Director’s Welcome

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Welcome to the Borderlands Digital Humanities Center opened in the Fall of 2024 following several years of externally funded collaborative digital and public humanities projects in the College of Liberal Arts. I am overjoyed to serve as the Center’s inaugural director.

Every digital humanist I have met came to the field by a different path. My own began by applying the theories and observations on representation from media studies and design to contemporary print literature, which quickly led to researching electronic literature and multimedia storytelling. The move toward making digital projects pressed me into exploring information science, UX design, and digital archiving. After feeling a bit distanced from my home medium of language, I revisited stylistics in mostly written language before I braved taking on a two-year course of study in mathematics and statistics to understand its uses and limitations in analyzing style. The underlying current in all these twists and turns was a persistent interest in how things are made and the cultural and social assumptions they reveal, perpetuate, or repress.

What makes digital humanities so enticing is its collaborative, interdisciplinary nature and its will to know both through doing and theorizing. What makes it so pressing today is that, while it is interested in digital technologies and cultures, it is still rooted in a humanistic inquiry that resists decontextualization, simplification, and black-box decision making. Digital humanists can help usher in a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the digital and datafied world we are making.

Regardless of your home discipline, the Borderlands Digital Humanities Center invites anyone interested in fostering a more humane, culturally-aware, and self-reflective digital future to join in our work and community.

Dr. Elisabet Takehana
Director
E: eotakehana@utep.edu

MISSION AND VISION

The mission of the Borderlands Digital Humanities Center (BDHC) is to be:

An open and inviting hub invested in serving as stewards of place and community collaborators
A visible and dynamic forum for interdisciplinary, humanistic inquiry
An incubator for digital project development
A training space for digital humanities methods and practices in the humanities

The Center advances intellectual inquiry across disciplines, anchored in the humanities and dedicated to engagement with communities throughout the U.S. – Mexico Borderlands. The Center pursues and supports bi-national, multi-cultural projects on digital platforms that honor the peoples, environments, and experiences of the Borderlands and beyond and reaffirm the role of human interpretation in the age of big data. The Center also trains students and faculty in DH methods and skills, sponsors talks and discussions, and collaborates with community partners on issues of digital literacy and culture.

Digital humanities scholarship, in broad strokes, (1) uses computational tools to answer humanities questions of humanities text, (2) asks new questions of humanities texts made possible or evident by computational tools or affordances, or (3) brings humanistic critique to computational, digital, and technological texts. Such work takes many forms and are methodologically diverse, but at the Borderlands Digital Humanities Center, we strive to imagine a digital present and future that centers care, equity, ethics, and social justice.