On Thursday, January 31st, Dr. Colin Wilder gave a presentation to the faculty and staff of the Addlestone Library on the role of digital humanities in the library. Dr. Wilder is the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina, and he received his PhD in German history from the University of Chicago. His presentation, “Developments in Digital Humanities Between Library and Classroom,” outlined how this growing field increasingly finds a home in academic libraries to foster a wide range of interdisciplinary digital projects. He also outlined how medium-sized to small academic libraries can particularly benefit from projects that use various types of open source (or at least cost-effective) software programs. Wilder emphasized that when libraries embrace digital humanities centers and projects, from literature data-mining projects to online public history exhibitions, this helps encourage academic libraries to become a creative space as well as an information repository.

For more information on the role of digital humanities in academic libraries, check out the following links:

What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?
by Micah Vandegrift

Digital Humanities and the Library
by Miriam Posner