Thaller, Manfred

Manfred Thaller, born 1950, holds a PhD in Modern History from the University of Graz, Austria and a PostDoc in empirical Sociology from the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, 1978. He worked for twenty years at the Max-Planck-Institut for History in Göttingen, where he developed a general concept of applied computer science in the Humanities, having visiting professorships at the universities in Jerusalem, London and Firenze. Since 1995 he held a professorship in that field of at the University of Bergen, Norway. There he also acted as founding director of the «Humanities Information Technology Research Program» and the attached research centre, before moving in 2000 as Prof. of «Historisch Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung» (Humanities Computer Science) to the University at Cologne, Germany, where he is co-responsible for two BA and three MA programs within the Digital Humanities.
Since the middle of the nineties he became more and more involved with digital libraries in the cultural heritage area, which lead to numerous research projects and membership in the Library Committee of the German National Research Association (DFG), 2002 – 2008. Within this area recently his focus in funded projects moved more and more towards long term preservation of digital content, where he has been participating in a number of national and international projects, most notably Delos, Planets and the Digitales Archiv NRW.
He very much insists that his involvement in these technical infrastructural questions is closely connected to the Digital Humanities. Understanding what the objects of the Digital Humanities are seems to him to be much too important to be left to librarians.