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.
For more information, see:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/cerch/events/fraistat.aspx https://kclmail.kcl.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=0d59056454a54d4f952a5affce1d6d5b&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.kcl.ac.uk%2finnovation%2fgroups%2fcerch%2fevents%2ffraistat.aspx