The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH-ÖAW https://acdh.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/) 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.
Over the past couple of years, the ACDH’s team has taken a strong interest in the build-up of digital infrastructures for researchers in the humanities, and have 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). In many projects, they have worked towards making Austria an important partner in the European DH infrastructure initiatives. Austria is now a founding member in both DH research infrastructure consortia CLARIN and DARIAH.EU.
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.