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Humanities Network and Network Groups

In 2004-05 the Humanities Center launched two complementary initiatives in collaborative research called the Humanities Research Network and the Research Network Groups program. Groups of scholars including faculty at Stanford and other institutions are undertaking projects that no single scholar could attempt alone, developing new research tools, and transforming the ways humanists think about their disciplines.This program makes it possible for them to collaborate at a distance using new interactive and multimedia technologies.

This project seeks not only to create new research opportunities but also to encompass several dynamic phenomena likely to change humanistic inquiry in the twenty-first century:

Research Network Groups are funded projects to allow scholars to collaborate face-to-face for short periods at Stanford or other institutions while continuing their collaboration over the web using Humanities Research Network. In addition, most groups make use of audio, video and text messaging for one-on-one or small group conferences. This multimedia technology lets scholars see and talk to one another directly from a home or office computer in real-time exchanges. The Humanities Network provides virtual spaces for these collaborative groups to post, edit and exchange text, images, and audio and video recordings of talks, commentaries, interviews, meetings, and other presentations of work in progress, and create and access online databases, websites or other electronic resources.

The Humanities Network will allow the Center to continue in this century to provide the kind of leadership in research that justifies its place as the top campus-based humanities center in the U.S.

This project is innovative because it explicitly inspires the organic emergence of interdisciplinary research groups from the Center's highly successful Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Workshop Program, which currently supports nearly twenty workshops on topics ranging from Critical Studies in New Media to Social Ethics and Normative Theory. A number of these groups have already produced collaborative research projects such as the collection of essays titled The Construction of Meaning, demonstrating linguistic research on a variety of languages ranging from Quechua to Mandarin and English to Korean, and a Mellon Sawyer grant that brought together experts from the United States, South Africa, Israel and Palestine to address the topic of Settlement, Race, and Sovereignty. The Humanities Network will foster these collaborative efforts and expand their reach creating new areas of research across institutions.

Through the Humanities Network and Research Network Groups, the Center seeks to build on its greatest strengths in order to construct a ground-breaking, yet flexible infrastructure for research that will emerge naturally from and provide vital energy for the Center's core programs, allow scholars to undertake projects that no single researcher or institution could contemplate alone, and build collaborative ties with scholars and institutions around the world.