National Humanities Center Announces Digital Humanities Summer Institutes | National Humanities Center

Education Programs

National Humanities Center Announces Digital Humanities Summer Institutes

November 10, 2014

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Research Triangle Park, N.C. — The first of the National Humanities Center’s summer institutes in digital humanities, devoted to digital textual studies, will convene for two one-week sessions, first in June 2015 and again in 2016. The objective of the Institute in Digital Textual Studies is to develop participants’ technological and scholarly imaginations and to combine them into a powerful investigative instrument.
Made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this institute is the latest scholarly program developed by the Center, which provides a variety of opportunities for humanities scholars and teachers to enhance their knowledge on specific topics and supplement their instructional and research skills.
“Our summer institutes in digital humanities are designed to meet the needs of ambitious scholars who want to learn how computational methods or digital technologies might enhance or even completely reshape their scholarship,” says Elizabeth Mansfield, NHC vice president for scholarly programs. “For the most part, existing summer programs devoted to digital humanities have been designed with young scholars and postdocs in mind; our program is intended to attract mid-career and senior humanities scholars who have not yet had the opportunity for firsthand experimentation with diverse approaches to digital humanities.”
The institute will be led by two of the foremost scholars in digital humanities, Willard McCarty and Matthew Jockers. McCarty, a widely acknowledged authority on the digital revolution in humanities scholarship, is a professor in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and in the Digital Humanities Research Group at the University of Western Sidney. He is also the recipient of the 2013 Roberto Busa Prize for lifetime achievement in the application of information and communications technologies to humanities research. Jockers, who specializes in text analysis and computational approaches to the study of large text collections, is associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska, faculty fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, director of the Nebraska Literary Lab, and, during his current sabbatical year, principal research scientist at Apple Inc. in Cupertino, CA.
Fifteen humanities scholars will be selected to join McCarty and Jockers for the two-year institute based on their research interests and scholarly records. Extensive technological experience is not required. Application information and additional details about the institute are available at nationalhumanitiescenter.org/digital-humanities. The deadline for applications is February 20, 2015.