In the past ten years, digital scholarship has become an innovative methodology for analyzing and presenting research across disciplines. Due to this shift toward “informatics,” major granting organizations now provide special programs to support this research, and many universities now have research centers to aid faculty in the development of digital projects. During 2010, faculty from across the university collaborated to create such a center at SIUE. The IRIS Center, or the Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship Center, launched its activities with a spring colloquia to explore the following questions:
March 30th, 2010 (3:30 p.m.) - Joseph Loewenstein
 | Joseph Loewenstein is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, specializing in Renaissance literature. He is also the director of Washington University’s Humanities Digital Workshop, a facility that provides support for the development of long-term faculty digital projects in the College of Arts & Sciences. In 2007 and 2009, Joe was awarded NEH Scholarly Edition Grants for his work on the Spenser Project, an edition of Collected Works of Edmund Spenser, a three-volume scholarly edition for Oxford University Press, freshly edited from the earliest extant sources in manuscript and print, and the digital Archive that will complement it. His most recent scholarly monographs treat the development of intellectual property in Early Modern England. |
April 6th, 2010 (3:30 p.m.) - John Unsworth
 | In 2008, John Unsworth was named Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, a campus-wide organization that serves to coordinate and encourage informatics-related education and research. He also continues to serve as Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a post to which he was appointed in 2003. In addition to being a Professor in GSLIS, he also holds appointments in the department of English, and on the Library faculty. During the previous ten years, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. He chaired the national commission that produced Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he has supervised research projects across the disciplines in the humanities. |
April 15th, 2010 (5:00 p.m.) - Kenneth Price
 | Kenneth Price is the Hillegass University Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His recent books include Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work, co-authored with Ed Folsom (Blackwell, 2005) and To Walt Whitman, America (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Since 1995, Price has co-edited The Walt Whitman Archive. In 2005, the Archive received a "We the People" challenge grant from NEH to build a permanent endowment to support ongoing work. In 2008, Price received a Digital Innovation Award from ACLS. |
April 22nd, 2010 (3:30 p.m.) - The IRIS Center Faculty Projects
| Faculty who work with the IRIS Center discussed the Center’s goals and also provide demonstrations of their own projects. |
