The new "Minor Subjects" portal has been online since early November 2018. The portal was completely redesigned with a user-centered approach and now offers not only comprehensive information and an academic mapping of the approximately 150 minor subjects at German universities, but also a new database of researchers in these fields and a blog. The redesign is the result of a collaborative research project between the Office for Minor Subjects at the Center for Quality Development and Assurance at Johannes Gutenberg University, i3mainz —the Institute for Spatial Information and Measurement Technology at Mainz University of Applied Sciences—and the Digital Academy of the Academy of Sciences and Literature.
Design of the new “Minor Subjects” portal commissioned by the Office for Minor Subjects (Graphic: M. Dufner, Mainz University of Applied Sciences)
Representatives of minor subjects, university administrations, higher education policy bodies, and funding agencies, as well as media representatives and the general public, can access comprehensive information on minor subjects via the portal. The focus is on the Center’s academic mapping of minor subjects. A database of scholars from these disciplines now expands the range of information available and offers opportunities for networking. The portal’s new blog serves as a shared forum. The development of the portal is part of the BMBF-funded project “Exchange of Experiences, Networking, and Promoting the Visibility of Minor Subjects.”
To implement this ambitious project, it was necessary to bring together a wide range of expertise available at i3mainz and the Digital Academy. Both partners have been collaborating since 2015 in research and teaching under the umbrella of the Mainz Center for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (mainzed), a network of expertise in the digital humanities. “Thanks to this collaboration, we can now implement even large-scale projects—such as the development of the new portal—much more productively,” emphasizes Professor Kai-Christian Bruhn of Mainz University of Applied Sciences, who is also the director of mainzed. Torsten Schrade, head of the Digital Academy and professor of Digital Humanities at Mainz University of Applied Sciences, also explains that “within mainzed, there is an ideal combination of digital research, teaching, and methodological development, particularly in the field of minor disciplines. This is due in particular to the fact that minor subjects play a major role in Mainz as a center of learning: in addition to the research center at the university, research and teaching activities in a total of 45 minor subjects also take place there.”
For the new portal, the center has completely revised its presentation of the academic research conducted in the approximately 150 minor subjects. The development of each individual subject can now be viewed on a Germany-wide basis as well as by federal state and location. Dynamic graphics and maps provide an overview. The expert database is a newly created resource that facilitates the search for experts for the press, for expert opinions, and for joint research projects. The database can be searched by academic discipline, regional and chronological research focus, and language skills, among other criteria. Comprehensive information on the framework conditions of higher education policy, funding programs, and successful collaborative initiatives is summarized in the third section of the portal. Finally, integrated into the portal as a fourth section is a blog moderated by the center, featuring information on publications, events, and new research initiatives.
i3mainz—the Institute for Spatial Information and Measurement Technology at Mainz University of Applied Sciences—has been engaged for 20 years in research and development as well as technology transfer, primarily in the fields of 3D measurement technology, image analysis, research data infrastructures, semantic modeling, spatial humanities, and communication design for the development of web-based research software.
The Digital Academy is the digital humanities research institute of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz. The team’s primary research focuses include standardization, modeling, and analysis methods for humanities research data; research software engineering in the humanities, with a particular emphasis on sustainability; the use of current web technologies in cultural research contexts; methods of network analysis and graph technologies in the humanities, as well as the modeling and application of Linked Open Data to unlock new potential for research questions in the humanities and cultural studies.
Since 2007, the Center for Minor Subjects has been mapping so-called minor subjects at German universities. In addition, through various projects, it has dedicated itself to an in-depth examination of the situation of minor subjects.
