Digital Humanities

Integrating computer technologies with humanities research. Using computational tools to retrieve, analyze, and visually represent data. Exploring multimodal ways of communicating and circulating scholarship. Building online archives. Teaching and learning in new formats. Exploring the historical, social, aesthetic, and cross-cultural implications of digital cultures. The Simpson Center supports the rapidly growing field of digital humanities through a broad range of programming.

Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships

This annual program supports faculty and doctoral students pursuing research projects that use digital technologies in innovative and intensive ways and explore their implications from multiple points of view. (See each year's fellows to find examples of their projects.)

Digital Humanities Summer Institute (Partnership)

A multi-year partnership with a renowned institute at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, supports faculty and doctoral students through week-long courses.

Northwest Five Consortium (Partnership)

The Simpson Center also supports the participation of faculty to the University of Victoria Digital Humanities Summer Institute from the Northwest Five Consortium, a collection of liberal arts colleges in the Pacific Northwest. This partnership supports development of faculty as teacher-scholars and promotes intellectual exchange across our campuses.

HASTAC Scholars

We support graduate students to look toward the future of higher education in a digital age via online dialogues with the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC).

Women Who Rock

An oral history archive hosted by the UW Libraries Digital Initiatives Program; annual participant-driven conference and film festival; and project-based coursework for graduate student and undergraduates.

Current Funded Projects

Several 2016-17 funded projects at the Simpson Center include significant digital humanities components:

Activist Poetics in the Digital Age (Symposium Feb. 3, 2017)
The Many Poems of Baki textual analysis workshop
Textual & Digital Studies Graduate Certificate launch

Visiting Speakers

Recent visitors include Nick Sousanis (English, University of Calgary), Jeffrey Schnapp (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University), Anne Balsamo (School of Media Studies, The New School), Cathy Davidson (The Graduate Center, City University of New York), Todd Presner (Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies, University of California, Los Angeles), Anne McClanan (Art History, Portland State University), Alan Liu (English, University of California, Santa Barbara), Sharon Daniel (Film and Media, University of California, Santa Cruz), and Joanna Drucker (Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles).

Recent Projects

The Simpson Center has supported major digital projects over the past decade. They include web-based archives of important historical material, digital editions of canonical English literature, and an interactive digital supplement to a print book.

Lake Union Laboratory (Collaboration Studio Grant)
Producing a Worthy Illness (Collaboration Studio Grant)
Affect & Audience in the Digital Age (Symposium)
SeaTac-Seattle Minimum Wage Campaign History Project (Public Scholarship project)
Seattle’s Freeway Revolt (Public Scholarship project)
Demystifying Digital Humanities Workshop Series presented guided introductions to the points of intersection between traditional and digital humanities.
Scale & Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History, a Spring 2015 conference and forthcoming publication in Modern Language Quarterly examining computational methods for literary analysis.
Svoboda Diaries "Newbook" Project, an extensive collection of personal diaries kept by members of a family living in Baghdad, Iraq, during the 19th century.
Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, a widely used digital archive that has driven civic debates and influenced public policy.
Keywords in American Cultural Studies, a hybrid print-digital publication examining nodal points in many of the most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life.
The digital text of the A Version of the medieval poem Piers Plowman.

Resources for Digital Humanists

See a list of resources for those conducting or considering digital humanities scholarship at the UW. It includes information about both on-campus and online resources.

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of digital humanities programming.

Photo: "DH" elevator button courtesy Quinn Dombrowski via Creative Commons/Flickr.