The Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, in partnership with the UGA Libraries and the University of Georgia Press, will launch its new Digital Humanities Lab on the third floor of the main library as part of “DIGI@UGA” Day April 17 at 2 p.m.
The day’s events will include the announcement of a new interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate program in digital humanities; a Digital Humanities Symposium; the opening of the UGA Digital Arts Library’s Textual Machines exhibit; and a public reception at the new home of the Willson Center at 1260 S. Lumpkin St. at 5 p.m. The reception is open free to the public, and refreshments will be served.
The field of digital humanities emphasizes the building of tools and resources such as digital archives, Web applications and mobile applications and their use in the service of advancing humanistic knowledge and making it available to the public.
The Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, known informally as the DigiLab, will be a state-of-the-art instruction space as well as an incubator and publicity hub for nationally recognized digital humanities projects. It will be outfitted with advanced technological resources and flexible workspaces for individual or collaborative projects. The DigiLab will open this summer.
The Digital Humanities Research and Innovation certificate program will bring together courses taught across a range of humanities disciplines—including English, history, classics, geography, Romance languages, theatre and film studies, historic preservation, art and music—under the course prefix DIGI. The program will begin in the fall.
The DigiLab and the DIGI certificate program both grew out of the Digital Humanities Initiative, a Willson Center Faculty Research Cluster chaired by Stephen Berry, holder of the Gregory Chair of the Civil War Era in the history department; William Kretzschmar, the Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities in the English department; and Claudio Saunt, the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and chair of the history department.
The launch event and symposium will take place opposite the DigiLab space in the Reading Room on the third floor of the main library. After opening remarks by organizers of the DigiLab and DIGI certificate programs, the symposium will feature talks by visiting scholars and innovators in digital humanities. More information on the speakers is online at http://t.uga.edu/1pJ.