NEH Funds to Boost Students’ Digital Skills Have Widespread Benefits at CUNY and Beyond

When CUNY Graduate Center Professor Matthew K. Gold tweeted last month that he and his colleague Lisa Rhody received a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help their students learn digital skills and create digital projects, he drew an outpouring of support. Close to 20 colleagues from across The City University of New York and beyond congratulated him and Rhody, and he thanked each of them. Gold and Rhody are widely respected as pioneers and proponents of the digital humanities, a once obscure area of academia that is now a significant field of scholarship and teaching. Over a decade ago, Gold founded the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives to integrate digital methods into the research, teaching, and service missions of the Graduate Center. Rhody became deputy director of the initiatives in 2015. Today, the initiatives encompass an array of research projects, workshops, labs, and degree programs. Gold and Rhody join The Thought Project podcast to talk about their new NEH grant; what students, scholars, and the public stand to gain from it; and the future of the digital humanities at CUNY, particularly with a new Center for Digital Scholarship and Data Visualization expected to open in 2022. They also define the digital humanities for non-scholars and explain what is so exciting about them. Guest co-host, Bonnie Eissner, director of communications at the CUNY Graduate Center. Listen in to learn more.