DH Community Lauds "School Without Walls"

On September 24, University administrators, faculty, staff, and students gathered to celebrate the official launch of UVA's School of Data Science. Under a tent festooned with banners featuring the school's informal motto, "A School Without Walls," newly-appointed Dean Phillip E. Bourne offered remarks alongside President Jim Ryan and Provost Liz Magill outside the Dell 1 building on Central Grounds. The launch event drew a number of affiliates from UVA's digital humanities community with curricular and disciplinary ties to what was previously the Data Science Institute.

Dean Bourne spoke enthusiastically about how the digital humanities contribute to the School of Data Science's research and teaching mission.

"Digital Humanities (DH) has long been an important area of active collaborations across the University and the new School of Data Science (SDS) intends to join in those collaborations," Bourne said. He noted existing collaborations in the areas of education and medicine and expressed his intent to explore joint DH/SDS faculty and staff hires and research ventures based on shared academic values.

"At UVA, data science and the arts and humanities are well situated to reinforce one another," said Alison Booth, Professor of English and Academic Director of UVA Library's Scholars' Lab. She heralded SDS's interdisciplinary reach and the school's potential to capitalize on UVA's existing strengths including those in DH. "Many of the leaders in digital humanities today got their start here, and we have IATH, Scholars’ Lab, the DH Graduate Certificate, and the Humanities Informatics Lab (SIF-funded through 2019). We’re ready to help form a DH/SDS collaboratory and to coordinate cluster hires that serve Data (Arts and) Humanities/Science."

Worthy Martin, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Acting Director of IATH echoed the excitement about future partnerships between SDS and the DH community. "Digital Humanities (DH) scholarship is, in the vast majority of cases, a deeply collaborative endeavor between faculty, students and technologists. In that respect, DH is very similar to "computational science", e.g., computational biology. Extending these DH collaborations to include participation by members of the School of Data Science (SDS) community is an exciting possibility."

Rennie Mapp, Administrative Director of the DH Graduate Certificate program at UVA, highlighted curricular opportunities for DH Certificate students at the School of Data Science. "It's the good fortune of DH Certificate students to be able to take courses at SDS like Rafael Alvarado's Exploratory Text Analytics course. Collaborations between the School of Data Science and the Graduate DH Certificate program create opportunities that are absolutely unique among graduate-level digital humanities programs in North America."

Pre-dating its transformation into UVA's 12th school, the Data Science program at Virginia has a longstanding commitment to ethical and responsible data science. With the promise of a full complement of programming that includes UVA's DH partnerships, the SDS is poised to become one of UVA's most versatile institutions focused on both the future of technology and data and the humanistic concerns and questions they generate.