History of the Digital Humanities Initiative at SDSU

In 2013, Joanna Brooks (then Chair of SDSU’s Department of English and Comparative Literature) ventured across town to UCSD to hear Jessica Pressman and N. Katherine Hayles discuss their edited collection, Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. The book argues that the study of text is the study of media and thus strives to help humanities departments, especially literature departments, recognize and claim the important role they serve in training students for the digital ecology. After the talk, Joanna pulled Jessica aside and asked if she would help apply this paradigm to a particular department: English and Comparative Literature at SDSU.
Together, during the academic year 2013-2014, Joanna and Jessica developed a ground-up approach to using digital humanities to inspire faculty learning: to stimulate interest in new research questions or practices, to build community around these issues, and to experiment in ways of translating this new knowledge into lessons for the classroom.

The 2014-2015 marked the start of a full-blown initiative in Digital Humanities at SDSU. During that first year, we piloted grassroots programming efforts to inspire interest in digital studies, for faculty and students. These efforts included Digital Pedagogy Learning Community, Faculty Research Group, Reboot Faculty Camp. We also hosted special events that served our larger goal of stimulating digital humanities activity and community formation: THATCamp: Diving into Digital Humanities, Electronic Literature Reading Event, Special Guest Lectures.

In 2015-2016, we continued our successful programs and build upon them with new ones. In Fall 2015, Jessica Pressman joined the ladder faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she continues to direct the Digital Humanities Initiative. We received a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to build a regional network around digital humanities pedagogy, and we were awarded an Area of Excellence in “Digital Humanities and Global Diversity,”or http://go.sdsu.edu/research/ which allows us to hire tenure-track faculty in different disciplines and build a research emphasis in Digital Humanities at SDSU.

In 2016-2017, we welcome two new faculty hired under the Area of Excellence, we will hold a regional conference and continue building digital research across SDSU and the region.

In 2016-2017, we welcomed two new faculty hired under the Area of Excellence: Pamella Lach (DH Librarian) and Nathian Rodriguez (Journalism and Media Studies) and co-organized a regional DH Event “Learning through Digital Humanities: A Showcase” at USD. We held our first showcase of SDSU DH research at SDSU (December 2016) and co-organized, with the Library, The Year of the Book.

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Email: jpressman@sdsu.edu
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