“Humanities for the 21st century.”

UNI NOVA: You mean machine learning – automated pattern recognition that becomes slightly more effi cient and “intelligent” with each pass.

LAUER: Just like the natural sciences, we now solve problems by formalizing and modeling them. An example of such a problem is understanding the plot of a novel. This is not something that a computer can do. But we can simplify the problem by breaking the novel down into 10,000 lexical units. We then look at whether positive words like “happy”, “wedding”, or “sunshine”, or negative ones like “depressed”, “dark”, or “tired” occur more frequently in each section. This allows us to digitally analyze the plotline and gain an insight into how novels are structured. Computers are unable to read or interpret, but they are good at counting. They can measure the distribution of words, colors or shapes much better than we can.

UNI NOVA: Isn’t it a little bit painful for a literary scholar to see world literature being sliced up and “read” by computers? The humanities of the 21st century will be computer-based, believes Gerhard Lauer, Professor of Digital Humanities. Digitalization is about more than just facilitating access to research material, he explains – it brings completely new analytical methods to the humanities.

LAUER: No – this is something that literary science has always done. Literary history classifi es texts into diff erent eras or movements, and groups them into genres. What the Brothers Grimm did was no different: they collected and compared fairy tales from all over the world in search of common elements, such as motives. We are doing the same, but with the help of computers.

UNI NOVA: What do research and publication look like in computer-assisted humanities projects?

LAUER: Projects of this sort are for the most part still very labor-intensive. Digitally performing a sentiment analysis to determine which texts Robert Musil wrote during World War I while he was a soldier in charge of a propaganda newspaper in Tyrol took us three years, including two weeks of computation time at a supercomputing center. The project resulted in two publications: one version for humanities scholars and another for the computer science nerds describing all the statistical techniques we used. There is no question that the work we do is changing.

UNI NOVA: A notable feature of your latest publications is that they are mostly team eff orts.

LAUER: That’s another thing that has changed. I find myself writing fewer and fewer publications alone. There are usually computer scientists or other humanities scholars involved as well. The various disciplines in the digital humanities are heavily reliant on each other – as has been the case in the natural sciences for a long time. The idea that “I am a lone genius and can do everything myself”, although still widespread in our field, is a thing of the past. Collaboration and division of labor will be crucial elements of the humanities in the 21st century.

UNI NOVA: Does digitalization devalue conventional skills in the humanities?

LAUER: Yes, and this is why it is encountering such resistance. We have a modernization problem. Imagine you are a renowned theology professor, and you have a PhD student who is using new-fangled computer-based methods to determine which letters where in fact written by St. Paul – a classic problem in theology, as many letters have been “falsely” attributed to him. You probably don’t fully understand what your PhD student is doing, but you suddenly realize that their computer-based research could make your own research tradition and skills obsolete. That can be disconcerting.

UNI NOVA: Are there any examples of the digital humanities not just making research more effi cient, but actually creating new knowledge?

LAUER: Absolutely. In literary studies, constructivists like Foucault and Barthes have long argued that the author of a text is irrelevant, claiming that authorship is merely a social construct. However, in computer science there are now entire competitions devoted to authorship attribution – the process of using computerbased methods to attribute texts to a particular author. And the analysis shows that authors do in fact have what we might call a style of their own. So we’re actually refuting highly popular constructivist theories.

UNI NOVA: In the past, the humanities and social sciences have had a reputation of viewing digitalization in a critical light, and focusing mainly on its negative effects on society. Are they now being won over by the promise of new opportunities?

LAUER: I would question your premise. What many humanities scholars do – and this is generally as far as their criticism goes – is write articles about how digitalization is destroying our culture and making young people fat and stupid. In the 15 years I have been working in this field, I have seen very little constructive input on the issue from humanities scholars. Who was it that campaigned for open access to ensure equitable distribution of cultural wealth, for instance? Computer scientists. And as for the new methods: in the natural sciences there is a Nobel Prize for them. In the humanities, they are first and foremost an object of criticism.

UNI NOVA: How are the digital humanities aff ecting teaching?

LAUER: Radically. Our students attend introductory lectures in computer science and learn about statistics. Incidentally, our close collaboration with computer sciences has opened up new potential for that field as well: a significant number of women, who are otherwise underrepresented in computer science, are drawn to the combination of culture and  computer assisted methods.

UNI NOVA: How well-established are the digital humanities in Switzerland?

LAUER: ETH Lausanne and the University of Lausanne are leading the way. The latter was the fi rst university in Switzerland to off er a degree program in digital humanities. Geneva is currently advertising a vacancy for a professor in the field, and the University of Bern has been looking for one for some time. Digital humanities are a hot topic at a growing number of universities.

UNI NOVA: What is the situation like in the English-speaking world?

LAUER: The best place to do research in digital humanities right now is Nebraska.

UNI NOVA: Nebraska? Not Stanford, MIT or Harvard?

LAUER: No. Several high-caliber humanities scholars left Stanford University to establish a Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska, because there they had the freedom to do things they weren’t allowed to before. Even though Stanford is at the heart of Silicon Valley and has a techy reputation, the historians and literary scholars there still have a very traditional understanding of their field. This is why the canon of U.S. literature is being explored fi rst and foremost in Nebraska. Innovation often comes from the periphery, not the center – Max Weber was right about that.

UNI NOVA: Before you came to Basel, you tried to establish the digital humanities at the University of Göttingen, but came up against resistance from the faculty. Aren’t you worried that something similar might happen in Basel?

LAUER: No, in Basel the fi eld’s potential is acknowledged not just by the University president but also by the dean’s office directly responsible for our lab. Despite the very modest means at our disposal, the signs are encouraging. For example, work is underway on a Data Analytic Center where humanities scholars, sociologists, biologists and chemists will work together, as the computer-assisted methods employed by these disciplines often have a lot in common. The difference between analyzing letters or DNA is smaller than you might think.

UNI NOVA: How much interest have your colleagues at the University of Basel shown in the digital humanities?

LAUER: More than we can cater for with our modest resources. We are currently listed as a partner in ten applications for funding under the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Digital Lives scheme – besides five applications of our own.