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Lecture Series

New Directions in Humanities Research, 06-07

4:00 p.m. Thursday, January 18, 2006
Levinthal Hall

John Unsworth
Dean and Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

New Methods for Humanities Research

Professor Unsworth considers the ways in which new methods, enabled by information technology, can support humanities research —some new kinds of research, and some very familiar kinds of research.

In 2003, John Unsworth was named Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with appointments as Professor in GSLIS, in the department of English, and on the Library faculty. During the previous ten years, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center.

Unsworth co-chaired the national commission that produced the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he has supervised research projects across the disciplines in the humanities. He has also published widely on the topic of electronic scholarship, as well as co-directing one of nine national partnerships in the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, and securing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, IBM, Sun, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and others.

In 1990, at NCSU, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture (now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as part of Project Muse). He also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, co-chaired the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, and served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Among his many other activities, John Unsworth is currently the Director of the Nora Project to create text-mining, pattern-recognition, and visualization software.

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