Digital Humanities

Participating Faculties: Arts and Humanities (host), Information & Media Studies, Schulich School of Medicine & 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.