Almost every domain of scientific, technical, and artistic practice is experiencing rapid change in its culture, institutions, and material practices due to new (i.e., digital) media. The aim of this workshop is to provide a venue for attracting a multi-disciplinary group of faculty, staff, and graduate students together with persons outside the university in industry and the arts who think about and work with new media in the humanities.

We are particularly interested in fostering the fusion of critical theoretical work from the humanities with the computational sciences. The transdisciplinary endeavor in “computational humanities” we envisage would draw upon expertise in the philosophy of media, film studies, communications, literature studies, cognitive science and computer science.

In addition to theoretical and critical studies our initiative incorporates a significant “hands-on” component in which the technical aspects of new media are discussed and workshop members share aspects of their technical approaches, design philosophies as well as specific tool sets employed in their work. A key collaborative aspect of the workshop is our aim to attract persons locally and in industry who are building and interested in sharing tools for enabling the computational humanities.

The workshop is organized as a seminar / lecture / “collaboratory” in which the group discusses readings from the emerging field of critical studies in new media. A further feature of the workshop is the occasional invitation of a key outside guest speaker who has written on new media, constructed a work using new media, or created tools for enabling the construction of new media environments.

A key component of the workshop is the development of a collaboratory in which members share tools and expertise for enabling work in new media relevant to humanities projects. While the workshop would take place in meetings on the Stanford campus, we envision sessions using internet video conferencing that bring in outside guest-presenters or link up with other groups working on similar issues at other universities.