NEH Co-Sponsors Shared Horizons II Virtual Workshop on Data, Health, and Digital Humanities
Interdisciplinary initiative on medicine and the humanities accepting paper proposals from early career scholars
Washington, D.C.—The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is pleased co-sponsor Data, Health, and the Digital Humanities: Shared Horizons II (DH2), a series of all-virtual programs and a scholarly book, hosted by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and supported by a grant to Virginia Tech.
The DH2 initiative will assess the past decade of burgeoning biomedical-driven humanities scholarship; chart its increasingly interdisciplinary future; and address new challenges and opportunities for enhancing the humanities and its intersections with data and subjects of individual, community, and global health.
Through the involvement of participants drawn from a variety of areas in biomedicine and the humanities, DH2 will concentrate on themes and topics intersecting the digital humanities and health data, including transnational studies, data and health before the modern period, health and data experts from underrepresented populations, and experiences of marginalized communities
DH2 will mark the tenth anniversary of Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities, a unique interdisciplinary symposium held in 2013 which marked the beginning of the NEH/NLM collaboration. Since Shared Horizons, NEH and the NLM have co-sponsored many initiatives which have explored the intersection of biomedical and humanities research. DH2 will continue this impactful, decade-long collaboration, which has brought together scholars, scientists, librarians, archivists, curators, technical information specialists, healthcare professionals, cultural heritage professionals, and others in the humanities and biomedical communities to share expertise and develop new research agendas.
DH2 will include two virtual public lectures as part of the NLM History Talks series, and a virtual workshop followed by an edited volume of the research papers developed in the workshop.
The first virtual lecture, “Shutting the Digital Back Door: Creating Tech Justice with Health Data Liquidity and the Digital Humanities,” will be delivered by Kim Gallon, PhD, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University. Dr. Gallon will speak at 1p.m. ET on Tuesday, October 4, 2022, via NIH videocast.
The second virtual lecture, “Life after Lockdown: Pandemic Perspectives from Peru,” will be delivered by Katy Kole de Peralta, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor of History, Arizona State University. Dr. Kole de Peralta will speak at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 9, 2022, via NIH videocast.
Learn more about these public lectures here.
The Data, Health, and Digital Humanities workshop offers opportunities for early career scholars, including current doctoral students or scholars within eight years of completing their doctoral degrees, to participate. The project has issued a call for papers interested in taking part, with priority given to research exploring themes related to diverse populations, examining health across the regions of the world, and exploring periods of history before the modern era. Selected workshop participants will take part in a series of sessions, from fall 2022 through spring 2023, leading to publication of an edited volume of participants’ original research contributions. The resulting book will be made available as an open access, free, digital edition as well as a low-cost print edition from Virginia Tech Publishing. The deadline for paper proposals is September 14.
Participation in the DH2 workshop will be free to workshop attendees. Members of the public are welcome to attend events open to all audiences, including the History Talks lectures and roundtables by workshop participants in spring 2023. Public events will be announced on the workshop website.
About the Partner Institutions:
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at neh.gov.
U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)
NLM, part of the National Institutes of Health, is a leader in information innovation and the world's largest medical library with more than 17 million items in its collection. MNLM develops electronic information services used by scientists, health professionals, and the public around the world. NLM makes its information services known and available with the help of the Network of the National Library of Medicine, which consists of 5,600 member institutions, including seven Regional Medical Libraries. NLM conducts and supports research that applies computer and information science to meet the information needs of clinicians, public health administrators, biomedical researchers, and consumers.
Virginia Tech, in keeping with its motto Ut Prosim (“That I May Serve”), takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education and preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the Commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 225 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $496 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.