The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) is proud to announce it has signed a Cooperating Partnership agreement with the Centre for Digital Humanities (ELTE.DH) at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary.
“I’m very excited about our Cooperating Partnership with ELTE,” said Edward J. Gray, the Officer for National Coordination at DARIAH. “This is an important first step toward establishing a closer collaboration with our Hungarian colleagues, and in the future, welcoming Hungary as a full member into the DARIAH family.”
ELTE.DH was created by the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) to keep up with the global trends and to create a stable centre for the education and research of digital humanities in 2017. As a research- and practice-oriented scholarly institution, ELTE.DH ensures focus and coherence for all efforts that have been made in the field of digital humanities at the faculty and examines digital research aspects not yet considered.
“It was among the most important tasks of Hungary’s oldest institute of higher education, the Eötvös Loránd University, to adopt the latest scientific and technical advancements in the field of humanities,” said Dr. Gábor Palkó, Head of Department for Digital Humanities at ELTE.
Integration with DARIAH
ELTE.DH will contribute to DARIAH by granting access to some of its impressive training and pedagogical materials via DARIAH-CAMPUS, as well as participating in working groups and promoting the exchanges between researchers in Central Europe. The educational and research activities of ELTE.DH are summarized in the ELTE.DH Yearbook.
Since 2019, ELTE has introduced over 500 undergraduate students per year to digital humanities coursework, in addition to 150 PhD students who receive specialized attention. As of 2020, ELTE now boasts the first university department dedicated to Digital Humanities in Hungary. For more information on ELTE’s DH courses, check out the DARIAH-CLARIN Digital Humanities Course Registry.
One of ELTE.DH’s key objectives is to help increase the visibility of Hungarian, and in a broader sense, Central European DH research through organising international workshops and conferences. Two major international events took place at ELTE, with a large number of European and non-European participants in 2018 (DH_Budapest_2018) and 2019 (DH_Budapest_2019). The International Journal of Digital Humanities was initiated by researchers at ELTE.DH and its third thematic issue will be published soon.
Research strengths
Supported by the Institutional Excellence Program for the Higher Education, ELTE.DH’s researchers focus on the peculiarities and differences of the analogue and digital approaches of textual analysis, ranging from the questions of semantic repository representation and automatic data enrichment of digital heritage, to the handling of biographical and bibliographic data, the use of stylometric and author identification algorithms, and the development of various natural language processing tools. As participants in the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History”, ELTE.DH’s researchers have worked on establishing literary corpora to promote the practice of computer-aided “distant reading”.
ELTE.DH is also leading the National Laboratory for Digital Humanities, established on the initiative of the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation and Technology, which aims to develop, in an inter-institutional collaboration, a methodology for the AI-based processing, research and education of national cultural heritage and its widest possible dissemination.
The Laboratory focuses on the development of language-processing algorithms based on machine intelligence, the development of an annotated Gold standard corpus as well as web-archiving of Hungarian language materials.
Members of the Laboratory include: ELTE, National Archives of Hungary, University of Miskolc, Research Centre for the Humanities, Eötvös Loránd Research Network
