2023-2024 Annual Report

Dear colleagues,

During 2023-24, DH@MSU has taken several important steps toward deeper collaborations across the college and around the university. Perhaps most exciting among these steps — if a deceptively small one — is completing the process of renaming our undergraduate minor from “Digital Humanities” to “Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities.” This renaming serves several purposes, including making clear that the minor has long embraced ways of engaging with the arts as well as the humanities. Most crucially, however, it opens the door to some exciting major-minor combo meals, as we’re fond of saying.

Majoring in English, for instance, and minoring in Digital Studies presents the potential for MSU students to build a degree focused on Digital Studies in English, engaging both with the vitality of arts and humanities and the hands-on skills that the 21st century demands.

In what follows, the DH@MSU team reports on the other work we’ve done this year, including our strategic planning process, our ongoing engagement efforts, and the wonderful research we’ve had the opportunity to support. We’ve also been delighted to welcome some fantastic new colleagues this year. But we’ve had to say goodbye to others, and those goodbyes weigh heavily as I write. In particular, losing our good friend and long-time supporter Bill Hart-Davidson has been hard for all of us. As his collaborator and business partner Jeff Grabill noted during his celebration of life, Bill was probably the most accomplished, most important scholar of his generation in his field. He was also the most generous colleague, mentor, friend, and all-around human that many of us have known. His work was wide-ranging, deeply thoughtful, and always focused on making things better, whether those things were peer-review processes in writing classrooms or health outcomes for folks with diabetes. Even more, he was committed to using his institutional and intellectual capital in support of the work of others. We are deeply grateful to have had him join us as one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Global DH Symposium, where he shared his wisdom — neither unthinkingly optimistic nor despairingly pessimistic — about the future of writing in the age of generative AI.

As we look toward the year ahead, the DH@MSU team will strive to continue learning from Bill’s model, seeking always to be a little more thoughtful, a little more creative, and a little more generous. We’re grateful for the opportunity to continue building and supporting this community, and we’ll look forward to thinking with you about how best to honor Bill’s legacy in the years ahead.

With all my best,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Director of Digital Humanities