Faculty, students, and librarians filled the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall in early March, to hear engaging and provocative talks by three experts in the field of digital humanities at the New Directions for Digital Scholarship, Spring Chapter. The forum examined how scholarship and its supporting institutions might face the upcoming opportunities and challenges of an open, digital, and networked environment.
Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, University of Victoria, traced the evolution of Digital Humanities from an early focus on digitization of content to more recent curiosity-based analyses. David Germano, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of SHANTI, University of Virginia, vigorously identified inherent sustainability challenges and argued for synthesizing services across multiple disciplines and repositories. Peter Leonard, Head of Humanities Research Computing, University of Chicago, and incoming Librarian for Digital Humanities Research at Yale, provided examples of innovative approaches to textual analyses. Yale University Librarian Susan Gibbons introduced the forum and a number of digital scholarship projects from across the university were featured.
Administrators, librarians, and graduate students continued the conversation in a half-day workshop with the three speakers, exploring themes surrounding stakeholders, institutions, and infrastructure. The ideas discussed will help to shape strategies at Yale to promote this emerging field. A fall chapter will follow later this year.