{"id":85842,"date":"2013-11-07T09:13:35","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T14:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=85842"},"modified":"2013-11-08T08:47:31","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T13:47:31","slug":"digital-humanities-expert-tom-scheinfeldt-joins-uconn-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/11\/digital-humanities-expert-tom-scheinfeldt-joins-uconn-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Humanities Expert Tom Scheinfeldt Joins UConn Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tom<\/a>
Tom Scheinfeldt, associate professor of digital media, joins UConn from the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Moving quickly through the halls of Bishop Center, Tom Scheinfeldt passes an \u201cUnder Construction\u201d sign here, a blank wall there, and sees nothing but potential.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is going to be lab space,\u201d he says, pointing behind a door to a room draped in canvas. \u201cAnd this is where we\u2019re going to have a space for lunchtime seminars, after-hours meetings, and just a place to show our work.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fitting that Scheinfeldt looks at an empty room and sees what will soon fill it, since he\u2019s been at the forefront of the discipline of digital humanities since the days when a researcher could count every history-oriented site on the Web.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s less a discipline than a group of people with backgrounds in the humanities applying ourselves to the digital space,\u201d says Scheinfeldt, who joined UConn as an associate professor in the Department of Digital Media and Design this fall.<\/p>\n

Scheinfeldt, who holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford universities, came from George Mason University, where he was managing director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The center grew from a staff of five when he started to become the world\u2019s largest digital humanities center.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, I see a similar commitment among the senior faculty and administration at UConn to making the University a leader in the digital space,\u201d says Scheinfeldt, who also serves as director of digital humanities in the Digital Media Center. \u201cThe strengths exist already on campus, and if they\u2019re harnessed correctly UConn can be at the front of the field. It\u2019s a real opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a mission-oriented aspect to this that I think actually helps us do digital better than private universities … How do we make sure that interactions between scholars and the general public are productive for both?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Part of the opportunity comes from a chance to define what\u2019s understood by the term \u201cdigital humanities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scheinfeldt, whose background is in public history and history of science, says the term can mean everything from creating software tailored to the needs of humanities scholars to applying insights about history and culture to digital technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a mission-oriented aspect to this that I think actually helps us do digital better than private universities which don\u2019t have that component,\u201d he says. \u201cHow do we serve the public? How do we make sure that interactions between scholars and the general public are productive for both? How does what we do benefit people? Digital humanities is one way UConn can answer those questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

To that end, Scheinfeldt has already begun a number of outreach projects aimed not only at benefiting the UConn community on campus, but the state as a whole. He\u2019s working with the Hartford Public Library on ways to tie its extensive programs for new immigrants to its existing collections, and with Connecticut Humanities on ConnecticutHistory.org<\/a>, what he calls \u201ca re-imagining of what a state encyclopedia looks like in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also forging collaborations with campus partners, including one with digital archivists and human rights scholars in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center that would see the creation of a digital volume of the former senator\u2019s papers from his time as executive trial counsel at the famous Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals.<\/p>\n

Those kinds of collaborative efforts are what help set the digital media and design department at UConn apart from counterparts at other schools, which risk becoming too focused on one aspect of digital research or technology, Scheinfeldt says. At the UConn department, which includes artists, programmers, designers, humanities scholars, business experts, and others, cross-fertilizations are a natural part of the environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy prior work always came back to the field of history in one way or another,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat UConn offers is the opportunity to work across the University: the program we\u2019re starting is radically trans-disciplinary. We\u2019re taking digital media and the digital sphere and we\u2019re bringing it all to the disciplines.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the department continues to grow \u2013 just like those tantalizingly promising spaces in the Bishop Center \u2013 Scheinfeldt says he expects the University\u2019s already burgeoning digital efforts to begin bearing fruit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much activity in the digital realm on this campus,” he says, “and what we can do is provide the focus and resources to get some of these fantastic projects off the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scheinfeldt is an authority on the intersection of digital media and the traditional humanities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":85861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1715,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[131],"class_list":["post-85842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-impact","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 05:28:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85842"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85866,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85842\/revisions\/85866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/85861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85842"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=85842"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=85842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}