Launched in 2012, the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, housed within the Franklin Humanities Institute, provides an arena in which PhD students in humanities and interpretive social sciences can learn about new digital scholarship, engage with its challenges, and see its promise for their own research and professional lives within or outside the university. Innovations in the digital, informational, and computational fields are generating new forms of pedagogy and shaping novel modes of scholarship. They are widening our collaborative communities and expanding the publics with whom PhD candidates will engage.
In the PhD Lab, we seek to balance the practical and the conceptual by allowing participants to prototype projects and receive peer feedback to enrich their understanding of the potential of digital scholarship. Students in the ISS Graduate Certificate and related courses are especially encouraged to get involved in PhD Lab activities, and to use the community as a sounding board, a source for collaborators, and space in which to share their digital project work.
The Lab is supported by the Duke Graduate School, the Provost's Office, and Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. In 2015-16, the Lab is co-directed by David Bell and Victoria Szabo. Szabo also directs the FHI's new Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI), which is co-located and runs jointly with the PhD Lab. The DHI aims to provide a gathering point for Duke faculty engaged in digital research and scholarship.