From reusable toolsets to scholarly databases to collaborative online learning environments, UW faculty, staff, and students are deeply involved in the digital transformation of the humanities.

The Simpson Center is working to seed, support, and strengthen work in the digital humanities, through participating in consortia, sponsoring classes and hosting hands-on workshops on digital scholarship.

Early Buddhist Manuscripts Richard Solomon Asian Languages & Literature	Electronic Piers Plowman Míċeál Vaughan English
WebArchivist Kirsten Foot Communications	Digital Collections University Libraries

The Simpson Center for the Humanities was selected as one of twelve sites across the nation selected to host a Text Encoding Initiative workshop, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and conducted by the Brown University Women Writers Project. TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps scholars, libraries, museums, and publishers represent literary and linguistic text for online research and teaching.

Brian Reed (English), Mary Childs (Graduate Student, Comparative Literature) and Blynne Olivieri (Graduate Student, iSchool) at the TEI Workshop.

The goal of the workshop was to enable  scholars to learn about text encoding, to play a more engaged role in digital projects, and to undertake text encoding projects on their own. Programs and departments represented included the Information School, Asian Languages & Literature, Comparative Literature, English, the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program, Linguistics, History, Scandinavian Studies, Anthropology and Museology, Textual Studies and DXARTS. The intensive two-day workshop included lectures, discussion, hands-on encoding labs, and a panel featuring digital projects and resources at the University of Washington.

Panelists
Kirsten Foot (Communication) is co-director of  WebArchivist.org. Ann Lally (UW Libraries) is head of the university libraries' digital initiatives program. Richard Salomon (Asian Languages & Literature) directs the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project, and Andrew Glass (Asian Languages & Literature) is a postdoctoral fellow on the project. Míċeál Vaughan (English) directs the Electronic Piers Plowman Project to bring this Middle English poem to the 21st century.

Project Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in the arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bamboo tackles the question, “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”

The first planning meeting for Project Bamboo took place in April of 2008, at the University of California, Berkeley. The University of Washington was represented by Ann Ferguson (Digital Initiatives Librarian), Robert Mason (Information School), Axel Roesler (School of Art), Oren Sreebny< (UW Technology), Phillip Thurtle (History and Comparative History of Ideas), and Kathleen Woodward (Simpson Center and English).

An interactive website—keywords.nyupress.org—accompanies the release of the book Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007). Developed through a partnership between the Simpson Center for the Humanities and New York University Press, this website enables users to revise, extend, and add to the research conversations contained in the volume. The website also provides spaces where classes and working groups can create, experiment with, and publish new keywords projects. For more information or to find out how to host a project, go to keywords.nyupress.org.

“Keywords for American Cultural Studies can and should be used as an essential handbook, but it really is more like a treasury of the intellect, bulging with sharp insights and lasting revelations.”
—Andrew Ross, author of Fast Boat to China

Collaborative in design and execution, Keywords for American Cultural Studies edited by Bruce Burgett (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington Bothell) and Glenn Hendler (English, Fordham University) collects sixty-four new essays from interdisciplinary scholars. Each essay in the book is on a single term such as “America,” “body,” “ethnicity,” and “religion.” Alongside “community,” “immigration,” “queer,” and many others, these words are the nodal points in many of today’s most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life, both inside and outside of the academy.