these disciplines.

In the digital humanities, interdisciplinarity plays a major role: research approaches from the cultural sciences and humanities are combined with those from computer science and brought into relation with one another. This not only opens up new possibilities for the humanities and cultural sciences, but also allows datafication and digitization to be understood not merely as a purely technical matter, but to be critically reflected upon in terms of their methodology and consequences. 

Behind this lies the conviction that the cultural sciences and humanities, with their core competencies in dealing with pluralistic, multi-perspective worldviews and their competent handling of sources and critical reflection, can make essential contributions to shaping the digital transformation of society.  

Our department

The Department of Digital Philology is part of the Digital Humanities research focus at the University of Vienna, which it forms together with the Digital Humanities Research Group at the Faculty of History and Cultural Studies. In addition, digital philology is also embedded in Vienna's extremely diverse digital humanities landscape, which encompasses ‘traditional’ disciplines as well as the Austrian Academy of Sciences, museums, and archives, thus extending far beyond the university. 

Within this comprehensive field of research, digital philology places particular emphasis on texts (which, in the digital realm, must always be considered in multimodal contexts) and research in the fields of linguistics and literary studies.

The department has three main areas of focus:

    • Digital Corpus Linguistics (Prof. Hannes Fellner)
    • Digital Text Studies (Prof. Benjamin Roth)
    • Digital Scholarly Editing (Prof. Gabriel Viehhauser) 

Our teaching: MA and EC Digital Humanities

In terms of teaching, the Department of Digital Philology is involved in organizing and running the Master's program in Digital Humanities and the corresponding Bachelor's extension curriculum, to which we contribute a number of courses. In addition to an introductory lecture series, our teaching focuses in particular on practical and research- or project-related courses that not only familiarize students with the methods of digital humanities, but also enable them to apply and expand these methods independently and reflectively to their own questions.