Shared Horizons: Data, BioMedicine, and the Digital Humanities (Final Performance Report)

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes for Health, and the Research Councils UK, hosted a two-day symposium, April 9-11, 2013. The symposium had three main goals: (1) to address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship; (2) to investigate the current state of the field; and (3) to facilitate future research collaborations between the humanities and biomedical sciences. Awarded via a National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman’s Cooperative Agreement, “MITH-NEH-NLM Genomics Workshop” (renamed in-house to the more descriptive title of “Shared Horizons: Data, BioMedicine, and the Digital Humanities”) explored collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship. Shared Horizons created opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium explored ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with “big data.”