Event Explores Groundbreaking Potential of Digital Humanities

The event “Defining the Digital Humanities” will examine these topics and more on Wednesday, April 6, at 12:00 PM in Alfred Lerner Hall, Room 555, on the Columbia University campus. Although the event is open to the public, guests who do not have a Columbia University ID must RSVP to kp2002@columbia.edu by Tuesday, April 5.

The definition of the digital humanities, or “humanities computing,” remains contested. Digital humanities scholars are a diverse group whose work is the result of cross-pollination among humanities scholarship, computer science, and digital media. Many well-known digital humanities projects apply tools borrowed from computer science—such as data-mining or geographic information systems—to works of literature, historical documents, and other materials traditionally in the domain of the humanities. But what do digital humanities scholars see as the potential of this interdisciplinary field? And what are the important theoretical and methodological contributions digital humanities can offer to both the humanities and the sciences?

The panelists are distinguished scholars at different points in their careers, all working within the digital humanities: Daniel J. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. His new book, The Ivory Tower and the Open Web, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. At CHNM he has directed projects ranging from digital collections (September 11 Digital Archive) to scholarly software (Zotero). Federica Frabetti is a Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media, and Culture Program at Oxford Brookes University. Her professional background includes a decade as a software engineer in telecommunications companies. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Technology Made Legible: A Cultural Study of Software. Dino Buzzetti is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. He has taught medieval philosophy, document representation and processing, and humanities computing. His published essays are on topics ranging from medieval logic and metaphysics to digital text representation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.

Sponsored by Columbia University’s Scholarly Communication Program, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, this event is free and open to the public. It is the final event of this semester in a speaker series, Research Without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication, organized by the Scholarly Communication Program. Follow the series remotely via Twitter at http://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. For information about Research without Borders, please email Kathryn Pope at kp2002@columbia.edu, or visit http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events.

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) at Columbia University is one of the country's oldest and most distinguished graduate schools. The GSAS seeks excellence in the training of graduate students for careers in and outside academia. It promotes the integration of graduate students into the research and educational enterprises of Columbia, oversees the quality of graduate education in the Arts and Sciences, and nurtures the diversity and intellectual collegiality of its programs.

The Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University (www.socialdifference.org) is an advanced study center that promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the global dynamics of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race.

The Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University ranks as one of the first and most prestigious of postdoctoral fellowship programs. Over the years, it has supported the research of over 160 Fellows in a variety of humanistic disciplines—from literature, art history, and music to anthropology, history, philosophy, and political theory—whose scholarship has garnered numerous book prizes, grants, awards, and other forms of professional recognition and acclaim.