PRICE LAB FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES AT PENN:
In 2017, the School of Arts and Sciences opened the Price Lab for the Digital Humanities. It is the centerpiece of the new Penn Arts and Sciences strategic initiative Humanities in the Digital Age, and the Price Lab will provide the technological hardware and technical support staff necessary for a robust program that reaches across the University. Music Professor Glenda Goodman is a Faculty Fellow for 2017-2018, and is co-curating the Spring 2018 Seminar on Music/Sound.
“Digital humanities” is an umbrella term for the proliferation of digital and computational technologies that are being applied to scholarship across higher education and transforming the way humanists work. The digital humanities encompass tools ranging from computers that read massive amounts of digitized writing to facilitatethe analysis of texts and detect previously invisible patterns, to geographic information systems (GIS) that present complex histories in the form of interactive maps and 3-D modeling technologies which can produce immersive re-creations of archaeological sites and artifacts.
It is a strategic initiative in the digital humanities because the digitization of rare manuscripts, art, and artifactsleads to the democratization of learning, along with increased possibilities for research, collaboration, and trend analysis. It allows the humanities community to increase access to materials and resources, and encouraging integration of knowledge.