Nick Vernon, Campus Carrier Deputy News Editor
Do you possess both a passion for the humanities and an interest in technology? If so, be sure to come see Dr. O. Vernon Burton, director of the Clemson CyberInstitute and professor of history at Clemson University, who will be speaking on Feb. 6 at 5 p.m. in the Memorial Library Mezzanine.
Dr. Burton will be presenting the first of three discussions as part of the “Torn to Bits?: Technology Becomes the Humanities” lecture series. His lecture is titled “Cyber Infrastructure in the Social Sciences and Humanities: An Educational Revolution in a Digital World.”
Dr. Burton is a widely recognized scholar as a historian of the American south and as an innovator of digital applications in research and higher education.
His notable published works include the Pulitzer Prize-nominated titles “The Age of Lincoln,” “In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions,” and “Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities.”
Additionally, Dr. Burton is the senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), founding director and present chair of the advisory board for the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (I-CHASS), and former president of the Southern Historical Association.
His lecture will deal with the digital humanities – a rapidly evolving field of research in which technological innovation converges with traditional humanistic practice. The discussion will focus on digital humanities’ emergence, practice and implications for education in the digital era.
Som Linthicum, who is the Instructional Services Librarian and was on the board that put this lecture series together, expressed his insight into the digital humanities.
“Digital innovation has the potential to profoundly effect the ways we approach both education and knowledge formation as we move forward,” Linthicum said. “The expectation will soon be that students should not only be familiar with these sorts of projects, but, potentially, should be expected to critique them, analyze them, and produce digital projects of their own.”
The Memorial Library at Berry is sponsoring the entire “Torn to Bits?” lecture series.