About IDRH
The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH) provides resources and training in the practices and tools of the digital humanities, facilitating interdisciplinary academic collaborations and innovative externally-funded research. Founded in 2010, IDRH is supported through a partnership of:
KU Libraries | Hall Center for the Humanities | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Our Charter
The goal of IDRH is to prepare and support faculty and graduate students as they explore and use computing technology to advance humanistic scholarship across disciplines. IDRH will enhance the possibilities that digital technologies present to humanities research by:
- Providing opportunities for faculty and graduate students to learn about the use of technology for humanistic inquiry, and stimulating ongoing discussions about relationships between technologies and human experience;
- Supporting the development or novel use of digital tools and practices for innovative humanities research, including collaborative and interdisciplinary research;
- Assisting scholars to explore new and emerging models of digital research, publishing, and peer-review;
- Providing a knowledge base and the training for faculty to successfully pursue external grant awards, particularly in computationally-assisted research;
- Working with faculty, departmental leadership, promotion and tenure committees, and KU administration to generate a series of dialogues about the transformation occurring in humanities scholarship, and the implications for digital research contributions and their evaluation; and
- Providing a forum for scholarly innovation, as well as for discussions between faculty, departmental leadership, promotion and tenure committees, and KU administration about the implications of the transformations in digital scholarship on their evaluation.
Our History
- Report of the KU Task Force on Digital Directions in the Humanities (2010). IDRH was founded in 2010 based on the recommendations of a task force formed by KU Libraries, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to fund an institute for digital humanities research.
- Co-piloting a digital humanities center: a critical reflection on a libraries-academic partnership. Rosenblum, Brian, and Arienne M. Dwyer. 2016. In White, John W. and Heather Gilbert (eds.) Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries. Purdue University Press, pp. 111–126.
This book chapter describes the community-building efforts that led to the establishment of the Institute, and evaluates the partnership between the libraries and academic faculty in fostering digital humanities research and teaching on campus.
