News

We publicly announced the new PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge Fellows for 2016 on August 23, 2016. This heterogenous group of grad students from various departments and programs will work with Co-Directors Phil Stern, History, David Bell, Romance Studies, and me to think about how digital knowledge production can transform their scholarship, teaching, and communications. This project, initiated by Cathy Davidson and closely tied to HASTAC, will continue to evolve as we focus in this year on Duke students and their projects. We plan 2x/month lunch meetings plus a variety of programs, events, and workshops designed to foster conversation, exploration, and connection. As the director of the Digital Humanities Initiative I’m eager to see the PhD Lab scholars initiating and integrating into various projects, as well as bringing back to their departments and programs a sense of how digital tools and approaches can complement, supplement and potentially transform their academic practices – while at the same time honoring the standards and values of their home disciplines.

The Digital Humanities Initiative website at Duke soft-launched on August 18, 2016. We are continuing to develop the project profiles and other resources on the site, but it is exciting to see it in place. Tremendous credit goes to the DH Klatch group, a team of mostly Duke staff from around campus who have been working hard on identifying the different strands of DH on campus, developing training and support services, and thinking through some of the tough questions on how we do scholarly work in the digital age. Kudos too to Trinity Technology Services for pulling it together over the summer, teasing out of our complex imaginings something that is usable and extensible. We will be officially launching it at a public reception at the Franklin Humanities Institute as part of the Fall 2016 DHI kickoff and introduction of the new PhD Lab Fellows.