Digital Humanities Podcast Series
January 29, 2026
Continuing to foster a space for discussion on the role of digital methods, data, and technologies in the humanities, a new Digital Humanities podcast series is being developed. In this series, researcher of the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art and University of Latvia doctoral candidate Haralds Matulis speaks with various representatives of the field about the theoretical and practical aspects of digital humanities, research tools, methods, and challenges. The podcast is produced in collaboration with the National Library of Latvia and serves as a platform for reflecting on the impact of digitisation on humanities research.
The most recently released episodes (Episodes 11 and 12) offer complementary perspectives on the development of digital humanities in Latvia. In Episode 12, “Programming and Artificial Intelligence in DH,” Haralds Matulis talks with Valdis Saulespurēns, a developer of research tools at the National Library of Latvia, who shares his experience with programming, data scraping, and the application of machine learning methods in digital humanities during the period from 2010 to 2020. The discussion addresses the importance of programming skills in humanities research, digital tools developed by the National Library of Latvia and support for researchers in building corpora, as well as practical ways for humanities scholars to begin learning programming using environments such as Google Colab and Jupyter Notebook.
Episode 11, “Digital Methods in Historical Research,” offers a more in-depth conversation about the role of digital methods in historical studies. Together with Jānis Tomaševskis, a historian at the Latvian War Museum, Haralds Matulis analyses how digital image processing, data analysis, and various digital tools can expand a historian’s research possibilities and transform established working practices. The episode also discusses the digital skills required of historians today, including the use of tools such as Excel, as well as the potential applications and risks of artificial intelligence. The conversation highlights the tension between the opportunities offered by technological innovation and the need for a critical, reflective approach to the use of digital tools, particularly in the context of museum and cultural heritage research.
All other episodes of the podcast series can be listened to on the digitalhumanities.lv YouTube channel.
The podcast is produced with the support of the State Research Programme Navigating the Latvian History of the 20th–21st Century: Social Morphogenesis, Legacy and Challenges” (No. VPP-IZM-Vēsture-2023/1-0003) and in cooperation with the State Research Programme “Towards Development of Open and FAIR Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia” (No. VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002), funded by the Latvian Council of Science. The podcast episodes are also supported by the project “University of Latvia and Institutes in the European Research Area – Excellence in Research and Collaboration” (Project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/011).