Quantum Humanities

Terra incognita Project

A Vision for Quantum Computing in the Digital Humanities

The Project

The establishment of digital humanities as a research field has shown that the use of computers as tools, but also the use of methods and techniques from computer science, can contribute enormously to research done in the humanities. Since quantum computers are expected to become generally available in the next few years, it is promising to use the advantages of this new technology for addressing existing as well as completely new questions in the Humanities. The use of quantum computers offers a great deal of potential: (i) they are much faster than classical computers in solving certain complex problems, (ii) solutions may be much more precise, (iii) they allow the solution of problem classes that can hardly been solved on classical computers, and (iv) their usage promises to be much cheaper than that of supercomputers. Parts of this potential are already used in different domains but are also particular promising for digital humanities research. To show how such "Quantum Humanities" can look like this project wants to provide a feasibility study and evaluation in one domain on basis of a first application use case from our Digital Humanities project MUSE, which deals with the communication of film costumes. In addition to the feasibility study, the first knowledge for further complex applications is to be built up.

 

QhAna ON GITHUB

Publications

To Appear

  1. Barzen, Johanna: From Digital Humanities to Quantum Humanities: Potentials and Applications. In: E. R. Miranda (Ed.): An Introduction to Core Concepts, Theory and Applications, Cham: Springer Nature. Preprint at: arXiv:2103.11825.

Journal Papers

  1. Barzen, Johanna; Leymann, Frank; Falkenthal, Michael; Vietz, Daniel; Weder, Benjamin; Wild, Karoline: Relevance of Near-Term Quantum Computing in the Cloud: A Humanities Perspective. In: Cloud Computing and Services Science. Vol. 1399, Springer International Publishing, 2021.
  2. Barzen, Johanna; Leymann, Frank: Quantum humanities: a vision for quantum computing in digital humanities. In: SICS Software-Intensive Cyber-Physical Systems, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2019.

Conference Papers

  1. Leymann, Frank; Barzen, Johanna; Falkenthal, Michael; Vietz, Daniel; Weder, Benjamin; Wild, Karoline: Quantum in the Cloud: Application Potentials and Research Opportunities. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER), 2020 

Workshop Papers

  1. Barzen, Johanna; Leymann, Frank: Quantum Humanities: A First Use Case for Quantum-ML in Media Science. In: ISAAI’19 Proceedings — Artificial Intelligence, Digitale Welt. Vol. 4(1), 2020, S. 102-103.

Contact

This image shows Johanna Barzen

Johanna Barzen

Dr. phil.

Lead of Research Area Quantum Computing & Digital Humanities

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