“Digital Humanities “is an interdisciplinary research study domain, in which digital innovations and approaches are applied to humanities and social science concerns. It appropriates for analyzing big quantities of data and making them available. To provide students an insight into the many different locations of application of digital liberal arts, speakers at TU Dortmund University, RUB and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) together established a research study program that handles digital approaches and teaches trainees how to deal with data properly.
“The certificate is proof of our trainees’ digital skills and thus opens up a wider variety of career opportunities for them in research, culture, politics, NGOs or the economic sector,” discuss job leaders Professor Cornelia Weins, Dr. Stephanie Heimgartner and Sebastian Jeworutzki from RUB.
The certificate corresponds to at least 15 ECTS credit points and is composed of three parts: an introduction to data literacy (five CP), an expertise module on the scale of 9 to ten CP and a final colloquium where students provide their own subject-specific digital liberal arts jobs. Trainees can complete the courses required for the certificate at all three UA Ruhr partner universities. The course portfolio includes classes on a wide variety of topics, such as text technologies, data journalism and artificial intelligence.
TU Dortmund University has introduced the certificate, which is coordinated 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 established as part of the “Freiraum” project “Digital Liberal Arts Ruhr– Algorithmic Responsibility at TU Dortmund University”, for which Weinert protected financing in 2023, along with partner projects at RUB and UDE. “Without the financial support from the nationwide ‘Freiraum 2023’ effort, which funds ingenious concepts in university mentor, the ‘Digital Liberal Arts Certificate’ would not have been possible,” states Dr. Henrike Weinert. The participating scientists from the UA Ruhr have been working together in the field of information literacy considering that 2020 and likewise got assistance 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 projects. For 6 trainees, the poster presentation also marked the successful completion of the program, and they were granted their certificates. Among the very first students in this friend is Geraldine Baumann, who is studying for a dual major Master’s degree in German and English at RUB. Among other subjects, her tasks examined how persuasion techniques in German news posts can be acknowledged automatically. “To do this, I even more trained a widely known language model– RoBERTa– with appropriate data and expanded it to create a classification model that can compare text passages with and without persuasion techniques,” reports Baumann. “Through courses within the certificate program, I obtained the abilities needed to deal with big datasets that a person individual alone would never have the ability to analyze.”
Baumann enjoyed her research study so much that she is now working on a postgraduate degree within a computational linguistics research task. “I would recommend the certificate to anybody with an interest in various future-oriented digital techniques who wants to additional establish their own skills,” says Baumann, summing up. Interested students can already register for courses in the 2026 summer term and start collecting ECTS credit points for the certificate.
Impressions from the award event: