TFA.lab
Image: TFAIn the TFA.lab, a humanities laboratory, the Theodor Fontane Archive cooperates with the »Network Digital Humanities« at the University of Potsdam to combine our projects in the field of digital humanities. We invite everybody to join.
One one hand, we aim to explore the the potentials of innovative forms of agile project work, interdisciplinary collaboration and digital, partly experimental research in the humanities; on the other hand, we experiment with the possibilities of making the digitized cultural heritage accessible and presenting it.
As an institution that already brings together diverse expertise - for example, archival, librarianship, editorial philology, and literary studies - and cooperates with numerous partners from fields such as computational linguistics, computer science, media studies, and information science, the Theodor Fontane Archive is a particularly suitable location for establishing an interdisciplinary laboratory. Furthermore, archives, which have always been institutions for collecting and maintaining (material) objects and data, can be considered excellent places for digital humanities in the age of digitization.
Image: TFAFollowing the idea of laboratories in the humanities, the TFA.lab also combines research and teaching. In this context, workshops and seminars are organized in which questions of theory and methodology of the digital humanities are discussed or junior researchers and students are introduced to practices and concepts of the digital humanities and given the opportunity to take their first steps in the field in experimental projects. In addition, interdisciplinary teaching networks, for example with other institutes of the Faculty of Humanities or with the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, will be established and expanded.
Digital Projects
The digital projects of the Theodor Fontane Archive form the core of the TFA.lab. There are currently five research areas, for each of which projects, seminars and events have been or are being carried out.
Image: TFAIn the project FontaneVR, the »Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft e.V.« cooperates with the Theodor Fontane Archive to develop a prototype of a 3D interaction environment for literary societies. Villa Quandt will be modeled as a virtual 3D environment and equipped with a curated series of specific presentation and interaction scenarios that can be visited individually or (accompanied by professional guides) collectively. The project is browser-based.
Image: TFAIn the Digital Archives for Literature section, the Theodor Fontane Archive is working on making its holdings, collections and research data accessible online. Sub-projects we already completed are the Digital Collection of Manuscripts, which is being successively expanded, the Fontane Bibliography Online, the Fontane Blätter retrodigital, the Fontane Chronicle and the Fontane Correspondence Database. The project Library Catalog Online and the Fontane Picture Collection are currently in progress.
Image: TFA/UCLabIn the Archival Algorithm section, we explore ways of analyzing and exploring archival metadata, such as catalog data or other indexing data like the description of traces of reading and use in Fontane’s reference library, the visualization of which was the subject of a research project withUCLab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. An ongoing project that is entitled Escalating Catalogs.
In the Distant Reading Fontane section, we are working on projects that use explorative, partly experimental applications of computer-assisted analysis methods to inspect texts by Theodor Fontane in their historical context. In one sub-project, stylometric analyses of Fontane’s novels were carried out.
In the colloquium series Kulturdaten | Datenkulturen, which we have been conducting regularly in conjunction with the Digital Humanities Network at the University of Potsdam since the summer semester of 2021, we are addressing both practical and theoretical implications of the digitization of cultural memory. We ask about the nature of cultural data and the new data cultures emerging in the course of digitization.
Together with the »Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach«, we are organizing a Poetry Hackathon in the summer of 2021, in which interdisciplinary teams from philology, information science, computational linguistics, and design, as well as freefloaters, will conduct digital analyses with curated data on the poems of Schiller, Mörike, Hölderlin, Celan, and Fontane, discuss their methods and results with each other, and attempt an interpretation of these results.
Image: TFAIn addition, a project for the digital edition of Theodor Fontane’s letters is in preparation.
