National Endowment for the Humanities Invites You To Preview 54 Cutting-Edge Digital Humanities Projects

Come learn about developing mobile app platforms for history, capturing dance notation using an iPad, using gaming technology to teach the history of medicine, or applying crowd sourcing to culinary history… all in just two minutes.

From 10:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on September 27th at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the recipients of the 2011 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants will give the public a sneak preview of 54 ground-breaking projects that apply cutting-edge technology to high quality research in the humanities. Six recipients of NEH Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grants will also present.

On September 27th, Start-Up and Institute grant recipients from around the country will assemble at NEH headquarters in Washington, D.C. to present their projects in “lightning-round” format. Project directors will have just two minutes and three PowerPoint slides to introduce and explain their projects to the public.

See the full schedule of presentations here.

In between morning and afternoon lightning-round project presentations, Cathy N. Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English & John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, will deliver a lunchtime talk entitled “NOW YOU SEE IT: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” based on her book of the same title. Using cutting-edge research on the brain and learning, Cathy Davidson shows how the phenomenon of “attention blindness” shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment: Although we email, blog, tweet, and text as if by instinct, too many of us toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one in which we live.

The National Endowment for the Humanities invites you to join us— whether for a few minutes, or a few hours—to survey the future of digital humanities, in lightning-quick bursts. We ask that those who plan to attend please register online, as seating is limited.

Those too far away to make the event can use the Twitter hashtag: #SUG2011 to follow along online.

2011 Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting
September 27, 2011

10:30 — 10:45 a.m. Welcome from Brett Bobley, Director, NEH Office of Digital Humanities
10:45 a.m. — noon Project Presentations Lightning Round #1
12:30 — 1:15 p.m. Lunchtime address by Cathy Davidson, “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn”
1:15 — 2:45 p.m. Project Presentations Lightning Round #2

Location: The National Endowment for the Humanities
Old Post Office Building
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20506
Room M-09 (Ground Floor)