The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH-ÖAW) is a new research institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences which was set up with the declared intention of fostering digital methods in the various fields of the humanities. It is a spin-off of the Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology, pursues research in various fields of the digital humanities and offers services for digitally working humanities scholars. The new institute grew out of the ACDH project, an initiative jointly funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy to build up DH infrastructures. To make these efforts sustainable, the Presidium of the Academy decided in 2014 to found a new institute at the Academy dedicated to the cause of digital humanities. After the approval of the Academy Council, this institute became operative as of January 2015 as the Academy’s 29th institute.
As the Austrian coordinator for both humanities infrastructure consortia growing out of the roadmap (CLARIN and DARIAH), the ACDH has been playing a key role in the Austrian DH landscape, acting as a hub for many DH-related activities on the institutional, national and international levels. The institute strives to maintain close relations to other Austrian institutions, in particular the University of Vienna and the Karl-Franzens University of Graz with whom they collaborate on the development of digital infrastructures for the humanities by pooling existing expertise and resources. They have been able to establish many fruitful cooperations across the country. They have also been actively participating in the development of core infrastructure components (such as the Component Metadata Infrastructure, the build-up of the CLARIN identity federation, PIDs, Federated Content Search) over the last few years. The team succeeded in making Austria a founding member in both DH research infrastructure consortia CLARIN and DARIAH.
As effective digital research infrastructures can only be developed in connection with actual research, the ACDH does not only create, offer and run services for researchers, it also develops and conducts research projects. During the preparation phase, the ACDH was already quite successful in attracting substantial additional funds through local and international funding schemes for new research projects. Research interests are centred around a number of areas: next to topics such as technological standards, infrastructure components, semantic technologies and text technology, they also pursue projects that do research on historical language and digital lexicography.
The newly founded institute is in the build-up phase and invites applications for multiple new positions starting from 1 May 2015. For more details see http://acdh.ac.at/acdh-oeaw-hiring.