The Digital Humanities
Scholarship related to the digital humanities has gained momentum on the Georgia State campus in the past decade, thanks to strong intellectual interest among faculty and staff connected to the work of history, English and the geosciences. This scholarship has been given key support by the University Libraries and the Student Innovation Fellowship Program. Funded by the student technology fee, the Student Innovation Fellowship Program is a collaborative effort among the Center for Instructional Innovation, CURVE, the Center for Instructional Effectiveness and Georgia State faculty. Students in the program develop expertise and share ideas around emerging technologies and instructional innovations, with particular attention to enhancing learning and research at Georgia State through the innovative use of technology.
The main CMII connection to these efforts comes through two mechanisms. First, the media technologies and related capabilities that have been designed for the main CMII building bolster the university’s toolkit for undertaking work on data visualization. Second, several CMII-connected faculty participate in digital humanities collaborations.
For more information on digitizing the humanities research, complete our Research Information Form:
Scholarship related to the digital humanities has gained momentum on the Georgia State campus in the past decade, thanks to strong intellectual interest among faculty and staff connected to the work of history, English and the geosciences. This scholarship has been given key support by the University Libraries and the Student Innovation Fellowship Program.
Funded by the student technology fee, the Student Innovation Fellowship Program is a collaborative effort among the Center for Instructional Innovation, CURVE, the Center for Instructional Effectiveness and Georgia State faculty. Students in the program develop expertise and share ideas around emerging technologies and instructional innovations, with particular attention to enhancing learning and research at Georgia State through the innovative use of technology.
Professor Ben Miller, principally appointed to the Department of English, is affiliated with CMII. Miller was the first hire made into a new media research cluster, which set the stage for what became CMII, and he served on the initial steering committee that started the Institute and shaped its direction.
Miller is principal investigator on a Digging into Data project, “Digging into Human Rights Violations,” that explores methods for accumulating narratives and entities from across the breadth of collections pertaining to mass violations of human rights. Among his other projects are a monograph on the history and future of collective, networked memory entitled “Collective Magnetic Witness”; a special issue of Annals of Scholarship entitled “Reading the World of Big Data”; a biography of the inventor of the video game, Ralph Baer, for the German Historical Institute; a platform to collect and visualize the acoustic ecology of urban environments; an archive of electro-acoustic music; and a database documentary using the Korsakow platform on the urban planning history of the Atlanta metropolitan region. His projects are team-based and draw together faculty from many universities and students at all levels at Georgia State. His most recent work has been published in Leonardo: The Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and in In Media Res.
A few examples of Miller’s students’ interactive fictions and database documentaries are available at:
- “Adversarial Media: Campaign Ad.” This conversational interactive story was written by three students at MIT in an undergraduate digital media studies course, “Becoming Digital.”
- “The Day the Air Turned to Fire.” This brief interactive exploration of some scenes from Masuji Ibuse’s Hiroshima bombing memoir, ”Black Rain”, was written by a student at North Florida in a graduate course on collective memory and computational media.
- “Clayton County” is a Korsakow Film produced by three undergraduates at Georgia State in a digital documentary course using interviews conducted by two faculty at Georgia State, Tim Crimmins and Cliff Kuhn.