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First of all, if you understand, or ask yourself "What is digital humanities?" you will find
that in the field it's really hard; people....I mean, they're writing books about what it
actually is, right? One is of course the use of digital research tools in the humanities,
but there is also a branch, I think of digital humanities that reevaluates the digital artifact,
the object, as an object of research that has currency. What I'm doing, I'm working
on an online exhibition with a program called Omeka. So my pilot project right now is focusing
on Berlin, because that's where I'll be taking my students this spring break to discover
the city and take a class with me on the history of Berlin, and part of their requirements
are to create a portfolio and this portfolio will be the source material for this online
exhibition. And it's supposed to contain images like photographs they take, videos that they
take on their smart phones, essays, anecdotes -- which the students write while they are
in Berlin. I actually hope to create this geographic information system where we have
a map of Berlin and can just click on certain places and these anecdotes, these experiences
of the students, pop up. As a researcher, a literary scholar, a scholar in new media,
so what I'm doing, I'm looking at the digital image, video game image in particular. On
the one hand there's a big interest of mine in image theory and this is coming out of
the French philosophers, you know like Jean de Luz, what actually is a digital image;
what is a video game image, because it's such a special image.
The other thing is the relation of computer games, video games, to nationalism. The role
that literature plays in national media ecology. So how does literature position itself? So
this is really a broad interest of mine. The important part of whatever it is, digital
humanities, is that reevaluation of things that have been done before I mean an interest
in video games is not that new Digital humanities has a lot to do with that in that researchers
field of study that is important and critical.