Computer Science & Engineering

Research to Define the Future

Title: Complex Information and the Future of Digital Humanities

William G. Thomas, III

John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities

Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Thursday, September 15, 2005 at 4:00 p.m., 115 Avery Hall

Abstract: A new field called digital humanities has emerged in the last two decades around the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Historians, literary scholars, musical scholars, and others have begun to use advanced technologies both to discover new interpretations and to create new modes of scholarly communication. They have created large digital archives, complex hypertext narratives, and in some cases algorithmic programs, relational databases, and data mining systems. At the same time the volume of digitization has exploded, as libraries, archives, and governments rushed to move both historical and current data into electronic format. Despite these advances and some stellar projects in digital humanities, advanced computing technologies remain underdeveloped in the humanities and there is opportunity for fruitful collaboration across disciplines. Complex information rests at the heart of humanities scholarship--words, images, numbers, sounds, and artifacts in the billions. Yet the tools to arrange, model, visualize, and analyze this information need development. This talk explores the key issues facing the use of advanced technology in the humanities.

Biography: William Thomas is the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He teaches in the Department of History courses on American History, the Civil War, Southern History, and Digital History. He has served as Director and co-founder of the Virginia Center for Digital History and Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia where he led research in the field of digital humanities scholarship. His digital research initiatives have included The Valley of the Shadow, Race and Place: African American Community in the Jim Crow South, Television News of the Civil Rights Era, and The Roots of Modern America. He is also the author of Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South, published in 1999 by Louisiana State University Press.

Recently, he co-authored with Edward L. Ayers a fully electronic scholarly article for publication in the American Historical Review, titled "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities." The article is based on their research in the Valley of the Shadow project. Ayers, Thomas, and Anne S. Rubin shared the Lincoln Prize in 2001 from the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College for the Valley of the Shadow project, and the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association in recognition of the project as an outstanding contribution to the teaching of history.

Thomas' current research initiative is The Roots of Modern America, an interdisciplinary effort to study the systems, processes, and networks at the center of America's 19th century transformation. The pilot project in The Roots of Modern America is an environmental and social history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the coming of the railroad.

He earned his Masters and Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. He is a graduate of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and Trinity College in Connecticut. Thomas currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and their three children.