Since 2005, the Humanities Digital Workshop has supported computationally-assisted faculty research across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The HDW invites undergraduates and graduate students to participate in its mission of inquiry, engaging them in a collaborative research environment.
“Digital Humanities” can mean many things; the HDW at Washington University has made a special commitment to humanistic inquiry “at scale”. Because we pride ourselves in thinking subtly and ingeniously about big problems and large sets of data — networks of thousands of individuals, hundreds of novels, billions of words, — we find ourselves striving to situate the unique, to give precise description of the typical in order to discover the full marvel of the atypical. To do this requires the ability to manage the noise of large data sets, to bring math to bear on culture, to make complex sense of aggregates.
We call this undertaking DASH: Data Science for the Humanities.