Department of Classics
2015-2016 Library Enhancement Grant
Dr. Eleni Bozia, Assistant Professor of Classics, was awarded a Library Enhancement grant to improve the current digital humanities collection in Library West. Over the past few decades, the digital humanities as a distinct interdisciplinary field of research has grown significantly. Many universities including Harvard, Princeton, and Duke have founded Humanities Centers focused on digital humanities projects; individual faculty at the University of Florida have pursued their own avenues of research in the digital humanities, which has resulted in a wide variety of digital humanities projects spanning curated archives, new visualization methods, and big data text analysis. A variety of fields have benefitted from these projects such as classics, archaeology, linguistics, and history. A comprehensive bibliography accessible to students and faculty will support ongoing growth and ensure robust conversation about the theoretical underpinnings of digital scholarship in the humanities.
The acquisition of these digital humanities texts will improve and facilitate current course offerings at the University of Florida by facilitating the creation of a comprehensive and cohesive bibliography. Current courses that will benefit include such as the such as the Digital History Working Lab, the Oral History Seminar, the Introduction to Digital Architecture, Technology in Foreign Language Education, and Methods in Language Documentation. The growth of this library collection will also support the new Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at the University of Florida, which will be offered beginning in fall 2015. The addition of these texts will not only benefit these courses, but also suggest new avenues for research and teaching.
Overall, the acquisition of these texts encourage new questions and solutions in a new world of technology and mass deposits of information. How do we, as practitioners of the humanities, engage with new technologies and how do we incorporate them into our fields? Students and faculty pursuing this, and other questions, need access to relevant texts in order to understand the current landscape of digital humanities and its expanding trajectories.