"THE DIGITAL IMAGE" – A TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH CLUSTER

I mages have traditionally played a subordinate role in the context of the humanities. This is also true for the so-called Digital Humanities, which have so far focused on text studies using methods and tools from computer science. With the intention of remedying this situation, we applied to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for acceptance to a Priority Program on the topic of "The Digital Image", a funding format in which different disciplines at German universities dedicate themselves to a broader topic from a variety of perspectives. The goal of our program is not to limit ourselves to the development of tools for analyzing data in this respect we go beyond the Digital Humanities remit from the outset but to place the subject matter within a broader methodological and cultural horizon. We want to address the digital image as a phenomenon that is increasingly shaping the present and the future, while at the same time bringing into focus the fact that digital images play a considerable, indeed an increasingly important role both as objects of research and as epistemic tools for that research, not only in the exceedingly diverse fields of the humanities, but also in the life and natural sciences, and that this role needs to be described and analyzed.