Alex Poole, PhD, assistant professor of information science at the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI), recently published a paper titled “The Conceptual Ecology of Digital Humanities,” on the evolution, definition and scope of the field of digital humanities, a field at the intersection of humanities and digital technology. Digital humanities greatly impacts professions within the Library and Information Science (LIS) field, in addition to traditional humanities disciplines.
Poole’s paper, which
was published in the Journal of Documentation this month, discusses the importance of digital humanities and suggests opportunities for future research in the LIS field. His research highlights the importance of the LIS field by elaborating the intellectual and practical framework of digital humanities and its relationship to its stakeholders’ intellectual and professional work. The paper also explains fundamental issues related to the field’s structure and epistemology and also looks at the ways in which digital humanities brings new approaches to understanding different foci within the humanities. Poole’s research has value for those in the LIS field, which is particularly receptive to research in digital humanities as it provides a new current of interdisciplinary and collaborative intellectual activity both within and outside academia.
Poole's research interests center on digital curation, digital humanities, pedagogy, diversity and inclusivity in the LIS profession, and all matters archival. Poole previously served as teaching fellow at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, where he taught in areas such as archives and records management, digital humanities, and information resources and services. Among other venues, his work has been published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, American Archivist and Archival Science. He received the Theodore Calvin Pease Award from the Society of American Archivists for his article “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South.”
Poole earned his doctorate in library and information science and a master of science degree in library science from from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, a master of arts degree in history from Brown University, and a bachelor of arts degree in history from Williams College.