The U.S. 1940 Census was released in digital form on April 2. Read about our recent event exploring the 1940 census as digital big data.     Learn more about the our event and the 1940 Census.

[D]igital scholarship is the inevitable future of the humanities and social sciences. . . .  [D]igital literacy is a matter of national competitiveness and a mission that needs to be embraced by universities, libraries, museums, and archives. . . .  How will younger scholars in the humanities and social sciences engage these new technologies

and methods? . . .  [I]f more than a few are to pioneer new digital pathways, more formal venues and opportunities for training and encouragement are needed. . . .  A robust cyberinfrastructure should include centers that support collaborative work with specialized methods.

–Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006)

Launched by the College of Arts and Sciences in July 2011, the UNC Digital Innovation Lab is a project-focused hub for collaborative, interdisciplinary discovery, experimentation, implementation, and assessment in the use of digital technologies to advance the work of the University in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

The Lab’s agenda is organized around three interrelated areas of concentration:

• combining the project-focused organizational model of the laboratory with the social model of the network to stimulate digital humanities work as public goods: digital projects, products, tools, and applications that are (1) of special social and cultural value, (2) can be produced for free public use (or at a minimal marginal cost), (3) are scalable, (4) are reusable and repurposable, and/or (4) serve multiple audiences/end-users within and outside of the University.
• facilitating humanistic research and community engagement with large-scale data sources, and, in the process, guiding the humanities’ transformation from enterprises predicated upon data scarcity and remoteness to those that assume data hyper-abundance and ubiquity
• developing, testing, and documenting best-practice models for faculty and graduate student work in public humanities that integrates community engagement, digital technologies, and inter-disciplinary inquiry.

Associated with the Department of American Studies, the Lab seeks to collaborate with units across the University and to form project-based partnerships with cultural heritage organizations across North Carolina as well as public-facing digital humanities initiatives at other universities around the world.