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The Transylvania Digital Humanities Centre (DigiHUBB) is an emerging Digital Humanities Centre based in the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The Centre was officially established in April 2014 within the Faculty of Letters. As is evidenced in other cases, DigiHUBB exists because of the commitment of scholars experienced in various fields related to Digital Humanities.
Some of the DigiHUBB’s members were directly involved in Digital Humanities, like text editing or mapping, others expressed their interest in Digital Humanities as a discipline and an object of study. The DigiHUBB members come from different fields, like linguistics, geography, literature, computer science, art history, etc. There is a lack of collaborative projects concerning big historical events important for Transylvania and Romania, as the “1918 Centenary” where DigiHUBB could evidently have an important contribution.
The importance of analysing the different ways in which a DH centre is built was stressed by Claire Warwick in her seminal essay “Institutional models for digital humanities” published in the
Digital Humanties in Practice (Warwick, C., Terras, M., Nyhan, J., 2014). The cases analysed in the chapter - the creating of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Digital Humanities in Mexico - were considered representative for the way they illustrated the institutional environment and the particularities of diverse “particular academic, political, cultural and economic realities” (
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-9/).
This paper is a commentary on the manner in which a DH Centre is established in an Eastern-European country
Romania is, at the moment of this proposal, one of the last East-European country that entered the Digital Humanities circuit.
In approaching this report we have observed several paradoxes that could easily exemplify the challenges that an innovative approach faced in both the institutional environment and the investment in the research framework in Romania. In the first place, the rapidity with which DigiHUBB gained international support and assistance
Immediately after its creation DigiHUBB was put on the “Around DH” map (courtesy to Alex Gill from Columbia University Libraries),
http://www.arounddh.org/. The response of the Digital Humanities Community to the first call for assistance launched on Humanist Discussion Group was impressive.
As reported in http://ec.europa.eu/research/horizon2020/pdf/country-profiles/ro_country_profile_and_featured_projects.pdf#view=fit&pagemode=none.
The challenges that DigiHUBB faces are complex and they target, as our paper will show, several important issues that go from the generic ones ( the misunderstanding of the concept, the lack of confidence in its epistemological value, the supremacy of the published paper book over electronic publications, the absence of systemised pedagogy in Digital Humanities, the minimal funding from the University or governmental institutions) to more specific ones, which are more challenging to engage with.
DigiHUBB has been involved in a variety of activities related to the Digital Humanities since its inception: in January 2014 the keynote speaker for the inaugural conference was professor Susan Schreibman from Maynooth University; this was followed by a conference held by doctor Julyanne Nyhan, from UCL, in March and many informal meetings with other key members of the Digital Humanities community. The lobbying and promoting Digital Humanities also included participation to national academic events, publishing articles on the theme
See Corina Moldovan,
Corina Moldovan,
„Editing texts in a digital world:text encoding and data visualization”, workshop, Cluj-Napoca, 27 april-3 may 2015 and „Explorations in textual digital analysis for the humanities and social-sciences”, symposium, Cluj-Napoca, 14-15 may 2015.A discipline of reference in present days research digital humanities
, in “Globalization, Intercultural Dialogue and National Identity”, Iulian Boldea ed., Arhipeleag Press XXI, 2014, pp.286-294.
Les humanités numériques, une provocation, in “Debates on Globalization. Approaching National Identity through Intercultural Dialogue”, Iulian Boldea ed., Arhipeleag Press XXI, 2015, pp.99-108.
In the process of setting up our centre we had to fight a very specific way of relatedness that still characterizes post-revolutionary Romanian society, which we can be characterized as “non-digital humanist”, as it is, in most cases, individualistic, speculative, traditional, and change-resisting, in comparison with the collaborative, hands-on, innovative and co-creative features of Digital Humanities
„The digital humanities, therefore, not only widens the scope and processes of disciplines within the university, but contributes to national innovation agendas, creating new possibilities for the traditional scholar within an increasingly competitive academic and economic context. As such, the collaborative nature of digital humanities research contributes to the innovation ecosystem, understood as the productive interaction between people, ideas, flows, processes and outputs.” (Byrne, T and Schreibman, S (2015)
Understood as a HUB, our centre has multiple possibilities of offering innovation, at all levels of the research-economic-social chain. We also consider it as a new cultural model, a real co-working space opened to all the actors of our multicultural and multilingual region.