The cultural heritage digitization project
The project aimed to teach students the work processes involved in converting analog written artifacts into digital formats. On the one hand, practical skills in text and image digitization were taught and, on the other hand, the necessary translation processes, possible uses and legal aspects, such as copyright issues, were reflected upon. This critical reflection focused on the question of which characteristics of analogue documents are lost during digitization, which characteristics can be (better) represented digitally and which added value and opportunities, but also challenges, this entails for use in scientific research and museum exhibitions.
The teaching project was implemented in cooperation with the Hamburg State and University Library. Using handwritten letters from around 1900 from the Dehmel Archive and printed multilingual foreign language textbooks from the early modern period, different requirements and the resulting procedures for digitization were discussed. The students worked with the analogue artefacts in the archive and went through the entire workflow from cultural digitization to digital representation in a virtual environment.
Review and results
As part of the course, students became familiar with various methods from the broad field of digital humanities. In addition to the practical application, the focus was on developing a critical awareness of the effects of digitization on the form, function and use of objects and procedures used in the humanities for the full-text indexing of text documents relevant to the history of culture and science. Students have learned to use digital methods in a reflective manner with regard to the specific requirements of processing historical cultural assets.
Tips from lecturers for lecturers
The project was designed as a cooperative project between different institutions and disciplines (digital literary studies, linguistics, information science) and with several teaching staff. In the context of the interdisciplinary orientation of the seminar, co-teaching proved to be a profitable teaching scenario, as technical applications in particular require microteaching and close supervision of the students, which is difficult to guarantee by a single teacher. In addition, according to the students, the exchange and discourse that accompanied all sessions between academics with different research focuses proved to be an authentic and beneficial insight into the academic world. The interdisciplinary exchange was also perceived as stimulating by the teachers themselves.