The Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities (ADA) was inaugurated with a symposium on Friday at Freie Universität Berlin. The interdisciplinary competence center for digital humanities is supported by the Department of History and Cultural Studies, the Department of Philosophy and Humanities, the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and the University Library. The Ada Lovelace Center works closely with the Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC), which was founded in 2008. Together they function as a humanities hub at Freie Universität Berlin and within the University of Excellence Consortium, the Berlin University Alliance, for both regional and international networking.
The center is named in honor of Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who was the daughter of the British mathematician Anna Isabella Noel-Byron and the writer Lord Byron, one of the most important representatives of English Romanticism. A mathematician herself, Ada Lovelace wrote the first program for Charles Babbage, who invented one of the first mechanical computers. She was a pioneer, not only of the digital age and the interdisciplinarity between music, poetry, and mathematics, but also for the digital humanities.
