Malte’s Career Story

Hello Community, I am Malte Vogl and have been part of the steering committee since its beginning. Colleagues have told me I have made a “career” in DH, but thinking back about my personal development in the field of DH it never felt like a straight forward path. In hindsight the different parts form a coherent picture, but each individual change was driven more by curiosity than strategic planning.

My most recent stage of this path is a position at the DH branch of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which has a quite unique name: The Electronic Life of the Academy. My academic background is however quite different actually. I studied physics and did my PhD in quantum transport quite a while ago. What brought me to DH was a job advert and luck. In 2016, DH was still young and the idea of a research software engineer for DH was hardly heard of. A joint research project from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Humboldt University Berlin was looking for a general research software developer in the context of a cluster of excellency program. I applied and got the position, which is how my long-time adventure with DH started.

Together with several others, I started to think about the role of technical work in Digital Humanities at the DH2017 conference in Montreal. At the time I worked with Historians of Science on different projects related to the central question of how knowledge spreads and gets generated. In that role, I had the chance to build a wide range of software prototypes such as complex map visuals, corpus readers, and databases created from semi-structured texts and even and application that was using early forms of machine learning for edge detection in early modern astronomic wood block prints. However, all of these remained just that: prototypes. As a self-trained developer in a team of size one, I had to scrap together all the information I could find about current best practices or problem solving routes. That led to a lot of reading time, with not so much programming being done. I was looking for a peer group to learn from.

My academic life continued in DH while growing the social bounds in the context of the then newly founded DHtech group. One main motivation at the time was to learn about existing tools and not have to rebuild everything from scratch all the time. But equally important was the point to get acknowledgment for the work we do as the people doing technical work in scientific projects. Staying at the same institution, my job shifted towards a German DH consortium, DARIAH-DE, where we wanted to understand what factors led to long-term usability of DH services and infrastructure. As usual in the academic context, projects come with grant timelines that force one to move on to the next funding source. I had the chance to continue working on the topic of DH infrastructures, but this time by maintaining and extending an existing one. In a project on the history of the Max Planck Society I learned how to deal with Big Historical Data, running a full-text search and database infrastructure for 10 million scanned pages of archival material and keeping more than 50 users happy through the pandemic time.

Staying true to the prototype part of my career in DH, in 2021 I managed to get funding for my own team with the goal to develop new methods to analyze the evolution of knowledge systems as a temporal, multilayered network. Over the course of three years and together with a great team of people we built a lot of software, looked at a range of case studies, and experimented also with new types of academic output (tutorials, software papers, games). Results from this period are still in the process of being published, even if the software prototypes as well as practices have changed dramatically in the period between submission and publication of an article.

In 2024 together with parts of the old team, I moved to a newly founded Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology to think about the effect environmental changes can have on knowledge systems, and how knowledge systems have shaped the environment in the past and are therefore part of the Anthropocene dynamics. Part of our toolkit was the idea of agent-based modeling, which we tried to establish as a method for historical research more strongly. This has led to a series of software, articles and tutorials. Another important aspect was and still is the question of epistemic justice in DH, i.e. how archival data reflects past power structures and therefore influences what our algorithms can produce.

I am happy to be able to continue thinking about these aspects of DH and RSE in the context of my new position at the Academy, continuing the “Electronic Life of DH”.