Enhancing Humanities
Potentials of media and ICT in the Humanities
Annual Conference of the IfM, May 7 -8, 2009
Location: Artur-Woll-Haus (AW 103), Siegen
The Arts and Humanities have often been modelled as technophobic or even resistant to technical developments. But this view shows to be overly simplistic, as recent advances in development of Virtual Research Environments for e-humanities draw a different picture. In fact, new computer tools have already stimulated a broad discussion in large parts of the humanities field on how to adopt these into new methodologies and research practices. In Germany these activities are exemplified by a number of recent e-humanities-initiatives on national and European levels. These projects were already successful in establishing functional infrastructures for humanities researchers and can therefore be regarded as hallmarks for future research on e-science. E-humanities-projects have arisen from a variety of perspectives, including virtual collaboration and cooperation, publication and infrastructure development.
However, as the technical development of these tools, services and infrastructures is becoming more and more sophisticated, there are still huge questions to be answered regarding the sustainability of e-science infrastructures. A current major problem here is the limited adoption by the humanities researchers themselves. The acceptance of new tools and infrastructures keeps low, as long as these do not fit into everyday research practice. Therefore one of the central questions in the e-science field, apart from questions of sustainability and institutional organization of infrastructures, is how these new tools can find better acceptance and actual deployment in the diverse field of arts and humanities.
Download: Conference Agenda 
| Conference Poster
