USC receives $1.9 million for digital humanities study

On Tuesday the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded USC a $1.9 million grant that will support graduate and postdoctoral students in digital humanities. The funds will be implemented through digitization of research materials, workshops, fellowships and coursework that can be applied to a digital humanities certificate through the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the School of Cinematic Arts.

The grant, which is one in a series of grants from the Mellon Foundation, will allow students and researchers to utilize digital technology within subjects such as literature, philosophy and anthropology.

“For people training in old and traditional disciplines, we can use new hardware and new software to think about research in new ways and take advantage of technology and see things that we maybe didn’t see before,” said Peter Mancall, vice dean of humanities at Dornsife College of Arts, Letters and Science.

Mancall said the grant will give students opportunities to research undiscovered patterns. As an example, Mancall said students interested in Shakespeare can utilize software to see patterns in Shakespeare’s writing that people have not studied before.

“They can utilize a digitized archive and link to other archives. That couldn’t happen before because it was too                                     time-consuming to look at big data like that,” Mancall said.

Within the next decade, USC hopes to invest $1 billion toward the support of digital knowledge and informatics.

“Our century is dominated by the quantity and influence of information and data. USC is already a world leader in digital media and informatics,” said Elizabeth Garrett, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, in a press release. “This prestigious award will help to enhance our teaching and scholarship through new ways to explore and communicate.”

The university’s dedication to digital technology is demonstrated particularly through the strength of the Media Arts + Practice program as well as the Digital Repository, which holds more than 52,000 testimonials from the Shoah Foundation.

Currently, the programs funded by the Mellon Foundation grant will only be utilized at the graduate level. Mancall, however, said summer courses are expected to be available to select undergraduates starting in 2015.

In order to promote the spread of digital scholarship, the Mellon Foundation and USC agreed that all researchers supported by the grant will make their digital sources available to the scholarly community through the Digital Repository.

Mancall said he hopes that the possibilities stemming from the grant will reveal the importance of college-level humanities.

“I want to establish USC as a central place for the international center for digital humanities,” Mancall said.  “People talk about humanities in crisis and declining because students are moving toward professional schools. I hope this grant will show the central importance of humanities and show how cool humanities can be.”