Taylor Davis-Van Atta
Head of Research Services
University of Houston
Linda Garcia Merchant
Director, Digital Humanities Core Facility
University of Houston
Building a community of practice begins with identifying a collective of practitioners, scholars, students, and community members willing to engage in democratized methods to produce digital outcomes. In a first-of-its-kind approach to facilitating digital humanities (DH) research at scale, the University of Houston’s Digital Humanities Core facility (DHC), initiated in 2022 as a partnership between UH Libraries, UH Division of Research, and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Data Science Institute, consolidates technological infrastructure, training programs, and interdisciplinary expertise to establish an enterprise-wide resource for digital scholarship production and publication. At the heart of the Digital Humanities Core is a three-tiered, globalized, micro-credentialing program designed to train cohorts of researchers and students on successful strategies for project planning, development, and funding. This credentialing is aimed at producing autonomous communities of scholars capable of growing and sustaining a campus culture of interdisciplinary research. This presentation discusses strategies for building scalable, competency-based DH training for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates that meet the demands of a large public R1 institution. It also demonstrate outcomes that create opportunities for researchers and students at all levels of digital work and scholarship in a variety of forms collaborating across STEM and the Humanities.
https://www.uh.edu/research/about/core-facilities/digital-humanities/