Session 2

What is DH? · What is data? · Zotero

Author
Affiliation

Tobias Hodel

Walter Benjamin Kolleg / Digital Humanities, University of Bern

Published

22 September 2026

Modified

2 September 2026

Hodel Taught by Tobias Hodel.

In this session

  • Discussion of Sahle — what is at stake in the claim that DH does not exist
  • What is data? A first approach, worked out with an LLM agent
  • Zotero introduction (approx. 20 minutes), including the plugin
  • Documenting a first bibliographic reference

Discussion: Sahle

We take (Sahle 2015) apart together. Points to have ready:

  • Which of Sahle’s positions do you recognise from your own field?
  • Is “DH” a discipline, a method, a set of tools, or a funding category?
  • What would be lost if the term disappeared tomorrow?

Exercise: what is data, what is information?

Working with an LLM agent, in pairs:

  1. Ask the model to define data and information, and to distinguish them.
  2. Push it: give it a concrete humanities object — a charter, a photograph, a novel, a ceramic sherd — and ask what the data is. Where does the data stop and the interpretation start?
  3. Ask it for bibliographic references on the distinction. Then check every one of them.

Reflection: the limits of LLMs and prompting strategies

We compare results across the room:

  • Which answers were the same across groups, and which diverged? Why?
  • How many of the references were real? How many were plausible inventions?
  • What did a better prompt actually change — the substance, or only the register?
  • When is an LLM a reasonable first step in a research workflow, and when is it a liability?

Zotero introduction

A short, practical run-through:

  • Libraries, collections, tags, and saved searches
  • The browser connector, and what it does and does not capture
  • Attachments, notes, and where the files actually live
  • Plugins — installation and what they are good for
  • Documenting a bibliographic reference properly: what a clean record looks like, and why it matters for everything we do later

Everything you collect here feeds directly into your assignment.

Reading for Session 3

Task

Sign up for GitHub. Use a username you are willing to be associated with professionally.

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References

Sahle, Patrick. 2015. ‘Digital Humanities? Gibt’s doch gar nicht!’ Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften, Sonderband, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.17175/sb001_004.