Source-Based Initiatives

Our source-based initiatives are designed to address the most basic assumptions about matter and meaning: how object and subject, text and artifact, practice and theory are related and reflected in the sources that we use. Against this background, the department has continued its investment into the Digital Humanities (DH), developing three digital and one analog-digital initiatives: Local Gazetteers (since 2014), Drugs Database (2015–17), Visualization of the Heavens (since  2017), and  Maps (since 2017). Each source-centric project in Dept. III has generated a multitude of new questions and motivated historians to rethink their approaches in ways that have also contributed to the various working groups on histories of planning, judgement and scale, language, and the body of animals.