Centers & Resources - Digital Humanities Initiative

Digital Humanities Initiative

The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) is a collaboratory – digital parlance for a research and teaching collaboration – where new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based teaching, research, and scholarship across the liberal arts.

Visit DHinitiative.org

Developing scholar’s understanding of digital research methods and tools. DHi is a co-curricular center at the College whose goals include:

Integrating student collaborators into faculty research projects.
Connecting scholars with related research interests nationally and internationally.
Promoting “big ideas” in digital humanities investigations.
Assisting faculty in securing funds for and managing research projects.
Facilitating translations of research into curricula.

About DHi

Goals and Methodologies

DHi challenges the ways in which teachers and students interact, use, and create digital collections (archival holdings) through the design and implementation of new digital tools.
DHi creates opportunities for new interdisciplinary models and methods of collaboration between faculty and students. These activities support a fundamental shift in humanities research, leveraging the potential of technology to access and manipulate rich media collections in ways that increase collaborative scholarship (not only within Hamilton humanities but also, potentially, with other institutions around the world) and lead to the generation of new knowledge.
DHi promotes a fundamental shift in the humanities through new interdisciplinary models and methods of collaboration between faculty and student-scholars, as co-researchers and co-creators of new knowledge.
DHi supports innovative inter and multidisciplinary research while integrating that research with teaching at the undergraduate level and with programs designed for a larger public.

Curricular and Pedagogical Initiatives

DHi functions to promote curricular initiatives in Hamilton's inter- and multi-disciplinary concentration (and minor) in Cinema and Media Studies (CMS). This concentration introduces students to history, theory, literacy and production skills in film and new media. CMS brings together courses involving historical and theoretical study and/or hands-on experience of photochemical, electronic and digital media.
Hamilton's Research and Instructional Design Group (RID), coordinating academic support for media-based constructivist learning assignments, will be the foundation upon which connections between DHi research projects and the curriculum are built.

DHi Collection Development Team

Angel David Nieves, Co-Director & Associate Professor
Janet Thomas Simons, Co-Director of Technology and Research
Gregory Lord, Lead Designer & Software Engineer

Peter MacDonald, Library Information Systems Specialist & Metadata Librarian
Lisa McFall, Metadata and Digital Initiatives Librarian
Steve Young, ITS Network Services Unix/HPC System Administrator
Shay Foley, Director, Metadata and Digital Strategies

Sample Projects

American Prison Writing Archive

The American Prison Writing Archive will be a place where incarcerated people can bear witness to the conditions in which they live, to what is working and what is not inside American prisons, and where they can contribute to public debate about the American prison crisis.

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Sacred Centers in India

This project entails a study of Indian sacred centers, examining the emergence, multi-phase (re-)constructions and reformulations of both these important centers and their intertwined histories.

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The Beloved Witness

The Beloved Witness project will create a digital archive of the video-taped and audio-taped readings, as well as personal documents, letters, and manuscripts of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001).

Learn More Project website

Teaching, research and scholarship

Interdisciplinary collaborations

DHi sponsors a wide range of activities including faculty development workshops, media literacy programs, scholarly conferences and symposia, undergraduate seminars, a fellows program for Hamilton students and faculty, and humanities programs designed for the public-at-large.

dhinitiative.org

Support for Digital Humanities

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Hamilton College $1.75 million for the Digital Humanities Initiative.

Contact Information

Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi)

Christian A. Johnson Hall
Hamilton College
Clinton, NY 13323

315-859-4924 315-859-4185 dhi@hamilton.edu dhinitiative.org