So, things I want to talk about today is this.

Storytelling in digital humanities and people who know me will know I will always talk about

fiction as well.

So even real world stuff for me is very much connected to fiction.

I'm one of the people who does a bit more fundamental stuff today.

So just reflecting a little bit on when we talk about digital humanities, what is it

we actually mean?

Because there are so many things we can do in digital humanities.

So we can archive stuff, what we do can be about preserving things, making stuff accessible.

And here, for instance, this is a manuscript that Charles Dickens wrote, and manuscripts

are very precious things that we want to conserve, and therefore digitalisation is a very important

bit.

But just archiving, preserving isn't enough.

We also then need to study what's going on.

And it's about creating as well, and experiencing.

So here the example of the 3D printing is that sometimes when you go to museums, it's

all nice and well if everything is behind glass, but it's also about experiencing.

And so some of the digital methods that we have can help us experience reality in a new

way.

It's also about understanding the history on something I only learned recently in our

Rechenzentrum here.

We actually have an old Zuse computer.

And you can go there and look.

Yeah, we will go and have a look at this.

Absolutely.

And the very nice person who looks after that machine is very happy if we come and have

a look and get a little demonstration.

So this is so cool.

So anyway, this is happening here as well.

Now my focus in digital humanities is very much on language and data and how language

can be data and what data really is, linguistic data and all of that.

And that seems to be a very fashionable thing to do these days.

Everything is about data.

And what you then get an awful lot is people now talk about storytelling when it comes

to data.

And then you see there are things like this.

You probably might have seen something like this where people say, OK, data science, what

we do there is we collect data, we prepare data, then we visualize it, we analyze it,

and then we need to tell a story with our data.

I think this is a good argument.

Yes, if you don't have a story, you can't explain much to people.

But I think what we shouldn't forget is if we take a humanities perspective, the data

we looked at already had a story before we turned it into data.

And then we kind of pretend that it's just data, a lot of collection, and then afterwards

we look at it and think, how am I going to tell a story with the graphs that I now have?

And what I want to argue is that we need to make that connection clearer.

So stories don't just turn into data and then you forget the context.

We need to look at that context as well.

So here are some things I just want to leave with you in the fundamental section.

When we talk about writing, writing is not the same as text production.