From the 29th of September until the 5th of October, 2013, the international Summer School “Digitization and its Impact on Society” was held at the School for Humanities and Social Sciences. The main organizers of the event were Prof. Fr. Joachim Scharloth and Dr. Noah Bubenhofer from the School of Applied Linguistics. The opening event on Sunday, the 29th of September was also covered through generous support by the Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden.

The Summer School was highly interdisciplinary. This was also demonstrated by the broad range of subjects of our international participants. For example, representatives from Tsinghua University in China, the Queen Mary University of London, Bashkir State University in Russia, Ben-Gurion University of Beer-Sheva in Isreal, the School of Germanic Studies at the English and Foreign Languages ​​University in India, The University of Essex and the University of Szeged in Hungary at the Summer School atteded the summer school. A total of 28 applicants were invited to participate. The selection was made by the Scientific Committee, which consisted of 14 representatives from different TU Dresden institutes. In addition, 22 guests took the opportunity to attend.

The opening ceremony of the Summer School took place in the impressive atmosphere of the Militärhistorische Museum in Dresden. The guests were also given the opportunity to attend a guided tour of the museum. Furthermore, a communal dinner offered the first chance of getting to know one another and to start networking and rounded off the opening ceremony.

This was followed by an interdisciplinary week with a variety of seminars and lectures, on topics like "The digitization of our world: data, linking and data mining" (Monday, 30th Sept.), "The regulation of data streams: online platforms and platform neutrality , "Social networks and the revolution of political communication" (Wednesday, 2nd Oct), "John|Jane Doe and you: right of personality and informational self-determination" (Thursday, 3rd Oct.) and "Open education and open science: quality assurance in the knowledge society " (Friday, 4th Oct.).

This series of events was complemented by a visit to the digitalization center of the SLUB on Monday, a guided tour of Dresden-Neustadt on Thursday, as well as a discussion on "What we do with digitization and what it does to us" on Tuesday evening.

In addition, every evening a so-called Bloggers Meeting was offered, which was suppossed to motivate attendees to write articles for the official website of the Summer School Blog. This provided an opportunity to review and comment on the events, which is still actively engaged in the months following the completion of the Summer School. You can find the blog under the following link: http://linguistik.zih.tu-­dresden.de/digitization