Wednesday, September 2, 2015
$2 Million Mellon Foundation Grant Supports Digital Humanities
“The Mellon Foundation’s generous philanthropy will serve to strengthen Penn’s abiding commitment to the most creative scholarship and teaching in the humanities,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann. “We are grateful for the Foundation’s partnership as we launch key initiatives to advance the use of technology along with innovative analyses of the most important big data in the study of the humanities.”
“Digital humanities” is an umbrella term for the proliferation of digital and computational technologies that are being applied to scholarship across higher education and transforming the way humanists work. The digital humanities encompass tools ranging from computers that read massive amounts of digitized writing to facilitate the analysis of texts and detect previously invisible patterns, to geographic information systems (GIS) that present complex histories in the form of interactive maps, to 3-D modeling technologies that can produce immersive re-creations of archaeological sites and artifacts....