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University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is the largest and one of the oldest universities of the German-speaking area. Its ca. 90.000 students and 10.000 employees work in 20 faculties/centres and several service and central support units, many of which deal with matters digital.

The University’s Master’s program in Digital Humanities is organized together by the Faculties of Historical and Cultural Studies, and that of Philological and Cultural Studies which both have dedicated personnel on all academic levels who represent a broad variety of different approaches to data and computer-based research. These two faculties collaborate closely with other relevant stakeholders inside the university, e.g. with the University Library, the Computer Center and the institutional repositories PHAIDRA and AUSSDA as well as with the Vice-Rectorate for Digitalisation and Knowledge Transfer and the Research Network Data Science. But also outside the University, DH-related collaboration is going on with other relevant institutions in the field, in Austria and beyond.

People

  • Tara Andrews

    Tara Andrews became University Professor of Digital Humanities at the Institute for History in 2016. She has also served as a Scientific Director of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) at the ÖAW since 2018.

    With a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999), and the degrees of Master (2005) and Doctor (2009) of Philosophy in Byzantine and Armenian studies from the University of Oxford, her dual scientific training as well as her professional experience in the software industry has provided valuable and rare perspectives on the use of digital and computational methods in humanities domains. Andrews’ fields of expertise include the history and historiography of the Christian Near East in the tenth to twelfth centuries, the application of computational and statistical methods for reconstruction of the copying history of ancient and medieval manuscripts (stemmatology), and reflection on the implications of employing digital media and computational methods in humanities contexts.

    She has been invited to give keynote presentations at both academic and industry conferences, has contributed to both the Armenian-source content and the technical maintenance of the online “Prosopography of the Byzantine World”, has edited or co-edited two collections of papers on the subject of software and computational analysis in textual studies, and has published several journal articles as well as a monograph on topics that cover both medieval Armenian history and digital scholarly practice.

    Her scientific output also extends to research software, most notably the ‘Stemmaweb’ suite of online tools for analysis of text variants and their associated stemma hypotheses, but also including a range of smaller tools whose source code has been released to the public on Github. From 2021–2026 she will be PI of the ERC project RELEVEN, aiming to bring a new perspective to the history of the eleventh century in the Christian world by digitally re-modeling the data we have.

  • Andreas Baumann

    **Andreas Baumann **is senior scientist and coordinator for Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna.

    He has a background in Linguistics and Mathematics, and holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, focusing on modeling evolutionary dynamics of phonotactics in English, Polish, and Afrikaans.

    He was visiting researcher at the University of Stellenbosch, the South African Center for Epidemiological Modeling and Analysis, and the University of Torino. He was guest researcher at ACDH-CH from 2019 to 2021, and principal investigator in two projects on semantic and emotional dynamics in the Austrian German lexicon (DYLEN, DYSEN).

    In his research, Andreas Baumann combines methods from mathematical evolutionary ecology, data science, and corpus linguistics to study the evolution, complexity and diversity of languages. His teaching focuses on quantitative and statistical modeling for the Humanities, as well as text processing and analysis. On a regular basis, Andreas Baumann is external lecturer at Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań.

    At the University of Vienna, where he is part of the DH steering group, Andreas Baumann is involved in the coordination of the Extension Curriculum and Master Curriculum in Digital Humanities, as well as in organizing events and workshops focusing on DH research, tools, and activities.

  • Thomas Wallnig

    Thomas Wallnig is senior scientist for digital research matters at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of VIenna.

    He is an early modern intellectual historian and editor of historical sources by training, and holds a venia legendi in Modern History.

    He was PI of FWF Start Project “Monastic Enlightenment and the Bendictine Republic of Letters” as well as of several other correspondence-related projects. He co-chaired COST Action IS1310 “Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the DIgital Age” (2014-2018/9) which provided him with a broad overview of (text-based) DH approaches in the humanities.

    Thomas Wallnig has held fellowships or guest professorships in Wolfenbütte, Paris (DHI), Princeton (IAS), Stanford, Padova and Munich (LMU).