First “Digital Humanities Certificate” Awarded to Students

“Digital Humanities” is an interdisciplinary research domain, in which digital technologies and methods are applied to humanities and social science questions. It is suitable for analyzing large amounts of data and making them accessible. To give students an insight into the many different areas of application of digital humanities, lecturers at TU Dortmund University, RUB and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) together developed a study program that deals with digital methods and teaches students how to handle data responsibly.

“The certificate is proof of our students’ digital skills and thus opens up a wider range of career opportunities for them in research, culture, politics, NGOs or the private sector,” explain project leaders Professor Cornelia Weins, Dr. Stephanie Heimgartner and Sebastian Jeworutzki from RUB. 

The certificate equates to at least 15 ECTS credit points and is composed of three parts: an introduction to data literacy (five CP), a specialization module on the scale of nine to ten CP and a final colloquium where students present their own subject-specific digital humanities projects. Students can complete the courses required for the certificate at all three UA Ruhr partner universities. The course portfolio includes classes on a wide range of topics, such as text technologies, data journalism and artificial intelligence.

TU Dortmund University has introduced the certificate, which is coordinated by Dr. Henrike Weinert at the TU Dortmund – Center for Data Science & Simulation (DoDaS), as an extension of the Data Literacy Certificate. The “Digital Humanities Certificate” was developed as part of the “Freiraum” project “Digital Humanities Ruhr – Algorithmic Accountability at TU Dortmund University”, for which Weinert secured funding in 2023, as well as partner projects at RUB and UDE. “Without the financial support from the nationwide ‘Freiraum 2023’ initiative, which funds innovative ideas in university teaching, the ‘Digital Humanities Certificate’ would not have been possible,” says Dr. Henrike Weinert. The participating researchers from the UA Ruhr have been collaborating in the field of data literacy since 2020 and also received support from dataliteracyeducation.nrw, a regional funding program in North Rhine-Westphalia (2020-2023).

Award ceremony with poster presentation

At the final colloquium at the beginning of February, the first participants in the certificate program presented their digital humanities projects. For six students, the poster presentation also marked the successful completion of the program, and they were awarded their certificates. Among the first students in this cohort is Geraldine Baumann, who is studying for a dual major Master’s degree in German and English at RUB. Among other topics, her projects examined how persuasion techniques in German news articles can be recognized automatically. “To do this, I further trained a well-known language model – RoBERTa – with suitable data and expanded it to create a classification model that can distinguish between text passages with and without persuasion techniques,” reports Baumann. “Through courses within the certificate program, I acquired the skills needed to work with large datasets that one person alone would never be able to analyze.”

Baumann enjoyed her research so much that she is now working on a doctoral degree within a computational linguistics research project. “I would recommend the certificate to anyone with an interest in different future-oriented digital methods who wants to further develop their own skills,” says Baumann, summing up. Interested students can already register for courses in the 2026 summer semester and start collecting ECTS credit points for the certificate.

Impressions from the award ceremony:

Wide range of certificates for students

After “Diversity and Gender”, the “Digital Humanities Certificate” is the second program run jointly by the UA Ruhr partner universities. TU Dortmund University also offers its students ten further certificate programs. 

Learn more about the certificate (in German only)