Digital Humanities
Participating Faculties: Arts and Humanities (host), Information and Media Studies,
Schulich school of Medicine and Dentistry, Science, Social Science, and
Western Libraries
Project Leaders: Juan Luis Suarez
Total Project Funding: $300,000
Funding Period: 3 years
Abstract:
The IDI in Digital Humanities at Western U. is developing
research and academic programs around a combination of two sets of
skills: the traditional humanistic skills, and a new set of skills
related to the digital interaction with cultural artifacts:
- mastering a high level of digital literacy
- formalizing and storing of cultural and historical data in complex relations, and
- expert ability to produce and use digital tools to better reach the type of audience cultivated by the technological revolution.
By adopting the Digital Humanities paradigm, the humanists
and the humanities will also adapt their practices to produce critical
thinkers who are digitally literate and technically autonomous, able
to create the tools the different humanistic fields of enquiry require
going forward in order to better understand humanity, past and present.
The interdisciplinary sets of skills that researchers and
students will acquire and/or refine through the IDI in Digital
Humanities will:
- put new graduates in an excellent position to access a market that is more and more dependent on a digital economy;
- help develop collaboration with digital industries;
- widen the range and types of jobs that arts and humanities graduates have traditionally had access to; and
- create new synergies with other disciplines through intensive collaboration around similar problems and methodologies.