With
apologies for cross-postings.
Digital Humanities Centers and the New Humanities
Wednesday 5 October 2011, 18:00
Anatomy Theatre & Museum, King's College London
(for directions see http://atm.kcl.ac.uk/location)
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland
In association with arts-humanities.net
What is the function of the digital humanities center within a
rapidly changing humanities landscape? Although they have a great
capacity for focusing, maximizing, and networking local knowledge,
local resources, and local communities of practice, digital
humanities centers are also at risk of being silos, overly focused
on their home institutions, rarely collaborating with other
centers, and unable to address by themselves the larger problems
of the field. They also siphon off grant funding from schools
unable to afford a digital humanities center of their own and can
make it harder for scholars at such places to participate in the
larger projects that help to shape the possibilities and future of
the field. Are digital humanties centers crucial to the future of
the field, or deleterious to it? Or to point the question more
finely: in what ways and under what circumstances might digital
humanities centers be seen as more crucial to the field than
deleterious? I’ll be discussing these issues especially in terms
of the centerNet initiative, which seeks to create a truly global
network of local digital humanities centers.
About the speaker
Neil Fraistat is Professor of English and Director of the Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the
University of Maryland. He is a founder and general editor of the
Romantic Circles Website, the Co-Chair of centerNet (an
international network of digital humanities centers), and he has
published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies,
and Digital Humanities in various articles and in the eight books
he has authored or edited. Fraistat has engaged in projects
involving the preservation of virtual worlds and born digital
creative works; the development of the Open Annotation
Collaboration framework for sharing annotations of digital content
across the World Wide Web; and the building of international
cyberinfrastructure. He currently serves on the advisory boards of
Project Bamboo, CLARIN, D-SPIN, NINES, INKE, Project MUSE, and
CHAIN, a coalition of humanities and arts infrastructures and
networks that includes DARIAH, Project Bamboo, CLARIN, ADHO, and
centerNet. Fraistat has been awarded the Society for Textual
Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the
Keats-Shelley Association Prize, honorable mention for the Modern
Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition
Prize, and the Keats-Shelly Association’s Distinguished Scholar
Award.
--
Dr Stuart Dunn
Research Fellow
Centre for e-Research
King's College London
www.stuartdunn.wordpress.com
Tel +44 (0)207 848 2709
Fax +44 (0)207 848 1989
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