Digitisation of cultural heritage in Slovenia falls below the European average. With the exception of corpus linguistics and literary history where richly annotated corpora and critical editions are plentiful and internationally renowned, datalization work on DH collections has been highly fragmented and largely incompatible due to different encoding standards used. This clearly shows that the requirements of supporting state-of-the art data-driven DH research has not yet been met in Slovenia which significantly hinders research in the national context but also its international visibility.
The research programme addresses three broad research problems: 1) the development and integration of advanced workflows for creating and publishing reliable, interpretable, interoperable and richly annotated complex digital editions; 2) the development and promotion of novel interdisciplinary quantitative and qualitative methods for Slovenian DH; and 3) the development and evaluation of advanced technologies for the processing, enrichment and visualization of historical heterogeneous multilingual and multimodal data.
The scientific framework of the proposed research programme is highly interdisciplinary but rooted in corpus and computational linguistics and machine learning of heterogeneous structured and unstructured collections from Slovenian contemporary history, periodical studies, political studies and anthropology that are both mono- and multilingual, and contain textual, speech and image data and metadata. Developing and integrating these methods into Slovene DH is crucial because of their importance and potential to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of past and present cultural phenomena in the European context. The programme will also contribute novel technologies to support digitization of DH research data and cultural heritage.