Research in the humanities on intermediality thus paves the way for an in-depth examination of "media literacy", which should enable people (from appropriate learning material at school to dealing with information transfer in multiple contexts) to independently examine image, text, sound, and film material with regard to mechanisms of action and their manipulative power.

Finally, with digitalisation, the humanities are faced with a technological development that seems to call their basic epistemological assumptions into question: hermeneutic methodology is based on an analogy between producers of cultural products and their researching recipients. What a person produces can also be perceived by a person. The “data-isation” of perception introduces algorithms and data representations as intermediaries into the cognitive process. Machines are now being created that produce text to which humans attribute meaning. These latter developments even lead to the assertion that text production, as a core competence of humanities work, can be automated. A critical examination of these developments, which takes their opportunities and risks seriously, has long been pursued by the digital humanities. Building on their findings, the cluster will ask what forms of perception arise through the use of digital tools and the representation of humanities knowledge through data and how such perceptions can be categorised epistemologically.

The approaches in Cluster 1 are united by the question of the justifying power of perception within certain forms of knowledge, the reflection on the central concepts of immediacy and directness in relation to perception, and an interest in the various forms of mediation to human perception (for example through artistic, but also other forms of mediality).