Digital Humanities

Some at the cutting edge of historical research use computing tools to generate new knowledge about the past and present it in dynamic new ways. Our faculty and students play active roles in varied digital humanities initiatives, building on a storied tradition of innovation in the field at centers that include IATH, SHANTI, and the Library’s Scholars’ Lab. Faculty have integrated digital archives, cultural analytics, and geospatial visualization into their teaching.  They offer project-based seminar courses focused on the collaborative production of new digital scholarship. The current “spatial turn” toward the study of place and space in the social sciences and humanities has made mapping, from ancient cartography to GIS (geographic information systems), a vibrant focus for research. Our graduate students get first-hand experience as research assistants for MapScholar, VisualEyes5, the History Database Project (C-base), and the Nau Center for Civil War History; they become skilled practitioners through advanced fellowship programs; they earn recognition for their work through the DH Certificate @UVa program; and they learn text encoding at the University’s major documentary editing projects and digital media production at Virginia Humanities programs like Backstory. Our discipline is focused on the analysis and interpretation of primary sources--those documents and objects created by people in the past that offer access to their worlds. As this historical record moves from the archive to the internet, digital humanities will only become more important as an approach to understanding history.