Mission
Persistence through time and across media is the most critical attribute of humanities research, concerned as it is with the record of the past--but achieving that persistence in an era of rapidly developing technology is a very difficult task. IATH’s central mission is to provide scholars in the humanities with the time, the tools, and the techniques to document and interpret the human record, in electronic form. To that end, we select a small number of fellows each year, through a competitive application process, and we provide those fellows with consulting, technical support, applications programming, and networked publishing facilities. The Institute sponsors dozens of different humanities research projects, in disciplines as diverse as anthropological linguistics, architectural history, history of science, British literature, and film, to name just a few. Professional staff and student researchers assist IATH’s fellows.
History
In 1819, Thomas Jefferson founded a new kind of university in the Commonwealth of Virginia--a completely integrated educational environment, one that encouraged intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries, that combined living and learning, that brought people together in new configurations, and that involved everyone in a cooperative pursuit of knowledge. He called this environment his "Academical Village."
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities was established
at the University of Virginia in 1992, with a major grant from IBM and
a multi-year commitment of support from the University, as part of an
effort to bring Jefferson's educational ideals into the twenty-first
century. The University's strong information-technology and library facilities,
along with its historical dedication to the ideal of democratizing access
to information, have made it a national and international leader in the
application of information technology to the arts, humanities and social
sciences.
Beginning in 1992 a Steering Committee of visionary scholars including Edward Ayers, Alan Batson, Jerome McGann, William Wulf and others managed IATH. A search committee commissioned by the Steering Committee carried out the search for a Director of the Institute. John Unsworth was selected, and his term began September 1, 1993. IATH’s founders are respected leaders in humanities computing, digital scholarship, and academic administration.
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Through the years IATH fellows and projects have earned recognition and several awards.
- The first E-Lincoln prizes, for electronic scholarship related to the Civil Award, were awarded to two IATH sponsored projects , Ed Ayers' Valley of the Shadow and Steve Railton's Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture.
- The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a hypermedia
archive has been received accolades for the pioneering work of Jerome
McGann at IATH:
- The Richard W. Lyman Award of the National Humanities Center
- The Distinguished Achievement Award of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- The James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association for his book, "Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web.
- EdSitement, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities to recognize and promote the best web sites for humanities education, has selected a number of IATH projects including Salem Witchcraft Trials, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Valley of the Shadow.
- The William Blake Archive awarded The Modern Language Association Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition.
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IATH has generated over $9 million in grant funding and gifts in kind since it began operations. Much of this funding has come from Federal agencies and private foundations, and has gone to support faculty research and teaching across the University.