Digital Research

Shaping the digital transformation sustainably through innovative methods.

Digital research is a central component of the Academy’s academic work. It combines long-term basic research with innovative digital methods and takes responsibility for sustainable, resilient research infrastructures. Against the backdrop of far-reaching technological changes, the Academy regards helping to shape the digital transformation as a key task. In this context, the digital humanities are creating new forms of academic collaboration and knowledge.
 

Digital Academy

The Digital Academy is the research department for Digital Humanities at the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz. Since 2009, it has provided conceptual, methodological and infrastructural support throughout the entire digital lifecycle of the Academy’s projects, whilst also conducting a significant number of its own research projects at the interface between humanities and cultural studies, innovative technical processes and scientific infrastructures. The team currently comprises around 45 staff members across all career levels and focuses its methodological work around three Academy professorships.

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Digital research resources

The Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz provides access to a wide range of digital research resources. These include digital publications, specialist and research information systems, digital editions, collections and dictionaries, as well as web-based data and information services.

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NFDI4Culture

NFDI4Culture is the consortium for research data on tangible and intangible cultural heritage within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). It is creating a needs-based digital infrastructure that links data from the fields of architecture, art, music, theatre, dance, film and media studies, and makes it permanently accessible. The aim is to preserve digital cultural data in a sustainable manner, make it available in accordance with the FAIR principles, and strengthen the exchange between research, the cultural sector and society. The Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz coordinates the consortium as the lead institution.

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Centre for Digital Music Documentation (CDMD)

The Centre for Digital Music Documentation (CDMD) at the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz is a specialist resource centre for digital issues in musicology. Since 2021, it has been developing processes, technologies and infrastructure to support the digital transformation of musicological research. In collaboration with national and international partners, the CDMD promotes sustainable services, high-quality research data models and the digital cataloguing of complex musical data.

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At “mainzed”, the Mainz Centre for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies, the Academy is affiliated as a co-founder alongside five other academic organisations in Mainz, with the aim of jointly dedicating themselves to research and outreach in the field of the digital humanities.

Mainzed has set itself the goal of critically reflecting on the social processes taking place in the wake of the media revolution, supporting these processes through research, and thereby ensuring the future viability of the humanities and cultural studies in Mainz as a centre of scholarship.

Prof. Torsten Schrade represents the Academy on the mainzed’s Scientific Advisory Board. All other members of the Digital Academy’s team also contribute their specific expertise to mainzed as associate researchers.

Guidelines for research data

A consistent alignment of the humanities research data generated in the Academy’s projects with the FAIR principles lies at the heart of the Academy’s data strategy. With regard to the management and standardisation of research data and digitisation processes, the Academy is committed to the guidelines of the “Digital Information” priority initiative of the Alliance of German Research Organisations: All research data and all services and software tools based on it should be made available in a fully usable form, as far as possible without legal, financial, technical or organisational barriers. To ensure practical implementation, the Academy has adopted its own research data policy.
 

Master’s programme in Digital Methodology in the Humanities and Cultural Studies

This cross-university degree programme combines applied computer science with the humanities and cultural studies and is consistently research-oriented. It centres on the digital processing of diverse sources such as text, speech, music, 3D objects and geodata, with a clear emphasis on web technologies. Methodological approaches take precedence over individual disciplines. Thanks to this interdisciplinary qualification, graduates are in demand across a wide range of professional fields. In addition, the Academy places emphasis on digital editing, web applications, practice-oriented teaching and the annual International Summer School.

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© Astrid Garth
© Astrid Garth
Akademie der Wissenschaften
und der Literatur | Mainz
Akademie der Wissenschaften
und der Literatur | Mainz