The visual digital humanities – topics, researchers and cultures

The data foci of digital humanities are texts, images and objects. While the use of digital methods in the text-oriented disciplines is currently widely established and standardized, a scope of digital methods related to images and other visual objects and basing on vision rather than close reading remains – despite various attempts – essentially undiscovered. Against this background, three areas of usage of visual oriented methods and approaches are of interest for our investigation: (a) Scholars working in visual digital humanities, (b) Fields of research, topics and methods used by these scholars, (c) Institutionalization & disciplinary culture of these scholars. Investigations were done via 15 expert interviews with researchers in London and 6 interviews in Los Angeles as well as via two surveys with more than 900 participants each. Key findings are about disciplinary backgrounds and about how scholars enter the digital humanities as well as topics and international collaborations and project funding.