DIGI@UGA Day

The 'digital' designation is becoming superfluous, if not redundant, such do we all live in a world of 1s and 0s. Not to say that we don't make distinctions between the digital and the real world, but that the intersections have become not just more numerous but increasingly complementary to each other.

The Digital Humanities, for instance, refers to an area of research and scholarship at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Our humanities units and the Willson Center have been working hard on some major initiatives at this intersection and one of those is the new Digital Humanities lab at UGA, which launches today:

The Willson Center, in partnership with the UGA Libraries and the UGA Press, will launch its new Digital Humanities Lab on April 17 at 2 p.m. on the third floor of the main library as part of DIGI@UGA Day.

The day’s events will include the announcement of a new interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate program in digital humanities, a Digital Humanities Symposium, the opening of the UGA Digital Arts Library’s Textual Machines exhibit and, at 5 p.m., a public reception at the new home of the Willson Center, 1260 S. Lumpkin St.

The field of digital humanities emphasizes the building of tools and resources such as digital archives, Web applications and mobile applications and their use in the service of advancing humanistic knowledge and making it available to the public.

The Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, known informally as the DigiLab, will be a state-of-the-art instruction space as well as an incubator and publicity hub for nationally recognized digital humanities projects. Opening for use this summer, it will be outfitted with flexible workspaces for individual or collaborative projects and with advanced technological resources.

The Digital Humanities Research and Innovation certificate program will bring together courses taught across a range of humanities disciplines—including English, history, classics, geography, Romance languages, theater and film studies, historic preservation, art and music—under the course prefix DIGI. The program will begin this fall.

The DigiLab and the DIGI certificate program both grew out of the Digital Humanities Initiative, a Willson Center Faculty Research Cluster chaired by Stephen Berry, Gregory Chair of the Civil War Era in the history department; William Kretzschmar, Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities in the English department; and Claudio Saunt, Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and chair of the history department. Congratulations to these dedicated faculty members, and also Barbara McCaskill of the English department and Nicholas Allen, director of the Willson Center, for bringing this important initiative to fruition.