Introducing the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities

Posted by Vanderbilt on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 in DH Center Blog, News.

(Or, Hello World!)

If you saw the announcements last spring, you already know that Vanderbilt University was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon foundation to create a new Center for Digital Humanities, a trans-institutional center located in Buttrick Hall, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Provost.

Graduate DH fellow Cynthia Porter experiments with virtual reality

Since July 2016, this undertaking has moved from concept to actuality, and the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities is now open and active on the newly-renovated third floor of Buttrick Hall.

The existence of a DH center at Vanderbilt will certainly raise questions. Regardless of your level of familiarity with the expansive and diverse areas of activity described as “digital humanities,” the announcement of a DH center at Vanderbilt probably—that is to say, hopefully—will inspire curiosity about basic matters: “What goes on in a digital humanities center? What goes on in this digital humanities center? And what does this mean to my community / my department / my discipline / my research / my dissertation / my job prospects / my students?”

Creating a context and framework to explore these questions collaboratively is key to the Center’s mission.

The Center for Digital Humanities provides learning experiences, project support, and intellectual community to students and faculty across the disciplines and across institutions.

The Center warmly welcomes skeptics and novices, as well as those with developed interests and experience in digital scholarship. Above all, we aim to create a lively conversational environment for discussing the substance, utility, and effects of digital trends in the humanities.

In short:

It’s a place to connect with others

It’s a place to learn and develop technical skills

It’s a place to debate the meaning and impact of digital technology for humanities research, scholarly communication, creative expression, and pedagogy

Toward this end, the Center supports a wide range of activities, from weekly drop-in gatherings to instructional workshops to reading and writing groups to public lectures to large-scale, multi-year digital project development.

Areas of particular technological strength include text mining, data analysis and visualization, network analysis, multimodal digital publishing, online public humanities, open access and open data, text markup and digital editions, spatial humanities, mapping, GIS, digital gazetteers, digital archives, media art history and theory, 3D immersive environments, gaming, and virtual reality.

If any of these keywords initially seem challenging to comprehend, that’s part of the problem we’re here to fix: we encourage everyone to stop by Buttrick 344 and ask questions, or scan our calendar for opportunities to learn more.

IMG_1477 (1) — October 2016, just before opening.

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