This is exciting news, as are all stories on digital humanities, digital scholarship, and digital innovation centers, labs, institutes and the like because these entities provide a conceptual space (and sometimes this is located in an incredibly useful physical space) to support new forms of scholarship and new ways to increase impact with existing forms of scholarship. These entities are critical to connecting research with the public and public good. Congrats to UNC!
The news story copied below is from here.
| UNC to launch Digital Innovation Lab |
| Wednesday, September 14, 2011 | |
| The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will launch a new virtual lab that will encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary and innovative digital humanities projects.Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, will give a free public talk Oct. 10 to celebrate the kickoff of the Digital Innovation Lab, which will be affiliated with the American studies department in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Bobley will speak at 2 p.m. in the University Room of Hyde Hall, home of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, located off East Franklin Street.The Digital Innovation Lab will encourage the production of digital “public goods”: projects and tools that are of social and cultural value; can be made publicly available; are scalable and reusable; and/or serve multiple audiences. One immediate focus will be the use of large-scale data sources – maps, newspapers, city directories, public records – by scholars and the public in understanding the history of communities. The lab, accessed at http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu, was created with a startup grant from the college. “Digital technologies have the potential to transform how our faculty in the humanities ask questions about the world, engage with local communities, create learning environments for our students and collaborate with partners within and beyond the University,” said William L. Andrews, Ph.D., senior associate dean for the fine arts and humanities in the College. The lab will build on the nationally funded digital humanities work of its UNC co-directors and co-founders — Robert Allen, Ph.D, and Richard Marciano, Ph.D. Allen is the James Logan Godfrey Distinguished Professor of American studies, history and communication studies. Marciano is a professor in the School of Information and Library Science and affiliated professor in American studies and director of Sustainable Archives and Leveraging Technologies (SALT). This year the lab will expand two ongoing projects:
With another grant from the college, the lab will begin work this year on a project called “Connecting People, Past and Place,” a tool kit for extracting, organizing and representing data from widely available sources documenting everyday life in early 20th-century America. |