A flexible path to success
The DH Certificate is more than a curriculum; it’s a dynamic community and a network of resources. Students in the program receive individual advising, participate in a vibrant series of speaker events and workshops, and work within UVA's world-class DH ecosystem of experts to develop customized technical practices that support their disciplinary goals.
The program encourages students to focus on the intellectual priorities of their home departments, using digital and computational modes to enhance--rather than compete with--their humanities scholarship. Since our founding in 2018, we have enrolled students from a dozen departments, and our requirements are flexibly designed to accommodate diverse departmental requirements without slowing time to degree completion.
UVA's DH Certificate helps students find paths to career success, whether in university teaching and research, libraries, museums, the public sector, or industry.
Achieve your scholarly goals with targeted technical learning
DHI Technical Workshops are designed for graduate students and faculty who want to integrate digital and computational methods into their scholarship. Rather than broad overviews, our workshops emphasize clear, well-paced increments that help participants move past hesitation and into active practice.
Workshops generally include guided preparation (such as software installation) and follow-up studio time, designed to help you build regular technical practice into your research. In this way, our workshops support not only the acquisition of a particular tool, but the creation of consistent, collaborative workflows that support long-term scholarship.
Peer-driven communities of scholarly and technical practice
DH Incubators are self-organizing groups of students, faculty, and staff who gather around shared technical methods or research interests — whether in texts, images, datasets, audio, video, or virtual environments.
The DHI supports Incubators by helping surface connections. Events, workshops, courses, and resources on this website are tagged by technical practice and data type, informally connecting people with overlapping interests. Incubators grow organically, sustained by their members’ energy, while drawing strength from the larger community of digital humanities at UVA.
In addition, the DHI is responsive to emerging interests: we welcome suggestions for speakers and workshops, support mailing lists, and encourage collaborative resource pages that share established, vetted workflows with others.
When humanist scholars use digital and computational approaches to advance their research and public outreach, they are participating in the digital humanities (DH). DH methods include text analysis, image analysis, geospatial analysis with GIS tools, cultural heritage representations using augmented and virtual reality tools,
In the humanities, we study human culture and the human record. Digital and computational methods can supplement established modes of inquiry and critique in humanities disciplines, thus generating new understandings of the materials in our various subject domains. Every humanistic discipline has benefited from DH approaches, although literary studies and history are probably most widely known as beneficiaries. At UVA, where we have been investing in DH since the early 1990s, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities has supported over 70 faculty DH projects, on topics including the architecture of the University and of other historical sites; digital editions of important literary, legal, and biographical texts; musical composition tools; and immersive recreations of dance.
Sometimes the outcomes of DH scholarship are intended for academic audiences and are published in peer-reviewed journals or as monographs by academic presses; sometimes DH methods enable scholars to share their discoveries and collaborate with a broader audience in digital formats such as online archives, podcasts, crowdsourced scholarship and citizen science sites, and interactive cultural heritage platforms. This site is one portal through which you can explore our digital humanities resources at the University of Virginia. I invite you to investigate our events and workshops, our organizations, and our course offerings. The excellence that you'll discover is the result of a large community, where you will find welcome and support for your own DH explorations.
