The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Texas A&M University Libraries’ Sterling C. Evans Chair announce the third year of support for the early development of projects in digital humanities. This program will assist faculty in any department in the university by providing up to $10,000 to a project in digital humanities (collaborative or singly directed). Preference may be given to untenured or newly tenured faculty applicants.

This program is meant to offer significant but flexible assistance to faculty – as individuals or in collaborative teams – whose scholarly project depends on or is fundamentally inflected by information technology, digitization, and computer-aided research. The program is especially aimed at those embarked on or keen to embark on research in the humanities that is ‘born digital.’

Another call will be made in spring 2010.

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Texas A&M University Libraries’ Sterling C. Evans Chair are pleased to announce Dr. Heidi Campbell as the recipient of the 2009-2010 Evans/Glasscock Digital Humanities Project Fellowship.

Dr. Campbell (Department of Communication) received this fellowship to continue work on “The New Media, Religion & Digital Culture Project,” an interdisciplinary project to develop tools that can be used to help identify the issues and questions raised by religious interaction with new media. The project has three key goals: To conduct a more detailed mapping of the scholarship related to the intersection of new media, religion and culture; To increase networking options for researchers to share their research and publications in these areas; To resource the study of new media and religion at Texas A&M University.

To complete these goals, the project team will create flexible bibliographic database to more accurately map the current boundaries of the field and reflect on which research questions are in need of further exploration. This task will involve an information gathering symposium which will bring together members of other centers such as the Nabil Echchcaib Center for Media, Religion & Culture at University of Colorado and the Media, Culture and Meaning site at the University of Denver. It will also create an online networking forum for international scholars and graduate students in this interdisciplinary area of study while equipping lab space for more advanced research on religion online, especially related to religious video gaming and online religious rituals.