The History Department with a Fab Lab

For a couple of years I have been working on outfitting the History Department at Western University with a new digital lab and classroom, funded by a very generous grant from our provost. The spaces are now open and mostly set up, and our graduate students and faculty have started to form working groups to teach themselves how to use the hardware and software and to share what they know with others. There is tremendous excitement about the potential of our lab, which is understandable. I believe that it is the best-equipped such space in the world: historians at Western now have their own complete Fab Lab.

In provisioning the lab and classroom, I wanted to strike a balance between supporting the kinds of activities that are typically undertaken in digital history and digital humanities projects right now, while also enabling our students and faculty to engage in the kind of "making in public" that many people argue will characterize the humanities and social sciences in the next decade.

Here is a high-level sketch of our facilities, organized by activity. The lab inventory actually runs to thousands of items, so this just an overview.

William J Turkel

Full Story: http://williamjturkel.net/2013/02/02/the-history-department-with-a-fab-lab/

(Thanks to David Nelson for sharing this.)