IAH Launches Digital Arts and Humanities Program

Between November 2007 and April 2008, the IAH involved more than one hundred faculty and staff members in a series of meetings and demonstration sessions across the campus on topics in digital arts and humanities.
 
Communication Studies Associate Professor Joyce Rudinsky, who was part of the core planning group, said, “For the first time we had people all over campus sharing their visions about how we could work together to move the arts and humanities forward in the digital age. It was a very exciting series of meetings.”

Events: 

• November '07: IAH hosts conference on digital humanities with faculty from UNC and Kings College, London.
• February ‘08: Demonstration of emerging technologies for scholarly collaboration at the RENCI facility at ITS Manning. The facility includes a social computing room, dome room visualization and simulator technologies, and collaborative computing spaces.
• March ‘08:

• Discussion session on launching a major digital exposition and conference on the digital arts in February of 2009.
• Panel session in St. Louis at the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes on trends in digital arts and humanities across the nation. The session was organized by IAH Director John McGowan and Megan Granda, IAH Executive Director.

• April ‘08: Symposium on initiating new technologies that will advance teaching, service, and research efforts in the humanities. Invited units: The humanities departments, UNC Libraries, and the School of Library Science.
  

The sessions in digital technology exemplify the IAH’s mission of supporting collaborative faculty work whether in archival research, multimedia art productions, virtual forms of faculty conferences, as well as team teaching and course design efforts. The IAH will form several faculty working groups around projects in the digital arts and humanities as part of its major new initiative for collaborative faculty work. The steering group for the 2010 spring Digital Arts conference will be formed by early fall.
 
IAH Director John McGowan adds, “Unless UNC embraces the new technologies in our arts and humanities programs now, we will find ourselves lagging behind other major universities in this area tomorrow. But, if we do act now, we can be among the leaders in this movement and Carolina will be better positioned to attract and retain the next generation of teachers and scholars who will have grown up with—and more fully embrace—these new technologies.”

The spring programs were part of the Carolina Seminars program jointly sponsored with the Kenan Institute on the topic of arts and entrepreneurship.
 
Partnering with the IAH in this effort were staff from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) of North Carolina and Duke. Other active participant organizations included the Ackland Art Museum, Carolina Performing Arts, Davis Library, the School of Information and Library Science, and Instructional Technology Services. Faculty from the Departments of African and African American Studies, Art, Dramatic Arts, Communications Studies, Creative Writing, English and Comparative Literature, History, and Music were also involved.
 
Spring seminar presenters included Leesa Brieger and Ruth Marinshaw of RENCI-UNC; Marilyn Lombardi, Director, Duke RENCI; Julian Lombardi, assistant vice president of Duke’s Academic Services and Technology Support; Mark McCahill, Duke’s architect of e-learning and collaborative systems; and, Dr. Jose-Marie Griffiths, Dean of UNC’s School of Information and Library Science.