Simpson Center Digital Humanities Commons

The Simpson Center for the Humanities has been awarded a $625,000 Challenge Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support inventive forms of scholarship inspired by new and emerging digital technologies. The largest NEH Challenge Grant ever received by the University of Washington, this award provides a powerful endorsement of the Simpson Center’s vision as well as a compelling incentive to support the humanities. With a successful 1:3 match totaling $2.5 million, the Simpson Center will establish and endow the Digital Humanities Commons.

The NEH Challenge Grant program provides a major incentive for developing long-term institutional infrastructure in the humanities. These grants carry significant prestige due to the NEH’s rigorous peer review process involving leading scholars and experts. The NEH Challenge Grant award thus constitutes high-level recognition of the Simpson Center’s past record and future plans regarding cutting-edge humanities research. Nationwide, only fifteen out of ninety-nine challenge grant proposals submitted in the May 2008 competition were funded. Only two awards were made to humanities centers focusing on digital development.

In awarding this grant, Bruce Cole, then NEH Chairman, said, “The Simpson Center will serve as a national model for the transformation of traditional humanities centers in the digital age.”

The Digital Humanities Commons will support innovative and experimental research in the digital humanities with three primary objectives: the animation of knowledge; the public circulation of our scholarship; and the historical, social, and cross-cultural understanding of digital culture.

The centerpiece of the Digital Humanities Commons will be an annual cross-disciplinary eight-week summer program of fellowships for University of Washington faculty and doctoral students. The program will focus on collaborative projects with digital dimensions both amongfaculty and graduate student fellows and with other collaborators, including librarians, interactive designers, specialists of informatics, artists, and others.

During the academic year, the Digital Humanities Commons will augment campus-wide opportunities for graduate students by offering three one-credit courses at the leading edge of digital humanities research. Each year the Simpson Center will bring a seminal scholar or innovator in the digital humanities to the University of Washington for a two-day intensive visit.

Does the digital age of networked information herald new modes of thought and association? Does it displace others — historical thinking, logical argument, realist representation, individual authorship — that have organized values central to modern culture and scholarship?

In this lecture and multi-media presentation, Liu explores the common assumption that our culture is shifting from print-based, linear thought to the digital principles and graphic sensibilities of non-linear movement. In the process, he asks us to reconsider how we make sense of the past, the present, and the future and how we conceive the possibilities of knowing.

Colloquium: Literature +

As a follow-up to his public lecture, Alan Liu will offer an informal session Friday, May 8, 2009, 1:30pm. Digital technologies are facilitating a deeper interdisciplinarity than any the humanities have yet experienced: interdisciplinarity (as in collaborative, government funded projects) that requires collaboration between humanists, artists, engineers, and social scientists at the level not just of ideas but of elementary research practices and techniques. To initiate discussion, Liu will provide a theoretical opening and share some of his techniques for preparing students to undertake such collaborative work.

Alan Liu (English, UC Santa Barbara) is the weaver of The Voice of the Shuttle, a major web portal for humanities research, and a leading scholar of information culture whose recent books include Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008) and The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004). Liu’s lecture inaugurates the Simpson Center’s Campaign for the Digital Humanities Commons. Through a program of fellowships, lectureships, and courses, the Commons will incubate new digital cultural understanding and innovation, supporting creative research, education, and collaborative partnerships.