Duke University has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer 2018 Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities. Led by Victoria Szabo, associate research professor of visual and media studies, and hosted at the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Digital Humanities Institute (VARDHI) integrates humanities teaching and scholarship with artificial and virtual reality. Philip J. Stern, Sally Dalton Robinson Associate Professor of History, is project co-director.

VARDHI consists of a two-week summer institute for up to 12 participants to take place in Summer 2018 and to be focused on the application of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to humanities research, teaching, and outreach. The summer institute will develop virtual and augmented reality capacity among humanities researchers through a combination of critical and scientific readings and discussion, hands-on development workshops, informed critiques of existing projects, and group project implementation and reflection.



The program is designed for humanists who already demonstrate basic digital and/or computational skills in areas such as database design, image- and time-based media editing, creative coding, HGIS, 3D modeling, and data visualization, and who wish to expand their repertoire of available methods to include VR and AR. 

VARDHI is co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture, the Information Science + Studies Program, the History Department, and the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) in the Pratt School of Engineering.