Data Health and Digital Humanities Workshop

The Data, Health, and Digital Humanities workshop provides early career scholars with opportunities to publish original research in chapters following scheduled discussion of pre-circulated drafts resulting in an open access and peer reviewed scholarly volume. The workshop is funded by a Chair’s Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in partnership with the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, and organized by Virginia Tech. The partner institutions share a commitment to advancing scholarly research on data, health, and the digital humanities in ways that engage academic audiences, engage publicly relevant issues, and support early career scholars. The workshop follows broad and inclusive definitions of the key terms with the goal of advancing integrated analysis across multiple interdisciplinary perspectives. Data refers to the quantification of essential information which has long been central to analysis in social and health sciences, and only now is becoming more integrated into humanities interpretation. Health is broadly defined to include all types of disease, preventive and treatment measures, social determinants, and narrative interpretations. The digital humanities encompasses innovative approaches associated with the digitization of source materials, analytical tools, and scholarly communication. This workshop pursues an innovative approach by taking place entirely remotely, thus broadening participation for early career academics, faculty at institutions with limited research support, and unaffiliated scholars, for whom the demands of travel to workshops may pose obstacles to academic participation. The intellectual content, scholarly approach, and original format of Data, Health, and the Digital Humanities thus builds on a record of institutional collaboration while also pursuing new models of networked learning and engaged scholarship.