Tobias Kreten, M.A.

Curriculum Vitae

Tobias Kreten studied Digital Humanities and North American Studies at the University of Göttingen, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. He completed a Master of Arts in Digital Humanities in 2026. Since October 2026, he has been pursuing a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Martin Langner.

He has worked at the Institute for Digital Humanities since 2022, including on the 3D digitisation of cultural heritage at the Göttingen 3D Lab, on projects concerning virtual reality and immersive forms of mediation, and in the forContext project. He also tutors for the two lectures at the institute.

His current research examines how computational methods and humanistic interpretation relate to each other in film analysis. In his doctoral project Visual Hermeneutics in Computational Film Studies: A Methodological Approach (working title), he investigates which formal structures multimodal models capture in film and where their semantic interpretability reaches its limits. His starting points are the research environment CineSearcher, which combines multimodal retrieval with visual and quantitative methods of analysis, and his master’s thesis Beyond the Frame: Formal Legibility and Semantic Limits in Only God Forgives, in which he tested these methods on Nicolas Winding Refn’s highly stylised film. Building on this work, he is developing CineSearcher Continuum, an environment that makes the path from the exploration of a film to its reasoned interpretation traceable. Recurring themes in his work include visual retrieval, the relationship between machine representation and interpretation, and productive failure as an epistemic category in the digital humanities.