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Six internships to be created for MSI students at humanities centers
(Oct 2008) The University of Michigan School of Information is developing a model internship program to place six master's students as fully paid summer interns in digital humanities centers in Michigan, Maryland, and Nebraska.
The project is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C., through a three-year, $590,000 award.
Other participating iSchools are the University of Maryland and the University of Texas. Each of those schools and the University of Michigan will place six interns over three years, starting in 2009.
In addition, the Nebraska Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, the Michigan State University MATRIX program, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities are grant participants and intern host institutions.
A digital humanities center builds and makes available digital resources that support sophisticated new research in the humanities. The resources are usually digitized versions of primary resources, such as literary texts, photographs, and manuscripts.
"SI students will learn how to build digital collections, using specialized tools for analyzing digital texts and images, and interact with researchers who are breaking new ground in the humanities," says Associate Professor Paul Conway of the University of Michigan School of Information. He is the co-principal investigator for the project.
"There is tremendous interest among our MSI students in the digital humanities, in part because so many students wish to connect their arts and humanities background with emerging computational methods of text and image analysis."
As a field, digital humanities provides a bridge between students' undergraduate and graduate degrees. "Many of our students are eager to find work in digital libraries and the cultural heritage sector, and these internships will help prepare them to do that," Conway says.
Digital humanities collection-building encompasses sophisticated text markup using Text Encoding Initiative standards, high quality digital imaging, and complex Web sites that support research collaboration. Users of digital humanities centers are closely cooperating communities of scholars along with the doctoral students they train.
"Often digital humanities centers build thematic collections," Conway explains. "At Nebraska, for example, two important projects are the Walt Whitman Archive and the Willa Cather Archive. At Michigan State, MATRIX specializes in multimedia international resource collections. The Maryland institute builds tools to support the analysis -- often via data mining -- of texts."
Conway's research at SI is deeply oriented toward the building and using of these kinds of collections. He is also interested in improving general purpose digital libraries built by libraries, archives, and museums.
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