codhus

Humanities and technology

Humanities and technology do not reconcile, at least not in our collective imagination. We have become accustomed to the following archetypes: the HUMANIST who lives among books and who is not interested in technology and the IT SCIENTIST who is not interested in the „theoretical” topics approached by experts in linguistics, literature, history etc. We tend to separate these domains, but, in nowadays society, they are beginning to be more compatible than they seem (and they are about to even become complementary!). With the help of digital methods, the field of humanities opens up to a multitude of other domains that seemed intangible before: Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Big Data, or Technology in Education.

Have a look at the overview of intersecting areas relevant for Digital Humanities studies (Chitez et al, 2020) and imagine the possibilities:

All of these fields create the realm of Digital Humanities, where university students, teachers and researchers can exploit the potential of working with digital data and tools for the re-discovery of traditional humanities topics (e.g. quantitative literature studies; digital visualisation of linguistic-cultural developments; automatic detection of errors in translation studies). This will result in fundamental and applied studies that can either improve established theoretical paradigms or facilitate the creation of tools and apps for everyday use.

 

Digital Humanities at UVT

In order to compensate for the lack of use of digital methods in the Humanities in Romania, a team of researchers from the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology (FLIT) of the West University of Timișoara founded the CODHUS research centre (Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities) in October 2019.

CODHUS is a Digital Humanities research centre, including different faculties and departments. For instance, the CODHUS centre has gathers researchers interested in literature created by or in the digital environment, in which poetry meets computing in a content creation algorithm. CODHUS aims to involve colleagues from the Department of Computer Science, interested in developing solutions for the implementation of digital methods in the study/ research of the Humanities fields.

Thus, the centre is not about philologists who discovered programming, nor about IT scientists who understood that there is applicability potential in the Humanities. It is about the complementarity between research and digitalisation in order to obtain immediate results with an applicative character in the trans- and interdisciplinary spectrum. Being on a familiar and common ground, both humanists and IT scientists can focus on the mission of popularizing the use of digital methods in all the disciplines where the expertise of the humanists is required.

 

CODHUS profile 

The profile of the CODHUS centre is: a research centre which promotes the multidisciplinary use of digital methods related to corpus linguistics. Our centre has a strong applicative character, because we aim to offer practical solutions for teaching, learning or large-scale use: software solutions for universities or the pre-university environment (language teaching, translation tools, and digital teaching methods in the field of Humanities) and online resources (web pages, digital guides, databases).

 

CODHUS name

The name of the centre also has a story: COD (symbol of digitalisation) and HUS (hūs in Old English; Huus in Swiss German, meaning house). Therefore, our purpose is to create a house of digital codes for the Humanities.