by Jeff Young, reporter & podcaster
On the occasion of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities’ twentieth anniversary, Jeff Young, an editor, reporter, and podcaster focused on higher education and how technologies are reshaping our world, was engaged to author the story of the CDRH’s rich human impact.
“I hope this story will interest people new to the work of the CDRH,” said Andy Jewell, codirector and professor in the UNL Libraries, “but I also hope the many, many people who have been part of our shared history read it and feel pride at the scope of what we’ve accomplished together.”
Below is the abstract of the full publication.
Twenty years ago, digital humanities seemed like a frontier. Some pioneering academics and librarians saw the still-new technology of the internet as a space for scholarly discovery and multimedia storytelling and a way to bring once-hidden texts to everyone, everywhere. They faced skepticism that it was all a fad and concerns that such projects might not be rewarded in professional reviews in fields for which “publish or perish” meant in printed journals and monographs. Significant early digital humanities experiments grew at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and scholars there decided in 2005 to set up an outpost on campus to foster and lead digital humanities work across disciplines, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH).
Today, the Center has made its mark across the nation and globally, supporting the Walt Whitman Archive, the Willa Cather Archive, Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, Petitioning for Freedom, and other projects that collectively draw more than two million visitors a year. And the Center has been a key convener of scholars advancing digital scholarship around the world. In the process, the Center’s faculty, students, fellows, and affiliates have surfaced parts of history that had been silenced, enhanced education through adoption of its materials in countless classrooms, helped build tech platforms and standards to improve the sharing of scholarly materials, and nurtured the careers of a diverse collection of impactful scholars.
Read the full publication on the CDRH website. There is also a PDF version.
The 20th anniversary of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is just one of the anniversaries the University Libraries is celebrating this academic year. See all that we celebrate during Pages to Paths: A Celebration of Our Libraries.