Research Profile

Below you will find a selection of the Chair's current research foci.

Visual analytics offer enormous potential for various cultural studies subjects. They make "big data" usable and enable complex issues and networks to be analysed. The focus is therefore less on pure visualisation as an (aesthetic) form of presenting results and more on visualisation as a critical, analytical process for gaining knowledge.

Publications:

M. Rehbein. "Informationsvisualisierung". Beitrag in Jannidis, Kohle, Rehbein (Hg.): Digital Humanities. Eine Einführung. Metzler Verlag. 2017.
S. Maurer, M. Rehbein. Zur Entwicklung des Passauer Arbeitsmarktes im Ersten Weltkrieg anhand einer quantitativen Analyse regionaler Tageszeitungen (in Vorbereitung).
M. Rehbein. From the Scholarly Edition to Visualization. Re-using Encoded Data for Historical Research. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 8.1 (2014), 81-105.

Digital media are fundamentally changing cultural studies. As a result of the so-called "computational turn", a well-founded critical reflection on the new digital methods is still lacking. This is taken into account in the research focus "Reflection on Methods": It aims at a critical reflection of cultural studies methods, their conscious transfer to the digital medium and a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the "computational turn".

Publications:

M. Rehbein: Digitalisierung braucht Historiker/innen, die sie beherrschen, nicht beherrscht, in: H-Soz-Kult, 27.11.2015.
M. Rehbein. On Ethical Issues of Digital Humanities. In: "Ei, dem alten Herrn zoll' ich Achtung gern'": Festschrift für Joachim Veit zum 60. Geburtstag, hg. von Kristina Richts und Peter Stadler. 631-654 (preprint).

The chair conducts basic research into the coding, processing and visualisation of multi-layered, complex texts and the scientific interaction with them. The current focus is on "diachronic markup", i.e. the coding of texts that change over time.

Projects:

Diachronic markup and presentation practices for text editions in digital research environments (Autorenhandschriften des 19. Jh., laufend)
An Encoding Model for Genetic Editions (completed)

Modelling is a central aspect of digital humanities. Models are created and used in a variety of contexts. They serve as a tool for investigating specific questions; the model is then primarily of interest as the result of the research process. As part of experimental research activities, however, the focus of interest is on the modelling process, in the course of which knowledge about the modelled object is acquired.

Projects:

Modelling between Digital and The Humanities: Thinking in Practice (2016/17)
Media boundaries and conceptual modelling: between texts and maps
An Encoding Model for Genetic Editions (completed)

Digital data is the basis for many research projects in the digital humanities. Generating and making this data available is therefore also one of its fields of activity - in particular the creation of databases of digitised cultural assets that are made accessible to the public.

The Dynamic Digital Edition Prototype (ca. 1998)

This project implemented first ideas of visualising textual variance as occurred in witnesses of medieval texts. It employed a simple (mainly statistical) algorithm and used colours to indicate how often a reading of a particular text passage was witnessed: the darker, the less text witnesses for this reading. It could be regarded as a visual access to a critical apparatus. Although the visualisation seems to be “flat”, the prototype was dynamic and interactive as the user could include and exclude manuscripts in his investigation, thus focussing on what he is interested in (and not depending on the editor’s choices).

The Kundige Bok Digital Edition (2004-2008)

The kundige bok digital edition provides such full information on textual variation that originated in frequent revisions of this late medieval legal text. It is however not always clear in which chronological order these changes happened, which potentially allows different paths through the evolution of the text. Traditionally, this would have been annotated in the apparatus of the scholarly edition and the reader would have had no real chance to make up his own mind and even if so, only with a lot of effort. The kundige bok digital edition, however, offers its users a dynamic interface to it, visualising the possible choices of textual evolution in an interactive graph which serves two purposes: a) it visualises the uncertainty transparently and b) it presents the user the textual variation, he is interested in, automatically, on a mouse-click. This allows the user to easily rearrange the data for a particular research question without losing the editor’s knowledge about the text

Hyperspectral Analysis (2008/2009)

The Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI), a joint project with the An Foras Feasa Institute at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, investigated how HSI technique can be used to perform quality text recovery, computational segmentation and dating of historical documents. HSI, together with modern two-dimensional spectrum software and three-dimensional image and visualisation software, provides modern researchers working in the field of historic documents analysis with opportunities for forensic examination that were heretofore unavailable. Since the result of the HSI scanning process is not simply an image but a “data cube” (Shiel, Rehbein, Keating 2009), this data needs to be further processed and visualised in order to allow the user to draw conclusions.