Digital HumanitiesHeidelberg Research Architecture
The Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA) is the Digital Humanities Unit at the HCTS. The HRA focuses on digital humanities research, including consulting, data management plans, teaching, and various aspects of digital literacy. We offer partnership and advice for researchers and students, for current and planned projects and can organize training sessions. We support you in the development of all kinds of digital resources, be they visual, textual, audio-visual, or multi-modal. This includes, e.g. the collection, structuring, and reconciliation of data throughout the whole research data life-cycle, as well as the publication of research data and the preparation of their digital preservation. In addition, HRA staff has expertise in subjects like text recognition, non-Latin scripts, and multi-modal data. We can also help you in establishing contacts with other experts in Heidelberg, for example at the University Library or the Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities (HCDH), or consortia within the NFDI initiative, like NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory, or Text+, or national Digital Humanities networks like the DH-d association. The HRA maintains a small MediaLab at the HCTS, open to all CATS members. The HRA is committed to Open Science, and strives to help you make data, research, and code available to the public wherever possible.
Projects
In the "Projects" section we introduce a number of research projects that partnered with HRA. Our staff can be involved in various ways, for example, DH consulting in the conceptional phase of a project before or while an application or data management plan is written, or training project members in recording, structuring, and enhancing date, or deepen the expertise of applying a certain research software. We also support projects in preparing their research data for publication in research data repositories and digital archives.
Digital Output
The "Digital output" section provides a list of a variety of digital outcome, produced by or with support of the HRA, usually in close co-operation with research projects. "Digital Output" can mean different things, for example single files containing geo-referenced records that are visualized on a map (like kml/kmz files), source code of open software (published on GitHub or Gitlab), digital tools that are either running stand-alone or are part of software packages, or even full-fledged databases with front-ends, back-ends, as well as search and browse functionalities.
Data sets
A number of collections or research projects compiled their data output into sets that are published on dedicated research data repositories. Heidelberg University provides the research data repositories heiDATA, and heidICON. In this section you find an annotated list of data sets that were created in close collaboration with the HRA, or by the HRA itself. The earliest publications date back to the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe", the predecessor of the Heidelberg Centre of Transcultural Studies. In the long term, these data sets are migrated to heiARCHIVE for digital preservation.
Services
The HRA provides various services to both students and researchers. We maintain a small MediaLab for digitization and editing visual material, and co-host central CATS services. We also offer workshops and training sessions tailored to your needs.