136080 UE Project management in the Digital Humanities (2025W)

Unique, distinguishable, non-trivial undertakings with limited resources and a defined goal are referred to as projects.
In this sense, a scientific thesis can be regarded as a project just as much as a third-party-funded research project involving numerous participants over multiple years. Even projects in the humanities benefit from the use of methods and concepts common in the private sector, which often stem from practical experience in software development.

This course aims to provide fundamental knowledge of modern project management methods, with a particular focus on practical skills that can be directly applied to one's own endeavors. In practice, projects are usually team tasks. Taking into account the specific characteristics of academic research projects, the course emphasizes collaborative exercises to train approaches and ways of thinking, as well as to test planning and controlling methods that lead to an outline of a personal (possibly fictional) project. A particular focus will be placed on the integration of AI-supported methods.

Learning objectives:

Definition of a project, distinction from processes and tasks

Types of projects

Specifics of humanities projects

Project approaches:

Classical – Waterfall, V-Model, Simultaneous Engineering

Iterative – Spiral, Kanban, Scrum, DevOps, Design Thinking

Hybrid – Water-Scrum-Fall, Scrumban, etc. Tailoring

Project management components:

Phases

Milestones

Roles

Orientation

Quality assurance

Synchronization

Communication

Collaboration

Knowledge management

Reflection

Methods

Tools:

Use of office software and large language models (LLMs) in project management