Support for humanities Ph.D. students pursuing digital projects
About the Program
The Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities (Summer DH) supports a small interdisciplinary cohort of Cornell Ph.D. students who together investigate approaches to digital scholarship through collaborative workshops, readings, discussion, and co-work on independent projects. The fellowship is a project of the Digital CoLab, sponsored by Cornell University Library and the Society for Humanities.
Time and location
The 2024 fellowship program will take place over six weeks, June 3 – July 10, 2024, in person at Olin Library. Meetings will be held on about three weekdays per week, 10am – noon, excluding holidays. Exact schedule TBD. Fellows are expected to attend every meeting of the cohort, except in unusual circumstances that have been approved in advance.
Eligibility
Current Cornell Ph.D. students working in the humanities, who will continue to be enrolled at Cornell in the 2024-25 academic year, are invited to apply. Fellows are selected for their potential to benefit from the program, and their willingness and ability to contribute to a collaborative learning environment. Students who have expressed interest or applied in the past, but who did not participate in the Fellowship, are eligible to apply again. There are no technical prerequisites.
Requirements
- Status as a Cornell Ph.D. student in a humanities or closely related discipline, and continued enrollment in the 2024-25 academic year.
- 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 scholarly goals in research, pedagogy, or public engagement. Methods that Summer DH can support include: computational text analysis; the design, visualization, and analysis of datasets and databases; network analysis; creation of digital collections and exhibits.
- Residence in the Ithaca area during the six weeks of the fellowship period.
What the program 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.
How to apply
Step 1: Express interest and meet with a librarian
Submit an interest form and schedule an individual meeting with CoLab staff to discuss your project idea. The purpose of this meeting is to help you to determine if your project idea is a good fit for the program’s capabilities, and if not, to identify other resources to support you. If you have any questions about applying for the program, please contact digitalcolab@cornell.edu or visit the CoLab during Office Hours.
Step 2: Submit an application
Access the Summer DH application at this link. Applications are due by Monday, March 25 at 9am ET. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance by April 1, 2024.
Recent Summer DH projects
Explore descriptions of recent Summer DH projects, and a few examples by graduate students at other institutions. Some projects are public-facing and include accompanying links; others are not public-facing.
Examples of digital collections, digital exhibits, and digital publishing
Revisualize Archives: Visualizing Joy in 19th-century Studio Portraiture
Victoria Baugh (Literatures in English)
“This digital collection is meant to teach us how to look and relook at images, how to ask better questions, and how to discover new things about the archival images of Black life in the nineteenth century.”
Periodical Poets
Charline Jao (Literatures in English)
“A digital humanities project containing over 500 poems printed in New York-based, nineteenth-century periodicals run by Black editors … it reflects on literary trends, nineteenth-century reading practices, and the role of poetry in abolition and protest.”
The Data of Difference/ The Difference of Data
Jason Ludwig (Science & Technology Studies)
A digital exhibition on the history of personal data in twentieth-century American history and politics.
Examples of datasets, databases, and visualizations
Venesporan Artists Project
Waleska Solórzano (Romance Studies, Spanish & Portuguese section)
“The Venesporan Artists Project (VAP) works as an archival and experimental platform on the open-source platform Collection Builder that can support us in discovering artists of the Venezuela diaspora, or what I term the Venespora, by engaging with digital tools and methodologies.”
Medieval Sri Lankan Inscription Database
Bruno Shirley (Asian Studies)
“I’ve used a SQL database to keep track of my inscriptional corpus. It lets me record data about the inscriptions themselves–where they were found, what language they’re in, who created them–but also about relationship between the inscriptions and their creators. This allows me to identify patterns in inscriptional practices across time and space, and (almost as importantly) create pretty visualisations of those patterns for presentation slides and dissertation illustrations.” (Bruno’s project is not public-facing, hence no website. He uses it in service of his own research questions and answers.)
Virtual Cartographies: Visualizing Mass Grave Recovery in Contemporary Spain
Wendy Perla Kurtz (UCLA, Spanish and Portuguese)
“A digital map that combines data collected from the Spanish Ministry of Justice—which identifies over 2,600 mass grave found throughout Spain—with a rich collection of multimedia texts directly related to specific grave sites.”
Examples of computational text analysis
- Interés in Late Sixteenth-Century Spanish Literature: Before and After Topic Modeling
Montse Li (Romance Studies)
“I aim to shed light on the concept of interés as portrayed in Spanish prints from 1590 to 1600, especially the new insights I have gained by using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. Moreover, I articulate how Topic Modeling functions to enhance our reading practices.” - Toward Computational Economic Humanities
Kyhl Stephen (Literatures in English)
“This talk describes the process of running topic modeling analyses across a couple sub-corpora to disaggregate how differently positioned texts discuss the term ‘corporation’ differently. In this way, it aims to offer digital humanist methods as a means of bridging between the nuanced attention to form and genre in literary studies and the nascent sub-field of economics called narrative economics.” - Analyzing Sanskrit CoNLL-U formatted texts with Python
Alessandro Peiris (Classics)
“For this project, I have attempted to manipulate CoNLL-U formatted Sanskrit texts with Python. My aim has been to analyze the word-compounds in these texts: how often is a certain word compounded with other words? What can we say about the relative positions of words in compounds?”