Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities
Sponsored by Cornell University Library & the Society for the Humanities, The Summer DH Program supports a small interdisciplinary cohort of Cornell graduate students who together investigate approaches to digital scholarship through collaborative workshops, readings, discussion, and co-working on independent projects. The fellowship is a project of the Digital CoLab at Olin Library.
Time and location
Summer DH 2023 will take place over six weeks, June 5 – July 14, 2023, in person at Olin Library. Meetings will be held 2-4 times per week, 10am – noon, excluding holidays. A more detailed schedule will be available later in the spring.
Eligibility
Current Cornell Ph.D. students working in the humanities are invited to apply. The cohort size is expected to be six to eight students. Fellows are selected for their potential to benefit from the program, and their willingness and commitment to create a collaborative learning environment. There are no technical prerequisites.
Summer DH provides:
- Small-group tutorials on digital scholarship tools, skills, and approaches, tailored to participants’ interests and prior experiences
- Orienting readings and discussions
- An introduction to practical aspects of developing, implementing, and managing complex digital humanities projects, ranging from technical considerations to broader scholarly impact
- Ongoing guidance and technical support for participants developing their own digital projects
- A stipend of $2000
Requirements:
- Status as a Cornell Ph.D. student in a humanities or closely related discipline
- Desire to explore digital approaches to research and teaching through workshops, readings, and discussions
- Commitment to contribute to a supportive, interdisciplinary summer learning community
- Commitment to building an independent digital project related to your research or pedagogy
- Residence in the Ithaca area during the six weeks of the fellowship period
New structure for 2023
The format of the 2023 program is a bit different from previous years. Based on the nature of their proposed independent projects, fellows will join one of two sub-cohorts, each focused on a different type of humanities data. Some of the summer’s workshops and discussions will include the entire group of fellows; others will separate the sub-cohorts to allow each to focus on more specialized topics relevant to their work.
The 2023 sub-cohorts will organize around two of the following three types of humanities data, depending on the interests of applicants:
- Digital Objects. Build a website to showcase and interpret a collection of digital objects. Projects may include digital collections or digital exhibits for research, pedagogy, and/or public engagement. Fellows will examine issues related to: metadata, user design and experience, digital curation, and more.*
- Tabular Data. Create and use a tabular dataset to answer a specific question or conduct exploratory analysis. Projects may include mapping, data visualization, data storytelling, network analysis, or other forms of interaction or analysis. (Tabular data is any kind of data that is structured in a spreadsheet – it may include numbers, categories, and/or free text.) Fellows will examine issues related to data cleaning, processing, and arrangement, and various techniques for ethical and rigorous data exploration and visualization.
- Textual Data. Use a large collection of texts (also known as a corpus) to answer a specific question or conduct exploratory analysis. Projects may include topic modeling, sentiment analysis, clustering, named entity recognition, or other computational methods. Fellows will examine issues related to cleaning and processing unstructured textual data, learning Python for text analysis, ethics of distant reading, and more.
*Note that we will not cover digitization itself – e.g. photographing objects – during the summer program. If you are looking for support to digitize a collection, see the Cornell University Library Grants Program for Digital Collections.