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A short interview on arrival in TU Darmstadt

In January 2022 I joined TU Darmstadt’s Institute of History as the Chair of the newly established “Humanities Data Science and Methodology”. This short interview with me appeared on the TU Darmstadt website shortly after I arrived. I reproduce it here for no reason other than a continued sense of wonder at the many opportunites that studying the digital humanities has opened for me.

Name   Julianne Nyhan

Age 42

Faculty Fachbereich Gesellschafts- und Geschichtswissenschaften

Area of research Humanities Data Science and Methodology / Digital Humanities

Previous scientific / professional positions: Professor of Digital Humanities and Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCL, University College London), UK; Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Universitaet Trier, Germany;  Junior Science Officer, European Science Foundation, France; Research Associate, University College Cork, Ireland

Most important career milestone: I seem to always believe that it is the next career milestone that will be the most important one!   

Please answer three of the following questions:

Why students should be interested in your scientific subject? What makes it exciting?

The world around us is increasingly digital. My subject teaches students to engage with the digital to the fullest possible extent: to ask questions of digitized and born- digital objects and resources that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult to explore. But perhaps more importantly, my subject also draws attention to what the digital cannot do and to the very human processes that shape the digital. This critical orientation towards the digital is essential for many aspects of life today, so my subject is not only highly exciting and interesting but important for students too!

At the TU Darmstadt the need for interdisciplinarity is accentuated. Which cutting points / interfaces to other faculties exist in your area of research?

My research is inherently interdisciplinary and international as it takes place at the intersection of the Humanities and Computing. Moreover, my research is extramural in orientation, so I work not only with University colleagues but also with researchers in Museums, Libraries, Archives and sometimes Industry. You can learn more about my most recent collaborative and interdisciplinary project, which is devising ways of using digital technologies to explore historical museum collections here:  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/sloane-lab-will-open-historic-collections-all

In which faculty you would like to spend a day to get a taste of it? Why?

I’d love to visit the colleagues in the physics department to learn more about quantum computing as I’m very interested to think about how we can use quantum computing in the digital humanities. Because oral history is one of main research interests, I’d also love to visit the colleagues working on machine acoustics.

If I would be a student today, I would …

That is a difficult question to answer because I see myself as a student still, in the broadest sense of that word, in that I continue to learn and study every day

The perfect balance to a stressful working day is …

When teleportation machines are widely available it will be to go home to Ireland for a few hours and head out on the Atlantic sea in my beloved Kayak!

 

Julianne Nyhan
Julianne Nyhan
Professor of Humanities Data Science and Methodology, TU Darmstadt, Main research: Digital Humanities, Oral History, History of Computing and Collections… Read more

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Julianne Nyhan (February 4, 2023). A short interview on arrival in TU Darmstadt. Arche Logos. Retrieved June 18, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/bby0


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