We learned today that we were successful in funding for the development of a Digital Humanities lab.\u00a0The application was focused on developing the existing Southampton digital humanities community via web and interaction technologies and will be led by sotonDH postgraduate students. It will develop two existing spaces, connect in several others and build social networking tools.<\/p>\n
The two physically separated spaces at the Avenue Campus will be integrated through online technologies to create a single Digital Humanities Distributed Lab. In the second stage the distributed lab will also connect extant Digital Humanities facilities, teaching and people at the Highfield Campus (in music and electronics and computer science) and at Winchester School of Art. Standard social media and collaboration technologies will be tailored to offer UG and masters students involved in similar but disconnected Digital Humanities learning activities an opportunity to network, collaborate and share their activities. Technical interventions will emphasise connectedness and create a persistent awareness of work and resources occurring in the Digital Humanities across the University, initially focussed on the two spaces at Avenue Campus.<\/p>\n
The Digital Humanities Distributed Lab will employ a range of digital technologies to help building a community of students around the spaces associated with this application (including those at Highfield and WSA). We are encouraging Web Science, Web Technologies and Digital Humanities PhD students at Southampton to form a development team, supported by input from other PhD, UG and MSc students. Input has been sought from colleagues across the University with an interest in e-learning and human computer interaction.<\/p>\n
Teaching and learning within the spaces will be adapted to benefit from this environment. This could, for example, facilitate UG student-driven projects emphasising the fun aspects of collaborative research, breaking down the boundaries between Digital Humanities disciplines including those in the Humanities, at WSA and in the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciense. Above all the spaces will build on existing work in the Faculty of Humanities to promote learning that crosses hierarchical boundaries of UG, PGI, PGR and staff interactions in the Digital Humanities domain.<\/p>\n