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UC Berkeley Wins $2 Million Grant for Digital Humanities Research

The University of California Berkeley has received a $2 million grant to improve the integration of digital technology with humanities education and scholarship.

Awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the grant will launch a new fellowship and "provide opportunities for faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to develop proficiency in the use of digital materials and tools, and to apply those skills to their research," according to a news release. "Furthermore, the project aims to reach undergraduates by creating courses that integrate digital humanities tools and methods."

"Digital tools and methods such as data visualization, GIS, statistics and text mining can have a transformative effect on research and teaching in the humanities, particularly with the mass digitization of texts and artwork," said Anthony J. Cascardi, UC Berkeley's Irving and Jean Stone Dean of Arts and Humanities and principal investigator on the grant, in a prepared statement. "But they are unfamiliar to many humanities scholars and learning to use them effectively requires an investment of time and resources."

The project is part of a larger Berkeley initiative, Digital Humanities @ Berkeley, and will provide humanities students access to other digital efforts on campus such as the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the D-Lab.

"Humanities courses teach students critical engagement with texts and media," said Cathy Koshland, UC Berkeley's vice-chancellor for undergraduate education, in a prepared statement. "Incorporating digital tools and methods into the curriculum will give students experience applying more traditional humanities skills in contexts that are grounded in new technologies, and this in turn will serve them particularly well in the contemporary world."

More information about the Digital Humanities @ Berkeley is available at digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu.

About the Author

Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].

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