PACE – Passau Centre for eHumanities

The Passau Centre for eHumanities (PACE) investigates new computer-based approaches to determine the needs of the humanities and cultural studies fields for research and teaching.

The Centre

The Passau Centre for eHumanities (German) is an important component of the eHumanities field at the University of Passau. Under the guiding theme of multimodal construction and reception of cultural patterns, it examines how texts, images and audio interact to ascribe meaning to objects in the context of digital and digitalised media. Moreover, it establishes the necessary structural foundations for this research. The researchers engage in computer-assisted analysis of the patterns of digital(ised) media and examine different methods of their representation, annotation and the (semi-)automated discovery of multimodal knowledge bases in large digital corpuses. An example: Computers can autonomously recognise certain stylistic features in images of furniture or architectural objects by analysing technical texts and combining them with a given image.

Our research

PACE is designed to meet the needs of humanities and cultural research and teaching; it builds on targeted surveys of the need for structures supporting eHumanities. By employing concrete questions from the humanities and social sciences in five pilot projects, methodical and technological needs will be identified in order to develop new, computer-based approaches. The concept, being deliberately multidisciplinary, involves a number of disciplines under the roof of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Linguistics and Cultural Studies, History, Media and Communication Studies, Empirical Social Science, Art History and Visual Culture Studies), sub-sections of Computer Science (Digital Libraries and Web Information Systems) as well as the discipline of Law.

In the long run, PACE aims to develop strategies for interdisciplinary co-operation and examples of successful models, which will benefit future projects in the field.

Funding and involved academics

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research has provided seed capital for PACE for a term of three years. The project involves nine professors from the University of Passau; Professor Siegfried Handschuh (Chair of Digital Libraries and Web Information Systems) and Professor Malte Rehbein (Chair of Digital Humanities) are the principal investigators. Principal investigators at the University of Passau Professor Siegfried Handschuh (Chair of Digital Libraries and Web Information Systems) Professor Malte Rehbein (Chair of Digital Humanities).