Students of Leipzig University who are looking to write their thesis on a Digital Humanities subject are asked to send an e-mail to one of our advisors. Please include a short description of your proposed thesis topic in your e-mail.
Some possible thesis topics are listed below. Of course you are also welcome to come up with your own topics.
Please be aware that our staff member's capacitites for thesis advisement are limited and we may therefore not be able to accomodate every request.

Topic

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Historical research expeditions

The archives of the Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde (IfL) contain, among other things, collections of the photographic material of various research expeditions. The digitalisation of the documents of a specific explorer or a specific group of researchers lends itself as a thesis subject. Subsequently, these should be assigned to the places depicted and the resulting route visualised.

Andreas Niekler

Literary Tourism

This topic revolves around the identification of popular travel routes and points of interest on the basis of tourism data from the city of Leipzig and geodata from Google Maps. The second step is an investigation into whether these can be automatically linked to literary works that take place at the respective locations in order to provide tourists with suitable reading recommendations for their journey.

Andreas Niekler

Immersive Reading: Augmented reality for books

This rather experimental topic is dedicated to the extent to which AR technologies can be used to meaningfully supplement physical books with statistics and other distant reading overlays on the respective chapter.

Andreas Niekler

Augmented reality as a tool for collaborative annotations

The annotation of data plays a fundamental role in the digital humanities. When working with very large amounts of data, this work cannot be done by individuals, but only collaboratively. Especially when working with non-textual documents (such as maps or scans of physical objects), AR technologies open up new possibilities for collaborative annotation, which are to be explored in this thesis.

Andreas Niekler

Mental visualisation of literary passages 

Unlike visual media, images of literary works are created in the minds of readers and are therefore strongly dependent on subjective factors. Utilising Stable Diffusion, passages from literature can be visualised in ways that incorporate diverse cultural patterns. With the results, a test person study is to be conducted in order to find out how well each visualisation corresponds with the "image in the mind" of readers from different backgrounds. Due to its scope and complexity, this topic is primarily suitable for M. Sc. students.

Andreas Niekler

Literary Animal Embeddings 

Anthropomorphic animals appear again and again in literature. This topic deals with the question of whether word embeddings can be used to determine whether the characterisation of these figures aligns more closely to humans or to the respective animal, and how this relationship changes throughout history or over the course of a literary work.

Andreas Niekler

Audio Description

Sound effects are an important component in film and television. We are interested in finding out which features or descriptors are suitable to describe sound effects in such a way that similarities between effects of the same category can be shown. In this way, we want to investigate whether sound reuse in sound design and music production can be measured with quantitative methods. One possible research question is, for example, which sound is continued in which genres (e.g. the warp drive noise in the Star Trek franchise).

Andreas Niekler

What's that sound? Analysing synthesised sounds

There are recurring and new trends in the synthesis of music. Synthesiser sounds are an essential part of sound design and style in electronic music. We would like to find out whether it is possible to recognise certain patches in audio signals and detect similarities between synthesiser signals. Are there stereotypical sounds? Does a reuse of sounds occur? When was a certain sound first played? You should have a basic knowledge of processing audio data in order to work on this topic.

Andreas Niekler

Symbolic and audio-based music processing

"The advent of the Internet has made a large quantity of audio and symbolic musical data freely available. The analysis of these data can provide useful insights into several aspects of music. By comparing many musical pieces, it is possible to abstract relevant rules and processes that characterize a particular style." (Velardo et. al, Symbolic Melodic Similarity: State of the Art and Future Challenges)

What insights can we gain from symbolic and audio-based music data? This is the main question to be addressed in this thesis. For this purpose, different analysis algorithms should be implemented and critically discussed with regard to their potential in order to gain new insights into the methodological requirements of digital musicology.

Andreas Niekler

DH tools 

The main aspect of this rather theoretical topic consists of a requirements analysis of DH tools from a film studies, psychological or media studies perspective: Which questions are typical in the respective field? What functionalities are needed for a DH approach to these questions? Which existing tools can fulfil these requirements? Best practices and perspectives are to be explored in the thesis.

Andreas Niekler

Position of light sources in paintings

In art studies, a certain symbolic power is attributed to the lighting of the subjects, especially in historical works. According to the Distant Viewing principle, the aim is to identify the position of the light source in relation to the subject in paintings of different epochs using computational methods. On the basis of this data, changes in the artistic use of light over time can be examined and classified using existing art historical findings.

Andreas Niekler

Rendering historical travel maps

With the help of Rayrender and Sentinel Mission Landscape Profiles, it is possible to create 3D structures based on geographical data. This makes it possible to look at historical travel reports and travel literature from a new perspective and make the travellers' routes and the challenges they faced visible. Due to the abundance of possible sources, this topic offers material for several theses.

Andreas Niekler

New algorithm for dominant colour analysis

Colour design is an important stylistic device in cinematography. Existing tools for capturing dominant colours usually identify those clusters of similar colour values that occupy the largest area of the image. However, smaller clusters of colour that are nonetheless very prominent to the human eye despite cannot be reliably identified with these methods, but are certainly used as stylistic devices by filmmakers. An extreme example is the character of the girl in the red coat in the film "Schindler's List", whose colour can easily be identified by human viewers as the dominant colour in the otherwise grey scenes. The goal is to develop an algorithm that can better recognise the use of such contrasting colours.

Andreas Niekler

Textual patterns of the Hero’s Journey

In his 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell conceptualised the hero's journey (or monomyth) as a narratological pattern underlying many stories. Since then, various academic papers have dealt with this theory and critically examined it. A thesis on this topic could explore whether a distant reading approach can be used to identify textual patterns that suggest a certain archetype or station in the hero's journey.

Andreas Niekler

Exploring the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō with the help of topic modelling

The Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (jap. 大正新脩大藏經, Eng. "Taishō-revised Tripiṭaka") is a fundamental text in the Chinese Buddhist canon. The texts refer to different Buddhist schools. We are interested in using topic modelling to explore questions such as these: Can religious patterns be identified in the texts? What are the main topics? Are the topics evenly distributed or is there a clustering of certain topics around certain dates? Pre-processing has already taken place.

Andreas Niekler

Identifying video game mechanics on the basis of a walkthrough corpus 

While the modern video game landscape appears very heterogeneous at first glance, there are certain mechanics that appear repeatedly across a wide variety of games. However, a comprehensive study of a large number of games is challenging due to the complex nature of the medium, so much of the existing research on this topic takes a close-reading approach. The aim of a thesis on this topic is to investigate whether a corpus of textual walkthroughs is suitable for identifying and classifying the game mechanics discussed in previous research. 

Andreas Niekler

Colour analysis of video games

This topic also concerns the field of Game Studies and aims to explore the relationship between the genre of a game and its colour design, as well as the development of this relationship over time.

Andreas Niekler

Identifiying heraldic descriptions in medieval sources

Medieval sources often contain descriptions of coats of arms and heraldic symbols. On the basis of a French-language corpus, a thesis could investigate how passages with heraldic descriptions and their components can be automatically recognised and recorded. In addition, the question arises as to whether and how references to certain noble houses can be established using these text passages. 

Andreas Niekler

Detecting cultural patterns in music sampling

WhoSampled is the world's largest music discovery service for sample-based music, covers and remixes. We want to use this data source to explore the question of whether there are cultural patterns in music sampling. Are there significant temporal relationships between music styles and popular culture? Can films with strong music reuse be identified from their soundtrack data and are there any connections to the structure of the film? Or is the phenomenon of music reuse in films dependent on genre or year of release?

Andreas Niekler

 

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