DigiLab and digital humanities faculty in the news

Earlier this spring semester, crews from C-SPAN visited UGA to film classes taught by Stephen Berry and Scott Nesbit in the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab for the cable news network’s American History TV series. The lecture by Berry, Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era in the department of history and Willson Center associate academic director for digital humanities, will air on C-SPAN 3 at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 14, again at midnight the same night, and finally at 12 p.m. Sunday, May 22. After the program has aired, it will be available in its entirety on the C-SPAN website.

In Berry’s lecture, from a class about coroners in the 19th century South, he discusses the role of a coroner as an agent of the state and talks about the records created from their inquests. A preview is embedded below.

The class taught by Nesbitt, assistant professor in the College of Environment and Design, is tentatively scheduled to air in late June.

The Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, known informally as the DigiLab, is a state-of-the-art instruction space as well as an incubator and publicity hub for nationally recognized digital humanities projects. Opened in 2015, it is outfitted with flexible workspaces for individual or collaborative projects and with advanced technological resources. The DigiLab is located on the third floor of the Main Library, across from the newly renovated Reading Room and adjacent to the University of Georgia Press.

The DigiLab is affiliated with DIGI (Digital Humanities Research and Innovation), a course prefix and interdisciplinary certificate program that brings together courses taught across a range of humanities disciplines, including English, History, Classics, Geography, Romance Languages, Theater and Film, Historic Preservation, Art, and Music. The DIGI program also works closely with humanistic information science personnel at the Main Library, the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, and the Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection. DIGI courses are always taught in a “collaboratory” model, involving students as true partners in research projects supported by the DigiLab.