Iran/America is a project rooted in the emerging academic discipline of the Digital Humanities. It brings traditional interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry on the intersections of personal and political histories, evolving identities in a globalizing world, and questions regarding community to a digital platform. In this public ‘digital space’, the methodological tools of the humanities and social sciences — oral history, digital ethnography, documentary film, and interviewing — are combined with public contributions facilitated by new technology tools to produce truly participatory research and knowledge creation.
What are the Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities is “a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities;” it also refers to the changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanist inquiry…
The state of things in digital humanities today rests in that creative tension, between.. disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, between making and interpreting, between the field’s history and its future. Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally.
The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do, as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another.” – Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College (“The Humanities, Done Digitally,” Chronicle of Higher Education)
Definitions, discussions, and recent conferences
CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide
Melissa Terras, keynote speech at Digital Humanities 2010 at King’s College London, June 2010.
Patrik Svensson, “The Landscape of Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 4:1 (2010)
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference”
Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Digital Humanities v. New Media; a matter of pedagogy
Digital Humanities Projects
Bracero Program History Archive (Center for History and New Media)
Hurricane Katrina Digital Memory Bank (George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History)
September 11 Digital Archive (City University of New York Graduate Center and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University)
Nelson Mandela Center of Memory
Spielberg Film and Video Holocaust Archive (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
