Seventy scholars from around the world met for a conference yesterday at the University's Darden School of Business to consider the future of digital scholarship.
The conference, titled "Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities," is three-day event which began yesterday. Digital humanities is the application of information technology to subjects in the humanities such as history, art history, classics, musicology, linguistics and philosophy.
The conference will make a set of recommendations as to how to address challenges to advancing humanistic scholarship, said Anita Jones, chair of the summit's organizing committee.
According to Summit Co-Chair Bernard Frischer, the conference will look into digital tools such as software programs that help scholars apply primary material to their studies and academic endeavors.
"A word processing program can let you look at text, but a digital tool is something that will give you an insight," Frischer said.
Digital tools will allow humanists to access artifacts such as buildings, paintings and poems so they can discover something in their study that they did not notice before.
"The digital technology can provide us and lead us to new methodologies and new insights and new fields that weren't possible in the old days before [information technology] came along," Frischer said.
Some of the digital methodologies currently in use include search tools which allow historians to find particular items in extended documents through textual analysis.
"You can visit a Web site and see images of buildings in [antique cities], and the Web site is a digital tool because it allows you to visualize what was there before," Jones said.
The conference is bringing together scholars from various backgrounds in the humanities, including literature, history, linguistics, and computer scientists. The conference is being held in discussion format rather than in presentation format, Jones said.
"This is an innovative conference," Frischer said. "People are coming here to present already prepared papers, they are coming here to think, brainstorm, and be creative, and that's something new and exciting for us."
Although the conference was invitation only, organizers said the turnout was twice what they had expected it to be.
"The format of the conference presumes a lot of background knowledge, and the space limitations prevent us from opening the doors to the wide public," Frischer said.
He added that he did not want there to be a distinction between participants and spectators at the conference.
According to Jones, ideas discussed at the conference could affect the way in which material is presented to students and is available for research.
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