The Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) promotes new forms of humanistic inquiry through practices of design.
Through interdisciplinary projects in research, teaching, and community engagement, we are exploring how emerging forms of digital media and applied digital scholarship can be used to construct arguments, create artifacts, and prototype systems that address the reconfiguration of knowledge and social structures in the digital age.
DILAC was established in Spring 2015 with resources from Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. In Summer 2015 the Center moved into a well-equipped space in the heart of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, on the third floor of Skiles Classroom Building in Room 318. The faculty-led Steering Committee, the Lab Coordinator, and the Graduate Fellows, provide support for classroom- and studio-based learning, and project development, including guidance for interaction and information design, and recommendations and assistance for working with archives, datasets, visualization packages, physical computing, and emerging technologies such as AR and VR.
With assistance from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, DILAC provides annual funding, available through Spring 2019 for faculty-led projects in digital humanities and digital civics. Current and past DILAC projects include a digital recreation of a lost public artwork, a multimedia podcast on Latin America, a reimagining of an historical visualization scheme, an archive of Civil Rights era documents, a system for representing public debates of controversial topics, a computational analysis of nineteenth-century fiction, and an national symposium on Digital Humanities + Design. Many DILAC projects draw upon the situation of Georgia Tech within the City of Atlanta, examining what it means to do twenty-first century humanities work in the context of an urban technological institute.