John Unsworth honored

The National Humanities Center is pleased to announce that John M. Unsworth is the fourth winner of the Richard W. Lyman Award. A committee of scholars selected him for his critical efforts to make it possible for others to do rich and original work in the humanities that draws on the best of current technology and the best of current scholarship. As the first director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (www.iath.virginia.edu/index.html) at the University of Virginia, Unsworth helped foster and sustain the much-honored “The Valley of the Shadow,” “The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive,” and “The William Blake Archive,” among many digital humanities research projects. As the organizer and chair of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, Unsworth helped develop international and interdisciplinary standards to represent literary and linguistic texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. He continues his work to shape the way scholars, universities, libraries, and archives will conduct, represent, and preserve humanities scholarship in the future as chair of the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences. Unsworth has published widely on the topic of electronic scholarship, and he co-founded, in 1990, Postmodern Culture (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html), the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities. In 2003, Unsworth (http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/) became dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Unsworth will receive the Lyman Award in a presentation at the Newberry Library in Chicago on May 10 at 5:30 p.m.