Faculty members receive 100K digital humanities grant

Concordia College has received a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation that focuses on digital humanities.

The Mellon Foundation encouraged Concordia College to apply for the grant, aware of Concordia’s hopes to expand their digital humanities. In September, The Mellon Foundation notified Concordia of its acceptance.

The grant will be used to help students and faculty learn how to use digital tools and enhance Concordia’s humanities curriculum. Lisa Sjoberg, Digital Collections Librarian, said the funds will work towards developing a digital toolkit and resources for the future.

Digital humanities refers to the collaboration of technological tools and resources to manage and enhance humanities such as history, philosophy, art, etc.

Dr. Joy Lintelman, chair of the history department, said the college could greatly benefit from the grant.

“We’ve been trying to nudge the college forward in digital humanities,” Lintelman said.

Lintelman, along with Sjoberg, will use the grant to expand the college’s usage of digital humanities.

Sjoberg said she hopes Concordia will have a common definition of digital humanities and gain more tools to use them.

Sjoberg and Lintelman would like Concordia’s digital presence, both internally and externally, to be greater.

“(Digital humanities will) add another layer of knowledge to the methodologies and tools we already use in the humanities,” Lintelman said.

Miriam Posner, a Digital Humanities speaker from UCLA, will be coming to Concordia to speak in November. Not only will Posner be able to teach how to use digital humanities tools, she will also talk about their importance.

Last June, during a faculty workshop on digital humanities, Lintelman and Sjoberg came across and presented a video made by Posner, which received positive response.

Two open sessions will be held, one on Monday, Nov. 17 at 9:00 a.m., and one on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 12:00 p.m. Both will be held in Knutson Campus Center, Jones C-D.

Lintelman and Sjoberg encourage everybody to attend the open sessions. Although the grant focuses on the humanities and art disciplines, digital humanities can be valuable in other disciplines as well.

There will also be an interactive session on Monday, Nov. 17 at 7:00 p.m. in the Grant Center.

24 people will be accepted to go to the session. Both students and faculty are encouraged to apply especially those in humanities and arts disciplines. To apply, email kbrantn1@cord.edu.

At the session, participants will sit at a computer and experience a computer program called Palladio, which allows data to be visualized in many ways.

After the event a survey will be administered about digital humanities so they can get a better feel for the understanding people have as well as what they would else they would like to see in regards to digital humanities.

This summer, there two courses will be created or rewritten to include digital humanities. This course will be taught sometime in the upcoming 2015-2016 school year.