Design of the Program
The program will be open to Princeton graduate students in all humanities disciplines who have completed their general examinations. It will be explicitly interdisciplinary in focus. The program envisioned here will provide a model for fostering such inter- and cross-disciplinary scholarship, and will expose graduate student participants to the widest possible range of available tools and methods. This interdisciplinary focus will also benefit graduate students as they move into teaching, where new courses and programs increasingly cross departmental boundaries.
The proposed program will have three components: a pre-seminar training session for students needing basic skills; a one-week, intensive summer seminar; and a series of colloquia that extend the practice with new tools and discussion about new methods throughout the ensuing year.
Princeton humanities graduate students who have completed their general examinations will be invited to apply for the program. Each will submit a short statement of purpose and a letter of support from his or her departmental adviser. Applicants will be evaluated on the basis of interest, departmental recommendation, and potential for future excellence in teaching and scholarship in their fields. An effort will be made to include participants from as many different humanities departments as possible. Thirty participants will be selected by the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School.
It is expected that most graduate students attracted to this program will have the necessary basic computing skills (defined as familiarity with: word-processing; e-mail; on-line catalogues; and the Princeton network). For those that do not, however, CIT staff members will offer a two-day workshop to introduce those skills.
At the heart of the program will be an intensive, one-week seminar. The first two days will provide a broad overview of the history of humanities computing and the resources currently available and relevant to humanists across disciplines: specifically, these two days will focus on resources and research tools available in the library and on the Internet. Staff from the University's Firestone Library will provide support for these introductions. The rest of the workshop will introduce a variety of specific methods and applications, ranging from basic skills to cutting-edge theories. Presentations will be supplemented by books, handouts, and on-line materials. Wherever possible, however, the seminar will provide the graduate students with hands-on access to and practice with the best tools available for research with electronic texts in their specific disciplines, and in the humanities more generally. Graduate students will have ample opportunity both to integrate these new methodologies into their own scholarship, by working on their own projects, and to begin developing informal networks and intellectual communities. They will be invited to bring work-in-progress and larger research questions to the seminar, so they can actively involve their own research with the tools and methods taught in the course. Senior Princeton faculty, both the advisers of the participants and selected faculty members whose work engages with these new tools and methods, will be invited to attend the seminar, eat meals, and provide critique and discussion with the students.
In order to provide more opportunity for students to practice their new skills and to develop the networking and mentoring aspects of the program, the seminar will be followed with a bi-weekly colloquium through the summer for those students remaining on the Princeton campus. Topics for the colloquia will be determined in part by the interests expressed by students during the seminar itself. These colloquia will be continued monthly during the academic year, and will involve senior faculty as mentors and as fellow participants. The term-time colloquia will emphasize teaching applications of these tools and methods, and will be designed to be particularly useful to the graduate students who are serving as Assistants in Instruction (Princeton's term for Teaching Assistant). Leadership for organizing these colloquia will come from the Dean of the Graduate School.