Digital Humanities Commons

In January 2009, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Simpson Center a $625,000 Challenge Grant to support the digital humanities at the UW.  If matched 3 to 1 by private donations, the sum total of $2.5 million will endow the Digital Humanities Commons, a summer fellowship program for faculty and graduate students.

Anticipated to begin in 2013, the Digital Humanities Commons will support innovative and experimental research inspired by new technologies. It has three primary goals:

• To animate knowledge—using rich media, dynamic databases, and visualization tools
• To circulate knowledge—among diverse publics
• To understand digital culture—historically and generatively

Where research in the humanities is often undertaken by a single scholar, the Commons will enable faculty and graduate students to collaborate together with librarians, engineers, and designers.

In 2011, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave $600,000 to underwrite the Digital Humanities Commons fundraising effort.