“Digital Humanities “is an interdisciplinary research domain, in which digital technologies and techniques are applied to liberal arts and social science questions. It appropriates for examining big amounts of information and making them available. To offer trainees an insight into the many different locations of application of digital humanities, speakers at TU Dortmund University, RUB and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) together developed a study program that deals with digital methods and teaches students how to deal with information responsibly.
“The certificate is evidence of our students’ digital skills and thus opens up a broader range of career chances for them in research study, culture, politics, NGOs or the economic sector,” discuss job leaders Teacher Cornelia Weins, Dr. Stephanie Heimgartner and Sebastian Jeworutzki from RUB.
The certificate relates to at least 15 ECTS credit points and is composed of 3 parts: an intro to data literacy (5 CP), a specialization module on the scale of 9 to 10 CP and a last colloquium where students provide their own subject-specific digital humanities tasks. Trainees can complete the courses required for the certificate at all 3 UA Ruhr partner universities. The course portfolio consists of classes on a large range of topics, such as text innovations, data journalism and expert system.
TU Dortmund University has actually presented the certificate, which is collaborated by Dr. Henrike Weinert at the TU Dortmund– Center for Data Science & Simulation (DoDaS), as an extension of the Information Literacy Certificate. The “Digital Humanities Certificate” was developed as part of the “Freiraum” project “Digital Liberal Arts Ruhr– Algorithmic Responsibility at TU Dortmund University”, for which Weinert secured financing in 2023, as well as partner tasks at RUB and UDE. “Without the financial support from the nationwide ‘Freiraum 2023’ effort, which funds innovative ideas in university teaching, the ‘Digital Liberal Arts Certificate’ would not have been possible,” states Dr. Henrike Weinert. The getting involved scientists from the UA Ruhr have been teaming up in the field of information literacy since 2020 and likewise got support from dataliteracyeducation.nrw, a regional financing program in North Rhine-Westphalia (2020-2023).
Award event with poster presentation
At the last colloquium at the start of February, the first participants in the certificate program provided their digital liberal arts jobs. For 6 students, the poster discussion likewise marked the successful conclusion of the program, and they were granted their certificates. Among the very first trainees in this friend is Geraldine Baumann, who is studying for a dual major Master’s degree in German and English at RUB. Among other topics, her projects examined how persuasion techniques in German news articles can be acknowledged immediately. “To do this, I even more trained a well-known language model– RoBERTa– with appropriate data and expanded it to create a classification model that can compare text passages with and without persuasion methods,” reports Baumann. “Through courses within the certificate program, I got the skills needed to deal with big datasets that a person individual alone would never ever be able to analyze.”
Baumann enjoyed her research study so much that she is now working on a doctoral degree within a computational linguistics research task. “I would recommend the certificate to anybody with an interest in various future-oriented digital approaches who wants to additional develop their own abilities,” says Baumann, summarizing. Interested students can currently register for courses in the 2026 summertime semester and start gathering ECTS credit points for the certificate.
Impressions from the award event: