This research emphasis deals with the potentials, challenges, and consequences of digitalization.
On the one hand, it analyzes the effects of digitalization on parts of society, such as culture, media, politics, education, health, or science. On the other hand, it explores new digital methods and techniques that established themselves within the humanities and social sciences in the wake of the so-called digital turn.
Digitalization refers to the division of information and computer operations into an electronical binary code. Detached from processing and supporting material, this code can be distributed very rapidly and potentially automatically.
Due to these characteristics, digitalization harbors the potential to interfuse all aspects of life: unlike in the wake of the developments of the nineteenth century, technologization and automatization are not restricted to physical processes; they also pertain to non-physical processes, such as the acquisition of knowledge, communication, the maintenance of relationships, access to information, organization of labor, or processes of political decision-making.
In the same stroke, digitalization creates new possibilities and methods of academic research.
Particularly regarding the areas of text (linguistics, philology) and image, digital research tools enable analyses, observations, and knowledge production, which would have been impossible for the traditional techniques of the humanities and social sciences.
In front of this backdrop, research efforts of the faculty dealing with digitalization focus on two broader insights: one the one hand, digitalization has an impact on established institutions, organizations, structures, and social relations as instances of phenomena created by human beings; on the other hand, the new potentials change working techniques in the humanities and social sciences and require additional and extensive methodological expertise.
The research emphasis is dedicated to both approaches to the subject matter and is divided into two fields: digitalization as alteration of phenomena and digitalization as method.