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 with librarians, engineers, and designers to animate their scholarship with new visualization tools, digital media, and communications platforms.

Through the digitization of artifacts and documents, scholars help preserve, frame, and make accessible the heritage of cultures around the world. The Commons will support this work, as well as the research of scholars studying the historical, social, and cross-cultural implications of digital cultures.

UW faculty and graduate students will be able to apply either on an individual basis or in teams to the Digital Humanities Commons summer fellowship program through the Simpson Center.  Up to eight UW scholars will be selected on the basis of competitive applications and will join the Commons to explore how the next generation of technology can enhance their research and teaching. The Commons will also have support for their technical collaborators and equipment to help make their ideas a reality.

To prepare for the launch of the Commons, the Simpson Center has been working with other campus units to increase the profile of the digital humanities, inform UW scholars about projects and resources related to the digital humanities, pilot capacity-building projects, sponsor visiting lecturers—such as Johanna Drucker (Information Studies, UCLA) and Sharon Daniel (Film and Media, UC-Santa Cruz)—and strengthen connections to HASTAC, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, and other digital humanities organizations across the country.

In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave $600,000 to underwrite the Digital Humanities Commons fundraising effort.