About Us

“This grant is noteworthy because it represents a true partnership across two sectors of higher education in which undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, librarians and technologists will use digital tools and methods to strengthen teaching and research in the humanities.” ~ Eugene M. Tobin

Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry is a multi-year experiment with a variety of collaborative practices in the humanities. Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Bridges initiative offers faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students at Grinnell College and The University of Iowa opportunities to work together from 2015-2018. By building on the strengths of our two very different institutions of higher education—a robust liberal arts college and a public research university—we seek to design socially conscious, intellectually rigorous models for collaboration in the humanities with a particular focus on undergraduate education.

With students and project partners, the grant’s leadership team is translating our scholarly and pedagogical work in the humanities and humanistic social sciences into the dynamic, collective, public forms made possible by digital media. These projects include teacher-scholars and students, social science colleagues familiar with large scale data and viewer-friendly visualization and virtual maps, computer scientists, librarians, technologists, archivists, curators, project evaluators, and often public partners.

Through our experiments in collaboration, we seek not only to respond to the market’s demands for technical know-how and team-building, but also to sustain the best of the humanities—reflection, interpretation, historical context, culturally diverse explorations of multiple points of view, and the pursuit of understanding the world in all its diversity.