Digital Humanities: UC Berkeley Recipient of $2 Million Mellon Foundation Grant

From the University of California, Berkeley:

With a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UC Berkeley will be making major advances in the integration of digital tools and technologies in humanities scholarship and teaching.
“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. But they are unfamiliar to many humanities scholars and learning to use them effectively requires an investment of time and resources,” said Anthony J. Cascardi, UC Berkeley’s Irving and Jean Stone Dean of Arts and Humanities and principal investigator on the grant.
The Mellon project is part of the larger initiative, “Digital Humanities @ Berkeley.”
As part of the grant, a new fellowship program will also 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. Furthermore, the project aims to reach undergraduates by creating courses that integrate digital humanities tools and methods.
[Clip]
According to Cascardi, the grant will enable students and faculty in the humanities to participate in other digital efforts on campus including the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the D-Lab, which principally serve data-intensive research in the social sciences.
Additional support for the initiative for digital humanities from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research will fund faculty research, and expand the technology consulting for faculty and students in the humanities provided by UC Berkeley’s Research Information Technology (Research IT) and Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Data Files, Digital Preservation, Funding, Maps, Resources