Center for Digital Text Scholarship

Rapidly expanding developments in computational methods and capacity in recent decades have significantly and sustainably changed the opportunities that Humanities disciplines have at their disposal to carry out effective investigations using text-based data. This subfield of Digital Humanities research is particularly relevant for linguistics, literary scholarship, folkloristics and history, and yet relevant modern methodologies for computational approaches to processing textual data for Humanities research are often practiced and taught in a fragmented, individualistic way. The very recent arrival of generative AI and LLMs promises even more opportunities, but these uncharted waters are still waiting for exploration and potential exploitation in the Humanities, especially concerning smaller, less-supported European languages. This ERA-Chair project will permanently improve this landscape in Europe by creating the Center for Digital Text Scholarship – DigiTS – as an interdisciplinary pocket of excellence at the University of Tartu in Estonia for applying cutting-edge computational methods in text-based Humanities research at the European periphery. Prof Maciej Eder, a renowned expert in expert in computer-assisted text analysis, will lead DigiTS and its international interdisciplinary team in carrying out world-class Humanities research using established and novel methods in neural networks and data analyses for exploring textual data. In addition, the team will teach the next generation of Estonian and other European Humanities scholars in these methods at BA, MA and PhD levels, and also consult DH researchers at all levels. Simultaneously, the center will promote the creation and application of LLMs for Estonian, as an exemplary smaller European language. These activities, combined with collaboration with Humanities researchers in other institutes and consortia, will ensure that UTARTU becomes synonymous with text-based Digital Humanities research.