Digital History
Podcast "Talking Digital Academy"
This podcast format is produced by the Digital History Department at Bielefeld University and closely linked to our annual online event, the Digital Academy, which aims at discussing different phenomena in the Digital Humanities.
Silke Schwandt, Professor of Digital History at Bielefeld University, is hosting this podcast and interviews different experts on selected topics in the realm of the digital humanities.
It’s that uncertainty and complexity and messiness that makes things interesting, because we don’t have by and large structured data. I think one of the key things to me about that is being open about what we don’t know and being sensitive to what isn’t there.
With the first episode of this podcast, we begin our uncertainty series. Jane Winters, who is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of London, gives insights into the ways she is dealing with uncertainty in her research and draws attention to the manifold opportunities arising from uncertainty. This episode was recorded in September 2023.
Historians are aware of limitations [of their data] and take them into account when they are constructing their narratives. It’s something that is so ingrained in historical practice that it is very often not made explicit (…). And then some of the work is delegated to machines (…) and the more of the interpretative work is delegated to the machine, it becomes a problem because the machine obviously does not have the knowledge or the competencies of a human historian.
Michael Piotrowski is Professor for Digital Humanities at the University of Lausanne. In this podcast episode, he talks about different types of uncertainties between traditional and digital historical practice. Working with machines, technical tools and methods can certainly lead to new uncertainties. However, Silke Schwandt and Michael Piotrowski agree that in this context, dealing with digital data and digital methods also forces and helps us to be more explicit in our research when modelling.
It seems to me that in the humanities, we are always dealing with uncertain information, information that is, if you want to call it, contested.
Susan Schreibman is Professor of Digital Arts and Culture at Maastricht University. In this episode, she elaborates on uncertainty within her research projects. Together with Silke Schwandt, she discusses different opportunites to present uncertainties within humanities research to the research community as well as to the public and therefore create more transparency. She also highlights the importance of teaching data skills to reduce uncertainty within research processes in the digital humanities.
