Research

UZH’s History Department advances digital scholarship on multiple levels. Portals and databases provide access to research and sources on a wide variety of historical issues. Tools facilitate research and management of findings and literature. Ongoing research projects approach the digital era form various perspectives.

Linked Open Data for the Humanities and Social Sciences (LOD4HSS): Developing ORD Best Practices, Communities and Sustainable Services with Geovistory

While academic research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) collects high-quality information in order to gain more in-depth knowledge about past and present societies, there exist limited ORD practices allowing to reuse the significant amount of data produced. New virtual research environments (VRE) are being adopted with different potential to make data reusable, ranging from silos with specific data models to collaboratively enriched, open, high-quality knowledge graphs. The latter approach was adopted to create Geovistory, an easy-to-use VRE and Linked Open Data publication platform designed to enable and foster ORD practices in HSS. Geovistory is already used as a production and publication platform by different SNF and ANR projects, as well as in doctoral research and academic teaching. To develop its full potential, it is essential to broaden the community of users and supporting institutions. This project aims to validate and propagate ORD workflows using Geovistory according to different use-cases and in line with the needs of different domains in the HSS (WP2), to strengthen the share of best practices in a community of data producers and consumers (WP3) and define a clear governance and financial model closely interlinked with academia (WP4). As a result, ORD blueprints using Geovistory will be available for Swiss and international HSS researchers, as well as an engaged community and documentation of best practices. This project thus contributes to methodological innovation of ORD practices and makes the Geovistory VRE sustainable from a community perspective as ORD infrastructure meeting the specificities of HSS research.

The Digital History Lab (DHL) will make its contribution particularly in the area of strengthening the exchange of best practices within a data producing and consuming community.

Homepage of Geovistory

Potentials of Advanced Text Technologies: Machine learning-based Text Recognition

See more.

Tobias Hodel and Bettina Schöller have been teaching seminars on 3D modeling at Historisches Seminar. The results are now published on this website. The project is supported by Digitale Lehre und Forschung of UZH.

We are happy to present two new teaching projects as part of swissuniversities P-8 Digital Skills for You (2021-2024) with the participation of our HS members:

A self-study course on BA level for basics of spatial analysis, geographic data visualization and cartography by Daniel Ursprung. For more information see here.

Teaching project Digital Humantities: Systematic teaching of digital core competencies in the Humanities by Christine Grundig. For more information see here.