These pages are home to the research community “Digital Humanities Flanders” (DHu.F), an initiative sponsored by the Research Foundation of Flanders from 2015 to 2020.
Thanks to this support, DHu.F has been able to organise a series of DH related events at partner institutions, sponsor events that are of interest to the community, and support the mobility of affiliated postdoctoral researchers in the interest of knowledge exchange. For a list of these activities, please check our Calendar. For a list of the participating research groups, please visit our Members page. If you interested in joining our community, feel free to send us a message.
About Digital Humanities
The Digital Humanities (DH, also known as Humanities Computing or eHumanities) refer to an international scholarly initiative in which scholars from the conventional Humanities (linguistics, literature, (art) history…) as well as the Interpretative Social Sciences (e.g. social psychology, legal studies…) explore how digital methods and computation can support, enhance and transform traditional forms of research and teaching. This concerted effort is profoundly interdisciplinary in nature, since it implies intense and innovative collaborations with research groups in e.g. computer science and engineering.
It is broadly acknowledged that the Digital Humanities have momentum and can even be considered “the next big thing” across a multitude of fields in the Humanities. DH and its methodological innovations, nevertheless, are also faced with important challenges:
- dealing with computational tools and digital resources requires a set of scholarly skills that are currently underrepresented in academic teaching curricula (e.g. electronic data processing, statistics, etc.). Both junior and senior scholars therefore actively seek learning opportunities to acquire these skills.
- DH is a Humanities-wide initiative and implies new collaborations that extend beyond the discipline-specific, national networks which Humanities scholars have been typically involved in. This implies the need for international networking events that are not bound to specific disciplines.
Our Mission Statement
This research community aims to tackle the challenges of Digital Humanities by organizing (international) networking seminars, where the community’s members can meet and develop new scholarly partnerships. In particular, we also aim to combine these events with training opportunities where scholars can acquire new digital skills. The includes partners from various departments in (Flemish) universities and a large number of research units. Precisely, the wide range of partners in our community illustrates how DH’s focus is primarily methodological and this community has the unique opportunity to unite an interdisciplinary group of researchers with strongly divergent scholarly and thematic backgrounds.
Our research community also aims to consolidate the existing DH scholarship in Flanders: many researchers in the participating groups are already at the forefront of Digital Humanities worldwide. This community will help them realize their research potential, for instance, by taking part in national research collaborations. This community will therefore help to maintain and strengthen Flanders’s strategically important position in the international DH landscape. Our community complements and integrates a string of other initiatives in Flanders and the Benelux, such as the Dariah-BE network, the annual DHBenelux conference, the annual DH Summer School at the UAntwerp. Various ongoing initiatives complement this list, such as the Lecture Series by the Platform for Digital Humanities in Antwerp.