Mixing Methods: Practical Insights from the Humanities in the Digital Age

Digitality is a cause and a consequence of different data cultures. It applies to the 10 research projects that are included in this volume. They are rooted in various humanities disciplines such as art history, philosophy, musicology, religious studies, architectural history, media studies, and literature studies. As diverse as the disciplines are the objects and their formats, which are the subject of this book. The cultural data of the projects include recordings of music and spoken word, photographs and other types of images, handwriting, typoscripts and maps. The oldest material dates back to 500 BCE, followed by medieval times, the 18th and 19th centuries, early 20th century and the present. All projects share that they study their material with digital methods, although digitality comes into play at different moments and layers in each of the projects. Hardly readable manuscripts from the 18th century have to be treated with specialized OCR-methods while Plato’s texts are already available in digital form, and therefore open up other affordances for analysis. Special analysis possibilities had to be developed for certain image sources. For all projects, however, it is equally true that only the digitization of the objects makes them accessible to the methods that are the subject of this book.