Posted by Lexi Rivetti, UCB Student Intern, UCOP. What is digital humanities? Dr. Miriam Posner, program coordinator for UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities (DH) hears this question a lot. “There are a lot of different definitions floating around out there. There is even a website called http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/. Every time you refresh the site, you get a different definition,” she laughed.
For Posner, DH is all about exploring humanities questions with digital tools. For example, last quarter she helped students work with the Getty Museum’s large archive of provenance information to produce complex visualizations, combining art and data science!
Currently, Posner and her team are gearing up to offer a digital humanities institute for art historians this summer. Over a week and a half of training, art historians from around the U.S. will learn how to utilize the latest technology for their research projects, which they’ll present at a public colloquium on Tuesday, July 14, at UCLA. Before the summer institute, UCLA’s Center for DH works closely with IT staff to brainstorm creative ways to push the boundaries of art and science with the many tools at their disposal.
Posner enjoys working with faculty across disciplines and across the country to answer humanities questions. What she loves most is being inspired by the students at UCLA. “They always have lots of really good ideas and they tend to challenge me a lot, to stretch my knowledge and interpretive ability.”
I love to see articles like this, because so many times we think Tech only applies to the STEM fields. I have experienced several innovative areas in the humanities in my travels around the UC and glad to see one being highlighted
Tom