Center for Humanities and Digital Research

University of Central Florida

The mission of the newly formed UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) is to initiate and support both advanced research and teaching in the humanities and arts, and interdisciplinary scholarship within the humanities and with other disciplines. The institute provides space, resources, expertise, programming, and digital research support both for individuals and scholars who seek to collaboratively address issues of central concern to our time and place, to connect history to the present, and to explore new ways of understanding, and educating others about, the diversity of cultures and ideas in our society and around the globe.

The "humanities" are understood in a broad sense to include the traditional disciplines such as History, Philosophy, English, and Languages, area studies such as Women's Studies, African American Studies, Latin American Studies, and Judaic Studies, as well as the fine and performing arts, and also scientific, social scientific, technical, and professional disciplines that have humanistic components within them. The center builds on and extends the work in individual disciplines and departments in several ways:

- connecting faculty working on similar issues or problems within and beyond the College of Arts and Humanities,

- providing tangible support for research in the form of grant writing assistance, fellowships, publication and exhibition funding, a distinguished lecture series and forums, and scholarly conferences,

- interpreting and promoting faculty and student work in public venues that benefit the University of Central Florida community and the larger Orlando metropolitan area, and

- connecting with scholars and projects in Florida, across the US, and throughout the world.

The humanities center has a special mandate in the digital humanities, that is, in the development of tools and techniques based in computing for creating, archiving, cataloguing, investigating, and disseminating material related to human experience and representation, as well as in the investigation of the impact of the digital world on human meaning. As the digital environment has evolved into both a research and an authoring space, digital humanities blurs the boundary between scholarship and creative work. Digital technology allows the study of traditional and recent material in new ways, and it also provides new paradigms of scholarship as the tools for research become new environments for study and new sites for human expression.