New Executive Director at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH)

Dr Claudia Bamberg is the new head of the research department “Digital Edition and Digital Lexicography” at the TCDH / Competence Center. As an executive director, she develops new ideas and projects together with Dr Thomas Burch and in close cooperation with research partners, employees and students.

After studying German and musicology at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Claudia Bamberg received her doctorate in 2010 with a thesis on Hugo von Hofmannsthal ("Hofmannsthal: The Poet and Things"), supported by a doctoral grant from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. During her subsequent work at the Freie Deutsche Hochstift, Frankfurt a.M. and at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, Vienna, she brought her expertise to various projects about Hofmanntshal. She discovered her enthusiasm for the Digital Humanities as an editor and project coordinator in the cooperative DFG project "Digitalisierung und elektronische Edition der Korrespondenz August Wilhelm Schlegels": The digital edition was created from 2012 to 2020 as a cooperation between the Philipps University of Marburg, the Trier Center for Digital Humanities and the Saxon State Library - State and University Library, Dresden. Claudia Bamberg has also curated various exhibitions at the Freie Deutsche Hochstift and is a member of the Frankfurt network “Aktuelle Perspektiven der Romantikforschung”.

The Ease of the Digital Humanities

With Claudia Bamberg, the TCDH and, thus, the University of Trier have gained an experienced researcher specializing in modern German literature and edition philology. In the future, she would like to work with the TCDH team to expand the Digital Humanities and, in particular, the research area “Digital Edition and Digital Lexikography” with a few focal points. Trier's expertise in this area is to be further strengthened. In new projects, the focus is on translations as well as writings on music history and letter networks; in the field of digital lexicography, the networking of dictionaries, the TCDH has been successfully developing for a long time, is being promoted. For all fields, both an interdisciplinary and a collaborative way of working is required. Regarding this way of working, the intra-university cooperation should also be strengthened.

Communicate Research Results

Research topics in literary and cultural studies should inspire and, above all, show that digital methods and processes in the humanities are not only associated with effort, but also with ease and can facilitate access to complex topics and traditional contexts. In the best case scenario, those involved in the project and later the general public learn something new outside of their field. Because almost every topic becomes exciting when creative digital access is created: Digital editions and research platforms, but also exhibitions - analog and digital - offer an ideal introduction to this.

Driven by the question "Wie sieht die Zukunft der DH, der Editionen und neuer Präsentationswege aus?" and the consideration of what contribution the TCDH and the team can make in the diverse range of Digital Humanities, Claudia Bamberg, together with the TCDH directors Prof Dr Claudine Moulin, Prof Dr Christof Schöch and Dr Thomas Burch, further develops the idea of ​​networked and sustainable research, which is only made possible by the Digital Humanities: "Digitalen Infrastrukturen gehört ebenso wie digitalen Textausgaben – seien es Quellensammlungen, Editionen oder Wörterbücher – die Zukunft".