Attempts to convince humanities scholars of digital approaches are met with
resistance, often. The so-called Digitization Anxiety is the phenomenon that
describes the fear of many traditional scientists of being replaced by digital
processes. This hinders not only the progress of the scientific domains themselves
– since a lot of digital potential is missing – but also makes the everyday work
of researchers unnecessarily difficult. Over the past eight years, we have
made various attempts to walk the tightrope between 'How can we help
traditional humanities to exploit their digital potential?' and 'How can we
make them understand that their expertise is not replaced by digital means, but
complemented?' We will present our successful interdisciplinary collaborations:
How they came about, how they developed, and the problems we encountered. In
the first step, we will look at the theoretical basics, which paint a comprehensive
picture of the digital humanities and introduces us to the topic of visualization.
The field of visualization has shown a special ability: It manages to walk the
tightrope and thus keeps digitization anxiety at bay, while not only making it
easier for scholars to access their data, but also enabling entirely new research
questions. After an introduction to our interdisciplinary collaborations with
the Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University, as well as with the
Bergen-Belsen Memorial, we will present a series of user scenarios that we
have collected in the course of 13 publications. These show our cooperation
partners solving different research tasks, which we classify using Brehmer and
Munzner’s Task Classification. In this way, we show that we provide researchers
with a wide range of opportunities: They can answer their traditional research
questions – and in some cases verify long-standing hypotheses about the data
for the first time – but also develop their own interest in previously impossible,
new research questions and approaches. Finally, we conclude our insights on
individual collaborative ideas with perspectives on our newest projects. These
have risen from the growing interest of collaborators in the methods we deliver.
For example, we get insights into the music of real virtuosos of the 20th century.
The necessary music storage media can be heard for the first time through
digital tools without risking damage to the old material. In addition, we can
provide computer-aided analysis capabilities that help musicologists in their work.
In the course of the visualization project at the Bergen-Belsen memorial, we
will see that what was once a small diary project has grown into a multimodal
and international project with institutions of culture and science from eight
countries. This is dedicated not only to the question of preserving cultural
objects from Nazi persecution contexts but also to modern ways of disseminating
and processing knowledge around this context. Finally, we will compile our
experience and accumulated knowledge in the form of problems and challenges
at the border between computer science and traditional humanities. These will
serve as preparation and assistance for future and current interested parties of
such interdisciplinary collaborative project
