Summit Aims To Create National Coalition of Digital Humanities Centers

The University of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Humanities Will Host a Summit to Create a National Coalition of Digital Hamanities Centers.

The teaching, study, and practice of humanities on college campuses is being transformed thanks to technology. Digital humanities centers have been central in helping to coordinate, research and promote these changes. In the past, those centers have never really worked together under one organization. That is about to change.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland are pleased to announce a summit meeting to plan a national coalition of digital humanities centers.

The meeting will take place at NEH headquarters in Washington, D.C., on April 12-13, 2007. The meeting is part of NEH's Digital Humanities Initiative, which supports projects that use or study the impact of digital technology to offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualize relationships, and present scholarship.

At digital humanities centers around the country, historians, archaeologists, and other humanities scholars have been working with computer scientists and engineers to develop innovative ways of applying emerging digital technologies to the humanities. These collaborations have created new methods of conducting research, interpreting archival data, and teaching the humanities.

The Need for Collaboration

In order to take the digital humanities and humanities scholarship to the next level, collaboration at the national level needs to occur between digital humanities centers and funding organizations.

"Digital humanities centers serve as the technological backbone for the future of humanities scholarship," said Dr. Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities." Encouraging collaboration among the centers will serve to speed innovation and replicate success throughout the nation."

Collaborative work done by the nation's network of science labs has produced major breakthroughs, such as the human genome project and the creation of the Internet. As with the science labs, this new network of digital humanities centers will promote the national exchange of ideas and research necessary to generate revolutionary innovations in the humanities.

National Coalition Summit

The centerpiece of the conference is a day-long discussion of key issues involved in fostering collaboration, developing funding resources, and creating blueprints for future projects. The discussion will be chaired by Neil Fraistat, director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

"We hope that by the end of the meeting, a framework will be in place for a national coalition of digital humanities centers that can start functioning immediately," says Fraistat.

Along with the directors of major digital humanities centers, representatives from government, industry, and the private sector will be in attendance, including those from the Mellon Foundation, Google, Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Science Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Internet2, and Library of Congress.

The conference begins at 4:00 p.m. on April 12, with a welcome address by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. John Unsworth will then deliver a plenary address on "Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure." Unsworth is the director of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Vint Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist for Google, will also provide some remarks.

On April 13, the conference attendees will spend the day discussing how to create a framework for a permanent coalition of digital humanities centers.

For More Information about the Digital Humanities Summit Please Contact:

MITH: Neil Fraistat: 301-405-5896
NEH: Elissa Pruett: 202-606-8466