MISSION WELCOME
The Borderlands Digital Humanities Center (BDHC) at UTEP opened in the Fall of 2024 following several years of externally funded collaborative digital and public humanities projects in the College of Liberal Arts. The Center’s mission 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. Building on the strengths of our region, the Center pursues and supports bi-national, multi-cultural projects on digital platforms that honor the peoples, environments, and experiences of the Borderlands 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 discussion, and collaborates with community partners on issues of digital literacy and culture.
More broadly, digital humanities scholarship (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 but at the Borderlands Digital Humanities Center, we strive to imagine a digital present and future that centers care, equity, ethics, and social justice.
