Workshop: What is Digital Humanities?

Access the workshop schedule here.

In recent years, digital humanities [DH] has with much fanfare received the label of “the next big thing” in the humanities. The capacities of DH to facilitate new ways of gathering and analyzing data, interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement with broader audiences seem evident. Yet the approach’s possibilities and limitations are contested. By asking “What is digital humanities?” and creating a forum for debate, the workshop intends to foster the interdisciplinary exploration of this question and to inspire a long-term, campus-wide dialogue. We want to discuss the use of DH as a tool for research, teaching and public history, as well as to consider the alternative visions of DH: as “making stuff” (i.e., maps, databases, digital archives) and as a platform for making arguments, as in traditional forms of humanities.

The workshop will feature the rollout of the DH project GWonline: The Bibliography, Filmogra-phy, and Webography on Gender, War and the Western World since 1600, which collects and or-ganizes secondary literature, women’s autobiographies, films and informative websites on this sub-ject to make them available to the broader public. The project is connected to the Oxford Hand-book on Gender, War and the Western World since 1600 (General Editor: Karen Hagemann), which explores how gender, an amalgam of ideals and practices that give meaning to and socially differentiate male and female, shaped war, warfare and the military and, at the same time, was transformed by them. The online database allows users to search bibliographical information through multiple entry points: by author or director, publication or release date, collections, major wars, keywords or Oxford Handbook chapters. Additionally, a full text search function is available. The website is equipped with an OPEN URL feature that allows users to immediately check whether articles, books etc. are available in their local library.

Conveners: Carolina Gender, War and Culture Project and Series • University of North Carolina, Department of History • UNC Chapel Hill, Research Computing and Learning Technologies • UNC Chapel Hill, Libraries • UNC Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative

Organizers: Dr. Karen Hagemann (hagemann@unc.edu) (project director) • Dr. Aaron Hale-Dorrell (ahaledor@email.unc.edu) (project coordinator) • Dr. Anndal Narayanan (anndal.narayanan@unc.edu) (project coordinator)

Acknowledgement of Support:This event has been produced with the assistance of the European Union. The contents of this event are the sole responsibility of The UNC Center for European Studies and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union