Categories
Curriculum DH

From Board Games to Pac-Man: Studying the Evolution of Gaming in ENGL 295

“Everybody plays games, even people who don’t think of themselves as gamers” -Professor Ferguson

At the invitation of Professor Andrew Ferguson, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux gave a talk on video game culture and pedagogy as a part of the DH Speaker Series during spring term. They had recently published Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames and spoke on video game culture and pedagogy. According to Professor Ferguson, Boluk and LeMieux “take things that are on their face incomprehensible and so embedded in cultural baggage and social knowledge and pick them apart so that their readers can know what’s going on.” For example, during their talk, they presented a few seconds of game play and gave the audience the context of what was going on and how that fits into larger cultural questions.

Also during spring term, Professor Ferguson taught ENGL 295: Video/Games, which surveyed the medium of the videogame, from the beginnings of the genre in board and card games, through early computing and cartridge-based consoles, through the highly sophisticated online formats of today. The students made games throughout the course, including videogame-related board and card games and digital story games on the Twine platform. Professor Ferguson emphasized that everyone can make and play games and was grateful to have been able to use a room in the library as a console room where anyone could go and play all kinds of games throughout the four-week semester.

Professor Ferguson had been interested in teaching video games for a while when a DH incentive grant and spring term’s shortened semester gave him the opportunity to teach exclusively video games and immerse the students in playing video games almost all the time throughout the course. During the course, the students considered the varying experiences that can result from video games. For instance, Professor Ferguson noted that when people play video games, they often default to one type of game and rarely stray from that type. To challenge this tendency, Professor Ferguson gave students different types of games to see what interested and surprised them as they tried things they never thought of as video games before.

“Andrew Ferguson’s video game class was a delightful study into the development of video games, not only as a form of entertainment but as an art.” -MC Greenleaf ’19

Additionally, the class took a field trip to three different arcades to demonstrate what actively maintaining and creating games could look like. The first stop on the trip was to an arcade in a dying mall, which sparked the question: are arcades dying out? Next, they traveled to an arcade with retro video games, such as Pac-Man, Pole Position and Pinball games, showing that if we take care of video games, even though it is difficult to do so, we can keep them alive. Finally, the class went to Dave and Buster’s, which featured shooting and driving games, showing one possibility for the future of arcades.

MC Greenleaf ’19, a student in the class, said, “We studied the history of games, from board games to arcade games to handheld consoles as we know them now. Through this investigation we gained knowledge on how the coding works, how to critically analyze games and game culture, and the decline of arcades. It has heavily inspired my senior thesis, to code a game of my own design, and I feel capable of doing so thoughtfully and effectively because of my experience in Professor Ferguson’s class.”

Considering the future of videogame studies, Professor Ferguson would like to hope that more people are studying games as a source of academic inquiry, akin to literature or media studies. “Studying videogames will become more and more interesting as people move towards playing games as a way of telling stories,” he said. In fact, videogame studies is growing slowly and unpredictably and could become increasingly popular like film or TV studies. According to Professor Ferguson, videogame studies is about five years away from becoming just as popular. Thanks to his spring term class, some students had the opportunity to get a head start.

This post was written using an interview with Professor Ferguson. 

-Jenny Bagger, DH Undergraduate Fellow

Categories
DH Event on campus Speaker Series

DH Speaker Series: Roopika Risam

We are beyond excited to welcome Dr. Roopika Risam to campus next week! Join us for her talk on September 20th, 2018 at 5pm in Northen Auditorium. Refreshments will be served.


Historicizing the College Color Line: Digital Humanities, Activism, and the Campus Climate

As our students renew demands for equity and justice on their campuses, how can digital humanities be engaged to address the college color line? Risam begins this talk by exploring the complicated relationship between digital humanities, public scholarship, and activism through her work on the Torn Apart/Separados team. She then considers how digital humanities can be used to assist activist-minded students in addressing pressing issues of race on our college campuses, based on her work at Salem State University. While Risam urges caution against quick conflation of digital humanities and activism, she argues that its methods can be effective tools for shedding light on histories of campus activism and supporting today’s student activists.

Roopika Risam is Assistant Professor of English, Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives, and Coordinator of the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program, and Coordinator of the Secondary English Education BA/M.Ed. Program at Salem State University. Risam is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Worlds in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP) and co-editor of The Digital Black Atlantic for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press). She is the director of the NEH and IMLS-funded Regional Comprehensive Digital Humanities Network and co-founder of Reanimate (http://reanimatepublishing.org), an intersectional feminist publishing collective. Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Popular Communications, South Asian Review, and College and Undergraduate Libraries, among others. Risam is also a recent recipient of the Massachusetts Library Association’s Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record. More information and her CV is available at http://roopikarisam.com.

Categories
Announcement DH Event on campus Incentive Grants Pedagogy Speaker Series

Day of DH at Fall Academy 2018

DH @ W&L is holding two Fall Academy sessions this year. Don’t forget to register and check out all the other amazing-looking sessions. Join us on Thursday, August 23rd, 2018 in Hillel 101 for the following:

10:45AM-11:45 AM Creating Open Course Websites
Course websites are a great way to increase access to your courses, share your teaching strategies and materials with colleagues, and organize information for your students. Creating a course website is also an opportunity to re-evaluate the structure of your class and imagine how a student will navigate the different parts of the course. Learn about the benefits of making course materials open and accessible to audiences beyond the university, hear how other people in DH are using course websites, and learn strategies for organizing your own course into an easy-to-navigate website.

Presenters: Sydney Bufkin, Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow; Mackenzie Brooks, University Library; Sarah Horowitz, History.

12:00 PM – 1:45 PM DH Incentive Grant Panel
Come learn about DH funding opportunities for research and the classroom. Hear from current grant holders how they incorporate DH tools and methods in their classrooms. Presenters include Paul Youngman, Chair of Digital Humanities; Ricardo Wilson, English; Shikha Silwal, Economics; Stephen Lind, Business Administration; Stephanie Sandberg, Theater.

Come learn about DH funding opportunities for research and the classroom. Hear from current grant holders how they incorporate DH tools and methods in their classrooms. Presenters include Paul Youngman, Chair of Digital Humanities; Ricardo Wilson, English; Shikha Silwal, Economics; Stephen Lind, Business Administration; Stephanie Sandberg, Theater.

Categories
Curriculum DCI DH Pedagogy

Minor in Digital Culture and Information

We now have a new minor in Digital Culture and Information. This minor is an outcome of W&L’s digital humanities initiatives over the last six years.

We’re not abandoning the term DH. W&L will still continue to have a strong set of programmatic DH initiatives. We chose the term Digital Culture and Information (DCI) to recognize that our curricular efforts in DH extend beyond the humanities and into the social sciences, pre-professional fields (such as accounting, business administration, journalism, and strategic communication), and STEM disciplines. (And, yes, over the years we had huge debates over naming the minor.)

From our proposal for creating the minor:

An interdisciplinary program in Digital Culture and Information (DCI) allows students to deeply explore how the digital age impacts knowledge and society. Students will discover how software transforms information into valuable resources as well as the dangerous potential of algorithmically biased tools. Through courses that integrate theory with hands- on practice, students will develop creative projects that demonstrate their emerging expertise in digital media. The program is designed to teach students concepts and methods that will enhance their academic success within any major. Students participating in the program will gain significant experience with technological platforms, complex information resources, and visual design. The course of study nurtures critical reflection on the underlying structure of information and not merely technical proficiency. A minor in Digital Culture and Information provides the foundation for a career in any field and for life as an informed citizen in a digital society.

For those who are interested, here’s the full 23-page proposal for creating a minor in Digital Culture and Information (pdf).

Course of Study Requirements

Update: View the W&L site for the updated course of study.

A minor in digital culture and information requires completion of 18 credits, as follows. In meeting the requirements of this interdisciplinary minor, a student may not use more than nine credits (including capstone) that are also used to meet the requirements of other majors or minors. [The nine credits limitation is a W&L policy.]

Required courses:
DCI 102: Data in the Humanities (offered every Fall) 3 credits
DCI 108: Communication through the Web (offered every Fall) 3 credits

At least six credits chosen from the following:

DCI 110: Web Programming for Non-Programmers (offered every Winter) 4 credits
DCI 175: Innovations in Publishing (offered alternating Spring Terms) 4 credits
DCI 190: DH Studio [offered as needed] 1 credit
DCI 393: Creating Digital Scholarship (offered every Winter) 3 credits
DCI 403: Directed Individual Study (as needed) 3 credits
History 211: 19th-Century Scandal, Crime, Spectacle. 3 credits
Journalism 341: Multimedia Storytelling Design (offered every Winter) 3 credits

At least three credits chosen from the following:

Business 306: Seminar in Management Information Systems
Business 310: Management Information Systems
Business 315: Database Management for Business
Business 317: Data Mining for Sales, Marketing and Customer Relationship Management
Business 321: Multimedia Design and Development
Classics 343: Classics in the Digital Age
Computer Science (any course)
DCI 180 First-Year Seminars (offered every Fall and alternating Winter)
English 453: Internship in Literary Editing with Shenandoah
German 347: Goethe–Sentimentality to Sturm and Drang
German 349: Digital Goethe
Sociology 265: Exploring Social Networks
Sociology 266: Neighborhoods, Culture and Poverty
and, when approved in advance, DCI-designated courses offered in other disciplines.

Capstone project:
Three credits chosen from DCI 393, 403 (not used above), or a capstone or honors thesis in the major field of study, of sustained intellectual engagement using digital tools or methods and approved one term in advance of beginning by the core faculty of the minor

Portfolio:
At least three projects or assignments, in addition to the capstone, from courses in the minor which demonstrate attention to design, user experience, awareness of audience, and professional or academic context, and including both reflection on and analysis of each work in the portfolio.

Organizational issues

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the DCI minor is that it is based in the library though we still view it as an interdisciplinary minor with broad participation of faculty from other departments. Librarians at W&L have faculty status and the University Library is organized as an academic department within the College. The library faculty are teaching the required courses in DCI, coordinating the capstone and portfolio experiences, as well as teaching many of the DCI electives.

The official approval of this minor is a significant milestone for DH at W&L. It truly has been a collaborative effort over the years involving a lot of conversations, often with challenging viewpoints in those discussions. Collaboration is a process, and dissent is a critical element towards improving any initiative. Over time we talked it through, and we’re all better for that.

Thanks!

A huge thanks to Dean Suzanne Keen, who championed the digital humanities and provided the vision for DH in the undergraduate curriculum. We will miss her dearly and wish her the best in her new role at Hamilton.

Tremendous gratitude goes to Paul Youngman (Professor and Chair of German, Russian, and Arabic) for his brilliant leadership of the DH Committee.

Sara Sprenkle (Computer Science) for her enthusiastic support of a minor all along, for co-teaching with Paul the very first DH course at W&L in 2014, and all her efforts in DH here.

The library faculty have been remarkable in pulling together to create a curriculum. Jason Mickel (Director of Library Technology) came up with the term digital culture and information, and he eagerly embraces teaching at every possible opportunity. Mackenzie Brooks (DH librarian) shouldered the burden of co-teaching two DH courses with me, and she has demonstrated a remarkable aptitude in working with undergrads and developing her own courses. And thanks to all the librarians at W&L who are contributing to the new minor. The DCI minor is now a significant aspect of library instruction and belongs to all of us. The University Librarian John Tombarge deserves particular thanks for allowing us to even pursue this type of curricular initiative.

A special appreciation goes out to the two people who have served as Mellon DH Fellows at W&L. Brandon Walsh provided essential input into the structure of the minor. Sydney Bufkin thought deeply about the capstone experience and devoted significant effort this past year to co-drafting the proposal.

Thanks to our faculty colleagues who have contributed to DH at W&L and especially to those who provided feedback on the proposal, particularly Sarah Horowitz (History), Toni Locy (Journalism), Steve McCormick (French), and Jon Eastwood (Sociology).  We’re excited for future collaborations with faculty across campus as we make the DCI minor into a suitable complement for any academic major.

Of course, we do this for our students. It’s about them. We’re fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from these students. They make us better teachers.

Categories
Conference DH Event off campus Undergraduate Fellows

DH Fellows Attend 2018 UNRH Conference

“The potential for digital humanities is essentially boundless because there are no rigid definitions for such pursuits, and there is so much information to be observed, studied, digitized, and presented—not just academically speaking, but socially as well.”
–Colby Gilley ’20

In February, DH fellows Katherine Dau ’19 and Colby Gilley ’20 attended the Undergraduate Network for Research in the Humanities Conference at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. The conference, which is held annually and aimed at building a network for collaboration and providing a platform for peers to share projects, gave Dau and Gilley the opportunity to learn more about Digital Humanities.

Photo originally posted on the UNRH Twitter page

Dau and Gilley were able to present their project Florence As It Was to fellow undergraduate researchers, receive feedback on it, and explore the projects of other students interested in Digital Humanities. In particular, they were able to learn about ArcGIS, a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic data, and how useful it could be to their own digital reconstruction project of early modern Florence.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Jacob Heil, the College of Wooster’s Digital Scholarship Librarian and the Director of its Collaborative Research Environment (CoRE). According to Dau and Gilley, Dr. Heil emphasized the significance of the “betweenness” that comes to represent Digital Humanities. Because Florence As It Was incorporates various skills and disciplines, including website design, photogrammetry, 3D design methods, art history, architecture, history and religion, Dau and Gilley, like many other DH fellows, understand the importance of being able to maneuver between and transcend traditional academic boundaries.

Overall, Dau and Gilley highly recommend attending the UNRH Conference to students who are interested in learning more about Digital Humanities projects from around the world, sharing challenges and goals with a community of undergraduate researchers, and becoming a part of the next generation of scholars in Digital Humanities and academia.

This post was written using interviews with Katherine Dau ’19 and Colby Gilley ’20.

-Jenny Bagger, DH Undergraduate Fellow

Categories
DH Event on campus Speaker Series

Dr. Gregory Rosenthal: Deploying Digital Technology to “Make Roanoke Queer Again”

When Dr. Gregory Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of Public History at Roanoke College, arrived in Roanoke in 2015, they wondered how they fit in with the distinct culture of Southwest Virginia. Transported from New York City, they embarked on a journey of public history research and community interaction through the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a community-based history initiative committed to researching and telling the stories of LGBTQ+ individuals and organizations in the region. They founded this project with self-taught digital tools to engage queer audiences and encourage people to think about the queer past in new ways.

Photograph by Assistant Professor of History T.J. Tallie

Assembling a collection of gay newspapers, such as The Virginia Gayzette, and other artifacts relating to local LGBTQ+ history found tucked away in attics and forgotten in shoeboxes of local people, Rosenthal and the members of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project built a physical archive of historical materials that were not otherwise preserved in regional museums or libraries. The LGBTQ+ History Collection is housed at the Virginia Room in the Roanoke Public Library and available for public access. Some highlights of the collection are available online.

Through this research, a map of gay bars in downtown Roanoke from 1978 was found, and the queer bar crawls were born. In their talk, Rosenthal spoke about how during these bar crawls, the members of the Southwest Virginia LGBQ+ History Project and other history-loving bar-goers visit the sites of old gay bars, read the words of people who went to them when they existed, and listen to what they were like in their heyday. While the queer bar crawls do not occur online and have little to do with digital tools, they highlight the significance of the physical spaces of LGBTQ+ individuals.

One of the goals of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project is reclaiming historically queer spaces that are no longer queer, which involves doing the physical work that is at the heart of the project, like organizing the queer bar crawls and walking tours of downtown Roanoke. The advent of the internet in some ways destroyed queer spaces as LGBTQ+ people today meet and socialize via the internet rather than in gay bars or gay bookstores, which in the past created ways for queer people to find each other and engage in social experiences. Although it demolished queer spaces in the past, digital technology can be used to draw attention to and reclaim queer spaces. Through Audacity to record the voices of LGBTQ+ individuals telling their experiences and SoundCloud to embed these recordings into an online exhibit, Rosenthal created the exhibit “Coming Out: Gay Liberation in Roanoke, Virginia, 1966-1980,” which is an accessible and engaging mode of communicating the unedited, raw oral histories of gay liberation and queer history in Roanoke.

As these social experiences move online and gay culture becomes mainstreamed, are these physical spaces needed anymore? Rosenthal believes they are. It is still a struggle to be queer in public, and claiming these spaces encourages “coming out of the closet and into the streets.” Through the efforts of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a community of LGBTQ+ people forms both in physical space and online, which is the central goal of the project–aside from inspiring people to “Make Roanoke Queer Again.”

 

-Jenny Bagger, DH Undergraduate Fellow

This event was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It was co-sponsored by the Washington and Lee History Department. 

Categories
DH Event on campus Speaker Series

DH Speaker Series: Jeff Soyk

Join us for a talk by Jeff Soyk, an award-winning media artist. He will be speaking on “Interactive Documentary: Envisioning Story as a User Experience (UX).

Wednesday, March 7th, 2018
12:15 – 1:15 pm
Hillel 101
Register at http://go.wlu.edu/DHworkshops


Interactive Documentary: Envisioning Story as a User Experience (UX)


Jeff Soyk is an award-winning media artist with experience in creative direction, UX design, animation, web design, and film/video. His credits include creative director and UI/UX designer on PBS Frontline’s Inheritance (2016 News & Documentary Emmy winner and Peabody-Facebook Award winner) as well as art director, UI/UX designer and architect on Hollow (2013 Peabody Award winner and News & Documentary Emmy nominee).

Soyk’s passion for meaningful stories and multiple mediums has led him to interactive documentary, as he recognizes the potential to create engaging experiences with a positive influence. He works as a creative director at MIT, is a freelance creative director/UI & UX designer, and is an MIT OpenDocLab fellow alum. He has a BFA in New Media Design from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA in Media Art from Emerson College.

This event is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Dean of the College Cohort Grants (Interdisciplinary Multimedia Storytelling and Women in Poverty in Rural America). 
Categories
DH Undergraduate Fellows

Another DH Fellow!

[Enjoy this post by DH Fellow Caroline Nowlin ’19. She is working with Professor Michelle Brock on her Mapping the Scottish Reformation project.]


Hello, everyone! My name is Caroline Nowlin, and I am a junior here at Washington and Lee, majoring in Accounting & Business Administration and European History. I became a Digital Humanities Research Fellow this past fall and am currently working with Professor Michelle Brock on a project to comprehensively chart the growth and movement of the Scottish clergy during the Reformation.

If someone had told me a year ago that I would soon be involved in the creation of a research database, I highly doubt I would have believed them. Naturally inept with technology, I was initially intimidated when a history course I took with Professor Sarah Horowitz required the incorporation of digital scholarship techniques into the final class assignment. Much to my surprise, by the end of the semester I had become fascinated with the field of digital humanities and its potential for furthering historical exploration and research. As a result, I jumped at the chance to expand my experience by collaborating with Professor Brock on Mapping the Scottish Reformation.

I am very grateful to Professor Horowitz for introducing me to the digital humanities and to Professor Brock for allowing me to work with her on this project. I have loved my experience with the Digital Humanities program here and look forward to seeing where it takes me in the year and a half I have left at Washington and Lee.

Categories
DH Pedagogy UVA Collaboration

All About the Archive

[Enjoy this guest post by Lauren Reynolds, doctoral candidate in the Spanish, Italian & Portuguese Department at University Virginia. She came to W&L to give a workshop in Prof. Andrea LePage’s Contemporary Latinx and Chicanx Art course through a Mellon-funded collaboration with the Scholars’ Lab at UVA. More information about this initiative can be found here. This post is cross-listed on the Scholars’ Lab blog.]


I was invited to guest lecture for Professor Andrea LePage’s course, Contemporary Latinx and Chicanx Art. After discussing possible topics for the workshop, Professor LePage and I decided on the topic of “Archive as Protest.” It overlapped with my research on cultural memory in US Latinx texts and presented me with the opportunity to learn more about digital archives. As I developed the plan for the workshop, I organized the information into questions surrounding digital archives, preserving cultural memory, and cataloguing a variety of experiences.

These are very broad questions, so I outlined two goals for the class: First, I wanted the students to begin to think about information storage in the broadest sense. Then we would narrow the idea of seemingly endless information down to a conversation about cataloguing and metadata. Second, I aimed for our discussion of cultural creation and preservation to help the students understand one way in which preserving information through archives can have a positive social impact.

After introductions, we began the lecture with a brief discussion of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story La biblioteca de babel. This story gave me the opportunity to sneak a bit of Latin American literature into the course and provided an entry point for talking about information storage. So, we began with questions about Borges’ conception of an infinite library: Why do you think some people say that Borges “discovered” the internet decades before it was invented? What similarities do you see between the infinite library and the internet? What are some differences? How is a library organized? Is the internet organized? What possibilities/challenges do a universe of information pose?

Next, we zoomed in to a more focused discussion of archives, their purposes, and how the internet has changed the preservation and accessibility of information. We talked about documenting history from many perspectives and, in small groups, the students reflected on the following quote from Daniel Mutibwa:

“The overarching argument is that local, alternative, bottom-up approaches to telling (hi)stories and re-enacting the past not only effectively take on a socio-political dimension directed at challenging dominant, hegemonic, institutional narratives and versions of the past, but – in doing so – they also offer new and refreshingly different ways of understanding, representing, remembering, and rediscovering the past meaningfully in ways that local communities and regions can relate with.” (Mutibwa)

The students began to connect this quote to their own interests as we discussed the possibilities of digital archives. We specifically looked at the Hurricane Katrina collection to talk about the pros and cons of bottom-up archives: http://hurricanearchive.org/collections
We noted how such archives allow for individual stories to be shared and they can become part of a community’s healing processes after a tragedy.

This digital archive also prompted interest in logistical questions, such how stories are collected, saved, and mapped in the creation of an online archive. Specifically, the students were asked to think about:

  1. Development: How to choose what to include, authenticity
  2. Retrieval and Collection
  3. Reaching the Community: Supporting Research, Learning, and Teaching
  4. Reference Information and Providing Access

Our last activity gave them the opportunity to learn about different types of metadata and its role in cataloguing. We discussed social media presences as types of personal, living archives and how hashtags such as #TBT, #breakfast, and #gooddog can be seen as a means of organizing Instagram posts. In pairs, the students were then given three photos of different US Latinx artworks and asked to assign categories to each photo. They thought about specificity and accessibility: how to make the photos both accessible in broad searches, but easily found for specific inquiries. Each pair shared their selected words with a larger group. After comparing their different hashtags and debating which labels were most useful, each group came up with a definitive set of categories. We compared the different “data sets” created in class, noting the benefits and possible drawbacks of each set.

The class concluded with small group discussions of overarching questions:

  1. Difficulties posed by the fact that technology is always changing
  2. How to establish trust between archive curators and communities
  3. Library neutrality, the library’s role in community engagement, and the line between memorial and protest
  4. Advantages and disadvantages of allowing anonymous submissions
  5. Oral Histories: Who determines what questions are asked? How are these interviews and all texts edited and by who? Can “alternative” truths be abused to represent dangerous falsehoods?
  6. How do we preserve horrific histories? Do we reproduce offensive terms?

With the time remaining, the students talked about whichever question interested them most in their work and, more broadly, in their lives.


Mutibwa, Daniel H. “Memory, Storytelling and the Digital Archive: Revitalizing Community and Regional Identities In the Virtual Age.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, vol. 12, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7-26.

Categories
Announcement DH

DH Opportunities: Apply Now!

Check out these two DH opportunities! Apply for an internship with the Center for Hellenic Studies or apply for the Lisa Lena Opas Hänninen Young Scholar Prize:


CHS Summer Internship in Digital Humanities

The Center for Hellenic Studies is looking for interns to work for eight weeks on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek Project, a self-standing subset of the Open Greek and Latin Project in Washington D.C. Find out more information here. Apply now!

Application Deadline: February 14, 2018
Internship Dates: June 1-July 27, 2018


The goal of the Free First Thousand Years of Greek Project is to make freely available the corpus of the first thousand years of Ancient Greek as attested in manuscripts. The project aims to incorporate a modern search engine, the ability to download works, the capacity for including textual variants, and numerous other features.

Interns will work primarily with XML files, editing them to meet the project’s standards, and uploading the corrections to a GitHub repository. Additional tasks will include correcting OCRed texts, as well as contributing to other digital humanities projects as they arise.

Undergraduate students majoring in any field may apply. One semester of ancient Greek is required; intermediate knowledge of ancient Greek is strongly preferred. A minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 is required. No prior professional experience is necessary for this internship. Interns will be trained in all necessary technologies. Applicants must demonstrate the internship’s relevance to their studies and future career plans.

The CHS does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status in any of its activities or operations.


 Lisa Lena Opas Hänninen Young Scholar Prize

The Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen Young Scholar Prize is sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, awarding $1,829.32 in prize money. Find out more information about the opportunity here.

Deadline: October 1, 2018


A winner of a Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen Young Scholar Prize must be a student, graduate student, or a postdoctoral researcher who has contributed in a significant way to scholarship at a humanities conference using digital technology essentially. She or he cannot be a scholar with an academic position, whether tenured or untenured.

An author may be considered a “young scholar” for purposes of this award by being for example: aged 35 years or less at the start of the conference; in an entry-level academic appointment at a university or junior position in an organization involved with Digital Humanities; and new to Digital Humanities from another discipline or career.

Apply now!