Digital Humanities

The Simpson Center has been central to the emergence and growth of the digital humanities through its programming, opportunities for support, and facilitation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Digital humanities is located at the intersection of technology and humanities. The discipline houses scholarship that uses computational tools to retrieve, analyze, represent, and increase the accessibility of knowledge; builds and creates community around online spaces; centers multimodality through pedagogy; thinks about the impact of digital publishing; and takes a critical approach to digitality that considers the historical, social, and cultural implications of technology.

Our support of the digital humanities is inclusive of research and teaching, and the integration of the two. In the realm of digital humanities pedagogy, we value projects that address the goal of incorporating digital humanities skills and methods into both graduate and undergraduate education. This work might be undertaken at the level of a dynamic reimagining of a single course, or instructional innovation within a program or department—or across them. At the doctoral level, this might take the form of a new graduate seminar with strong digital humanities components, the development of a workshop series for doctoral students to sharpen their DH skills, a rigorous exploration of digital dissertation formats, just to name a few examples. We hope to see a continued increase in creative uses of digital technologies in courses and curricula across the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Digital Humanities Programs

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Digital Humanities Speakers

The Simpson Center has long been committed to supporting visiting speakers in the broad fields of digital humanities, data science studies, and digital culture. Past speakers include Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara), Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), Jentery Sayers (University of Victoria), Johanna Drucker (University of California, Los Angeles), Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman (Northeastern University), Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland), Anne Balsamo (University of Texas at Dallas), Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard University), and Michelle Caswell (University of California Los Angeles). Recent conferences sponsored by the Simpson Center range from a May 2015 working conference proposed by UW faculty member Marshall Brown, then editor of Modern Language Quarterly, on Scale and Value: New Approaches to Literary History which resulted in a special issue of the journal, to a two-day October 2018 conference organized by UW faculty members Adrienne Russell (Communication) and Matthew Powers (Communication) on The Shifting Landscape of Public Communication, resulting in their edited collection Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute

The Simpson Center is a sponsor of the University of Victoria’s renowned Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Held annually in June, the program provides a dynamic environment for learning about the new computing and communication technologies that are transforming teaching, research, scholarly communication, and preservation.

Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships

The Simpson Center offers annual summer fellowships for faculty and doctoral students to pursue research projects that use digital technologies in innovative and intensive ways and/or explore the historical, social, aesthetic, and cross-cultural implications of digital cultures.