Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recent years, its status as “a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., A companion to digital humanities (pp. xxiii–xxvii). Blackwell; 2004) and its position in the overall academic landscape are still being negotiated. While there are countless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little research has been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, Journal of Documentation; 2017:73). This study aims to contribute to the existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past three decades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers and the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quarterly) with research articles from journals in 15 other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens). As a method of analysis, we use latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, combined with recent approaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines—first and foremost, computational linguistics, and information science. Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the diachronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristic for DH

Modelling Cross-Document Interdependencies in Medieval Charters of the St. Katharinenspital in Regensburg

To overcome the limitations of structural XML mark-up, graph-based data models and graph databases, as well as event-based ontologies like CIDOC-CRM (FORTH-ICS 2018) have been considered for the creation of digital editions. We apply the graph-based approach to model charter regests and extend it with the CIDOC-CRM ontology, as it allows us to integrate information from different sources into a flexible data model. By implementing the ontology within the Neo4j graph database (Neo4j 2018) we create a sustainable data source that allows explorative search queries and finally, the integration of the database in various technical systems. Our use case are the charters from the St. Katharinenspital, a former medieval hospital in Regensburg, Germany. By analysing charter abstracts with natural language processing (NLP) methods and using additional data sources related to the charters, we generate additional metadata. The extracted information allows the modelling of cross-document interdependencies of charter regests and their related entities. Building upon this, we develop an exploratory web application that allows to investigate a graph-based digital edition. Thereby, each entity is displayed in its unique context, i.e., it is shown together with its related entities (next neighbours) in the graph. We use this to enhance the result lists of a full-text search, and to generate entity-specific detail pages

Tools for the Analysis and Visualization of Twitter Language Data

The microblogging service Twitter provides vast amounts of user-generated language data. In this article I give an overview of related work on Twitter as an object of study. I also describe the anatomy of a Twitter message and discuss typical uses of the Twitter platform. The Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) will be introduced in a generic, non-technical way to provide a basic under-standing of existing opportunities but also limitations when working with Twitter data. I propose a basic classification system for existing tools that can be used for collecting and analyzing Twitter data and introduce some exemplary tools for each category. Then, I present a more comprehensive work-flow for conducting studies with Twitter data, which comprises the following steps: crawling, annotation, analysis and visualization. Finally, I illustrate the generic workflow by describing an exemplary study from the context of social TV research. At the end of the article, the main issues concerning tools and methods for the analysis of Twitter data are briefly addressed

Bairisch 2.0: Erstellung eines Social Media-Dialektlexikons mithilfe von Crowdsourcing

This paper describes the creation of a Bavarian dialect lexicon that is based on social media and that was translated by means of crowdsourcing. In the process, we first obtain a corpus of dialect samples from the social network Facebook. For the translation of the dialect words to standard German, we involve the members of the social network, which allows us to produce a crowdsourced lexicon of Bavarian dialect words

From bench to bedside

The adaptive immune system has been the main focus of immunological strategies in oncology with only more recent approaches targeting innate immunity. Endosomal toll-like receptors (TLR-7, TLR-9) activate innate immune responses by signaling damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMP) from decaying tumor cells. This has led to the development of DNA-based TLR-9 agonists, which induce antitumor activity through innate and subsequent adaptive immune responses. Early clinical trials with CpG-ODN as TLR-9 agonists were associated with unfavorable tolerability and narrow clinical efficacy, leading to failure in pivotal trials. dSLIM®, the active ingredient of MGN1703, is a DNA-based, radically different molecular alternative to CpG-ODN, which results in genuine antitumor immunomodulation. Preclinical and clinical studies of MGN1703 have confirmed that this TLR-9 agonist has therapeutic potential in a variety of solid tumors, while long-term treatment with high doses was very well tolerated. A pivotal trial of first-line maintenance treatment with MGN1703 in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer is underway

Digital Humanities: Buzzword oder Strukturwandel in den Geisteswissenschaften?

Digital Humanities ist ein derzeit viel gebrauchter Begriff, der das Aufgreifen von Informationstechnologie und digitalen Arbeitstechniken in den Geisteswissenschaften thematisiert. Im folgenden Beitrag gehen wir zunächst allgemein auf die Digital Humanities ein und versuchen deren aktuellen Stand, ihre Entwicklung und ihre Perspektiven aufzuzeigen. Im Anschluss stellen wir am Beispiel der Universität Regensburg im Umfeld der Medieninformatik und Informationswissenschaft in den letzten Jahren durchgeführte Projekte aus dem Bereich der Digital Humanities vor, um die thematische Bandbreite digital arbeitender Geisteswissenschaften zu illustrieren