Urbina Appointed Director of Digital Humanities Program in Liberal Arts
Home > News > Urbina Appointed Director of Digital Humanities Program in Liberal ArtsEduardo Urbina, professor of Hispanic studies, has been appointed director of the Digital Humanities Program in the College of Liberal Arts effective immediately. As director he will work with liberal arts faculty to secure funding for research projects and promote faculty accomplishments to the appropriate audiences. About 20 faculty and students in the College of Liberal Arts are currently engaged in some type of scholarship involving digital humanities.
“The Digital Humanities program at Texas A&M University emerged from the scholarship of a rapidly growing number of Liberal Arts faculty and students,” said Ben M. Crouch, executive associate dean of liberal arts. “Digital humanities is an exciting new field, which our program will help advance. In addition to support from the college, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Evans Library also continue to make important contributions to this initiative.”
Digital Humanities deals with the fundamental changes that new media brings to modern humanities scholarship. It incorporates the new methodologies specific to electronic publication and the digital representation of archival materials. Digital humanities uses information technology to illuminate the human record. It also uses an understanding of the human record to enlighten the development and use of information technology.
In one form, that could mean scholars using computer technology to share information, such as putting different versions of the same book online so that scholars worldwide can access and study these versions without having to travel to various libraries. In another form it could mean researching how people gather and learn online to better understand how one teaches a classic novel using computers and the Internet.
Urbina has a long record of using technology to advance his scholarship on Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish author credited with the development of the modern novel. Urbina is the director of the Cervantes Project at Texas A&M, a three-part digital initiative that includes the Cervantes International Bibliography Online, the Cervantes Digital Library and the Cervantes Digital Archive of Images (http://cervantes.tamu.edu). Through this project Urbina serves as editor of the Anuario Bibliográfico Cervantino and of the Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos. He is founding member of the Cervantes Society of America, and a member of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española.
Urbina earned his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley (1979). In addition to his role as professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M, he also is visiting professor and director of the Cervantes Chair at the University of Castilla-La Mancha.
Reposted from: http://clla.tamu.edu/news/10-30-07-urbina-appointed-director-of-digital-humanities-program-in-liberal-arts
Posted by James Smith on Tuesday, October 30, 2007
