phd in digital humanities

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PhD in Digital Humanities

Requirements.

The PhD in Digital Humanities, run by Cambridge Digital Humanities and based in the Faculty of English, is a research-intensive programme new for 2024 that will enable students to engage at doctoral level with projects demanding the use of digital methods, tools, or adopting critical/theoretical orientations. The programme expands the humanities offering at research postgraduate level at Cambridge by offering a route for cross-disciplinary engagement, responding to the growth of the field of Digital Humanities as a research area.

The programme is designed to enable students from many areas of the arts and humanities to develop practical skills and knowledge and to generate the necessary critical literacy to understand and engage with digital research, and digital cultures, and to respond to questions arise around the ethics of automation, algorithmic analysis, privacy/surveillance, virtual cultures, data sharing, intelligent agency and creativity, archival justice and digital histories, and to explore work in relation to collections and heritage issues. Through supervisions and technical support from a research software engineer, contextualised by a research culture providing research led seminars and lectures, guest seminars, and practice-driven workshops, CDH provides the conditions for original PhD research in Digital Humanities or in other arts and humanities/social science disciplines that make a significant intervention into shaping the field.

Background Digital Humanities is an intrinsically interdisciplinary field: we therefore will consider candidates from almost any academic field. You might have a grounding in History, Archaeology, Literature, Linguistics, Art History, Economics, Computer Science, etc. The degree itself involves working with a range of materials from Cambridge Libraries, Museums and Collections and other disciplines.

Academic qualifications

Applicants for this course should have achieved a UK Masters (Merit) .

If your degree is not from the UK, please check International Qualifications to find the equivalent in your country.

University Minimum Academic Requirements

MPhil students in Digital Humanities from Cambridge who wish to continue to the PhD may apply to do so, subject to meeting certain conditions. The expected standard for continuation to the PhD at Cambridge is normally:

• An overall mark of 70 or more for the MPhil course
• A mark of 70 or more for the dissertation/portfolio submitted as part of the MPhil course
• Other conditions may also be imposed as deemed necessary

General entry requirements for the University of Cambridge: https://www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/application-process/entry-requirements

2024 Home students: £9,387

2024 Overseas students: £28,401

Anyone who applies to a postgraduate course at Cambridge can also apply to be considered for funding.

Every year the University of Cambridge awards over £100m in scholarships to new postgraduate students. This money comes from many generous University and College endowments, as well as government Research Council (UKRI) funds . A lot of our students also fund their studies from external sources such as charities or government schemes and loans.

Our major internal sources of funding are:

• Cambridge Trust
• Gates Cambridge Trust
• Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme (HDPSP)
• Research Councils (UKRI)
• Colleges and departments

General information found at: https://www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/funding-overview

European Funding Guide

The  European Funding Guide  is the largest online-platform in the EU for finding financial aid. The platform contains over 12,000 scholarships, grants and awards across the whole EU worth more than 27 billion Euros per year. Over 4,000 of these are specifically targeted at UK students.

General Enquiries: [email protected]

Postgraduate Administrator (Suzanne Daley): [email protected]

Admissions Enquiries: www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/contact-form

Twitter: twitter.com/camdighum

Applications for the PhD in Digital Humanities open on 4 September 2023.

The deadline for Gates (US) scholarships is 11 October 2023 ( https://www.gatescambridge.org/apply/timeline/ ).

The deadline for all other applications is in 4 January 2024.

For more information and a link to the application portal, look up Digital Humanities in the Postgraduate Course Directory after applications open.

What kinds of methodologies and projects are most popular at CDH? Moving forward, what areas is CDH most interested in developing?

Our aim is to further an expansive form of Digital Humanities that encompasses work with collections, literature as digital humanities, global digital humanities, critical media theorisation, digital media, methodological advancement, future and emerging technologies including AI and machine learning, and much more. You can find out more about our research activities at cdh.cam.ac.uk/research and a general statement about our research areas at cdh.cam.ac.uk/about . Our supervisors cover a range of research areas. Find a potential CDH supervisor here .

Regarding the application, what do you consider to be an eligible ‘sample of work’? Would essays written for master’s study, for example, or a chapter or two from the master’s thesis be accepted?

Both of these suggestions would work. The sample of work can be one long piece or several shorter essays (max. 5) amounting to around 5,000—7,000 words in total. You will also need to provide an 800-word research proposal. To find the full list of materials required for PhD applications, please visit: postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/elelpddgh/apply

Does your PhD programme accept applicants who already hold a PhD?

Yes. Applicants who do not hold a PhD are not at a disadvantage.

If we are currently awaiting results from our MA studies, would it be best to wait for these results to be released before applying, or is it okay to apply beforehand?

You can apply before you have been awarded your marks for your MA, but you will have to have your marks before you are administered to the PhD course. You would simply add a predicted grade to your application form e.g. ‘Merit predicted’.

Are there any specific guidelines or recommendations for creating a research proposal for the PhD programme in Digital Humanities? What should the research proposal look like?

  A PhD research proposal should be 800 words long. It needs to give those assessing your application an impression of the strength and originality of your proposed research, and its potential to make a contribution to knowledge. It should be written in clear, jargon-free, and unexceptionable prose. Grammatical mistakes and typographical errors give a very bad impression. You should make sure you cover the following areas (without explicitly dividing the proposal into headings).

• the research topic briefly outline the area and topic of your research.
• the research context relate your proposed research to other work in its field or related fields, and indicate in what ways your research will differ; you might mention monographs on the subject, as well as important theoretical models or methodological exemplars. This is a chance to show your understanding of the background against which your research will be defined.
• the contribution you will make this is your chance to show how you have arrived at your position and recognised the need for your research, and what it is that makes it both new and important; you should indicate what areas and debates it will have an impact on, what methodological example it sets (if appropriate) – in short how it contributes to knowledge and to the practice of our subject. Give examples of the sort of evidence you might consider, and of the questions it might help you to raise. Show that you are already thinking about the area in detail and not only in outline.
• your methods in some cases there will be little to say here, but if there is something striking about your methodology, you should explain it.
• the sources and resources you will use you should delimit your field of enquiry, showing where the project begins and ends; in certain cases, Cambridge will have unique collections and resources of central relevance to your project, and you should mention these.
• how the project will develop you might indicate some of the possible ways in which the project could develop, perhaps by giving a broader or narrower version depending on what materials and issues you uncover

My research looks at a topic that isn’t fully covered by the supervisory team at CDH. Can I still apply to the programme?

Research proposals that move beyond the specialisms of our supervisory team may still work within CDH, however, you may wish to consider applying to a PhD programme in another department. You will be able to engage with our programme and graduate training opportunities as a Cambridge student even if you aren’t based in CDH.

How can I better evaluate whether my research would fit with Cambridge Digital Humanities?

You can find CDH’s team of supervisors here . If you are unsure whether your intended research fits with the specialisms of our supervisors, please contact us at [email protected]

Can we apply for part-time studies at CDH?

Yes, you can apply for part-time study.

Does the October deadline for the Gates scholarship apply to US students already studying in the UK? Is the early round of the Gates scholarship exclusively for US-citizens?

Please see the Cambridge Gates Scholarship website for more details about application deadlines and eligibility.

Can I submit one of my publications as the writing sample for my application?

Absolutely.

How do I find funding? What does three years of funding usually look like?

The main way to find funding is via the University’s  Postgraduate Funding Search , which contains:

• University funding opportunities
• Funded studentships and research projects
• Research Council (UKRI) studentships

A lot of our students also fund their studies from  external funding sources such as charities or government schemes and loans. Anyone who applies for a postgraduate course at Cambridge can also apply to be considered for funding to help cover their  fees and costs . There are also specific funding opportunities available to applicants from underrepresented backgrounds from both UK households and abroad, including application fee waivers. Normally ‘full’ funding covers everything (including fees and living expenses), but there are sometimes opportunities for partial funding though this is less common.

For general information about postgraduate funding visit: postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/funding

For contextual data and widening participation funding, visit: postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/funding/contextual-data

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, please email us with any questions at [email protected]

Is there a difference between funding opportunities for part-time and full-time PhD applicants?

Tuition fees are essentially the same, just divided up into more years. We don’t control funding directly, so you should check with the specific funder you are targeting.

For more information about postgraduate funding, visit: postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/funding

Is it normal to expect to do fieldwork for the PhD project?

It depends on the nature of the project – fieldwork might be appropriate if you are carrying out interviews or observations, but if you are working on archival sources, it wouldn’t be.

Can you provide further information on where applicants can find details relating to the word count and format for the covering letter, the proposal, and writing sample?

To apply for this course, you’ll need to prepare a number of materials. Please see the full list of requirements on the ‘How to Apply’ section of the application portal: postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/elelpddgh/apply .

• Two academic references 
• Transcript 
• Evidence of competence in English  If required – you can  check using our tool
• Covering letter Applicants need to submit a single page covering letter explaining their rationale for wishing to undertake the course and justifying their case for a place.
• Research proposal (M) Please submit a 800-word research proposal
• Sample of work (max. 5) Please submit a sample of work which can be one long piece or several shorter essays amounting to around 5,000–7,000 words in total.

If you wish to be considered for a Gates Cambridge Scholarship you will also need to provide the following:

• Gates Cambridge Reference 
• Research Proposal (PhD applicants only)

See  Gates Cambridge  for more information.

If we have mitigating, contextual circumstances that have impacted our grades (e.g. health issues, family situations), how can we best share this context with the department on our applications?

There is room on the application form to include contextual circumstances.

When is the deadline to apply?

The general deadline for October 2024 entry is 4 January 2024. US citizens, who are based in the US, and are applying for a Cambridge Gates Scholarship must submit their application by 11 October 2023. For more information, including the application link, visit: postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/elelpddgh

Supervisors

Professor Caroline Bassett

Director, Cambridge Digital Humanities; Professor of Digital Humanities

Dr Leonardo Impett

University Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities

Dr Anne Alexander

Senior Research Associate; Learning Director

Dr Hugo Leal

Teaching Associate

Cambridge Digital Humanities

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Cambridge Digital Humanities University of Cambridge 17 Mill Lane Cambridge CB2 1RX

Email: [email protected]

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Digital Humanities serves the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences as an incubator for collaborative research and teaching initiatives that are vital to the school. We are a vibrant community developing digital tools and computational methods to enrich the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

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The Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT center on the undergraduate Digital Humanities UROP Lab that creates computational tools for solving problems to advance the state of knowledge in humanistic fields. All of our code is open source and available on GitHub.

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Sitting at the intersection of humanistic and STEM fields, Digital Humanities provides a space for students and faculty to speak across disciplinary boundaries. Giving engineering students deep exposure to questions in the humanities, arts, and social sciences serves as a foundation for them to take effective, ethical, and equitable approaches to problems throughout their careers.

Making connections at MIT and beyond

Digital Humanities at MIT creates interdisciplinary connections at MIT, within the Boston DH community, and throughout the world. Inclusivity is a core value of our programs: our undergraduate lab cohort reflects the rich diversity of our campus, and our speaker and workshop series engage with scholars from around the globe.

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2. communication cultivating “bilingualism” at mit, 3. community making connections at mit and beyond, undergraduate research.

The Digital Humanities Lab works with a cohort of 30-40 undergraduate research associates (UROPs) every semester. These students build their programming skills as they create new tools that address pressing questions in the humanities. UROPs collaborate with faculty, expert programmers, and fellow undergraduate researchers on creative solutions to interdisciplinary challenges. In 2022-2023, UROPs had the opportunity to work on visual analysis, machine learning, mapping, and more! In Spring 2023, we also ran a new class, Encoding Culture (21H.S05) , that combined coding and the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Check out the class website for more information!

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Every year, the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT invite faculty and teaching staff of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences to propose projects to conduct in the lab the following year. DH Faculty Fellows work closely with UROPs, postdocs, and the lab’s technical staff to create innovative digital projects to further their research and teaching. Through deep collaboration and ongoing communication, faculty and students produce cutting-edge digital humanities research tools.

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A pioneer in the field of Digital Humanities, we were the first department in the world to offer a PhD in the subject. 

Study in a department ranked first in the UK (along with the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries) for research power in the most recent Research Excellence Framework. 

Undertaking a PhD with us, you’ll be able to research ways in which digital information technologies are transforming the humanities, arts, culture and society.    Look at the impact of the globalisation of information and how we might better understand our digital selves, culture and society. Or research the interaction of technology and digital content with cultural and social processes, with how we read and publish and how we create and keep memories.  

You can choose to research solely with us or take a collaborative PhD with other departments such as Classics , History , English  and Culture, Media & Creative Industries . 

Digital Humanities Research

Take a PhD in Digital Humanities at King's College London or a joint PhD with the National University of Singapore.

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The Rise of the PhD in Digital Humanities

England may have fared poorly in the World Cup but it is leading the way in the development of innovative, interdisciplinary doctoral programs in Digital Humanities.

The first dedicated PhD program in Digital Humanities started at King’s College London in 2005. That program is offered through the Center for Computing in the Humanities, though students also work with advisors from other departments. The program is designed to foster research into “the implications and consequences of digital methods for any field or combination of fields in the humanities or beyond.” Students currently in the program are working on a variety of projects including a study of political language in Victorian electoral politics (using computer-assisted corpus-based linguistic methods), a prosopographical study of the Portuguese Court in the 16th century, a study of the semiotics of verbal vs. graphical representation in maps (using computer-based semantic modeling), and a study of the distribution of grammatical sentence patterns in Elizabethan dramatic texts. We can see how the combination of digital technologies with traditional objects of humanities study yields new kinds of research questions, but not all the projects apply new methods to traditional objects; some also consider, for example, "the use of new media in city and public space."

Additionally, University College London has recently announced a fellowship program for its own PhD in Digital Humanities .

In the US, Georgia Tech offers a PhD in Digital Media , but most research in digital humanities takes place, it seems, in English departments. Some of them are listed on Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s blog here . In a previous lab blog , we reported on the Stanford Literature Lab, which uses the vast Google Library Project archive to explore new methods -- including what Professor Franco Moretti calls “distant reading” -- for approaching literary history.

It would seem on this evidence that there is a particular openness towards new computational methodologies in the disciplines of English Literature and Linguistics. What remains to be seen is whether or not other humanities fields, like Philosophy and Religion, will also find themselves transformed by new digital technologies.

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Center for Digital Scholarship

Digital humanities phd certificate, program requirements.

Steering Comittee

Application

The Doctoral Certificate Program in Digital Humanities offers an opportunity to currently enrolled Ph.D. students interested in adding expertise in digital methodologies and techniques to their research portfolio.

Digital Humanities  is a vibrant and wide-ranging research domain. The field uses digital methodologies and formats to answer humanities and humanistic social science research questions, produce and share knowledge, and teach.

It encompasses critical studies of digital environments (for example, bias in algorithms or the ethics of data), innovative modes of research and advancing arguments (such as new methodologies for constituting archives, analyzing texts and images, and visualizing data) new forms of scholarly and general publications, and aspects of digital pedagogy.

Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities are pleased to partner together to offer the doctoral certificate, which will provide students with a foundation in digital methods and skills for their research, as well as an understanding of the broader theoretical questions that digital approaches to scholarship offer.

The certificate is aimed at Ph.D. students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences though Ph.D. students from all disciplines are welcome to apply.

Upon completion of the certificate, students will:

• Have a foundational understanding of digital humanities as a broad scholarly field, including basic theory and debates.
• Develop deeper familiarity with specific areas of digital scholarship (e.g. mapping or text mining) of relevance to their own research and teaching.
• Know how to evaluate and critique digital scholarship.
• Be able to design and execute a research project using digital humanities research techniques grounded in a theoretical articulation of the stakes of that project.
• Be empowered to explore this fast-moving domain of practice and research further.
• Introduction to Digital Humanities (HMAN 2300) . This course, which is open to all graduate students, will provide an overview of the field and introduce students to the wide range of methodologies and theoretical underpinnings in the digital humanities.
• The curriculum for the doctoral certificate in digital humanities, mixing theory and practice, requires completion of four components, with all courses taken for credit (letter grade or pass/fail).
• An elective at the 1000 or 2000 level , selected from the approved course list in consultation with the CDS faculty director.
• Digital Tools and Methods . This requirement may be fulfilled through completion of a programming course, the CDS Summer Workshop in Digital Humanities/Digital Scholarship, or seven or more workshops in the CDS academic-year workshop series selected from the approved workshop list in consultation with the CDS Director.
• Digital Humanities Capstone Seminar (HMAN 2301) . This seminar will provide students with hands-on experience working on their own Digital Humanities project and/or contributing to a Digital Humanities project as part of a team. Students will present their capstone project in the Digital Humanities Salon . Admission into the course is conditional upon admission into the certificate. Students are encouraged to take Intro to Digital Humanities prior to the Digital Humanities Capstone Seminar. Students can apply to enroll in the certificate at any stage in their coursework. 

Steering Committee

The certificate’s steering committee is composed of the CDS faculty director, the CDS director, a member of the Cogut Institute, and three faculty members.

Laurel Bestock , Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture

Ashley Champagne , Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, Lecturer in Humanities

Kim Gallon , Associated Professor of Africana Studies

Damien Mahiet , Associate Director of the Cogut Institute, Lecturer in Humanities

Tara Nummedal , John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History, Professor of Italian Studies

Sohini Ramachandran , Director of the Data Science Initiative, Professor of Biology, Co-Director of Graduate Studies for the Center of Computational Molecular Biology, Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Professor Computer Science

Please apply to the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate Program using UFunds .  To access the application, log in to UFunds , and select Doctoral Certificates , then Digital Humanities . Applications are accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis throughout the year. (Deadlines in UFunds are administrative: a new application cycle will open as soon as the previous one comes to end.)   

The applicant’s home department DGS approval is required. Please note that the program is open only to Ph.D. students currently enrolled at Brown University. For more information, please contact Professor Tara Nummedal .

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Doctoral Certificate in Digital Humanities

The graduate certificate is designed to provide students with rigorous training in digital humanities that is also tailored to their particular research interests and areas of specialization. The certificate offers students a depth and breadth of knowledge about computational approaches to humanities scholarship; the ability to clearly articulate their own methodological approaches to digital projects they complete; the ability to intervene in and discuss the larger theoretical debates that shape digital humanities scholarship; knowledge about multiple digital methods and tools that students can employ to answer research questions; and experience with project management and working in cross-disciplinary collaborative research teams. 

To view details about  Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities click here.

Strengths in Digital Humanities

The University of Miami is recognized internationally for the Cuban Theater Digital Archive, an ongoing digital humanities project. The archive has been awarded three grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is utilized by scholars, teachers, and students in Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and History. Headed by Lillian Manzor in MLL, it has already proven to attract graduate students and researchers from around the globe to UM. Our digital collections in the University of Miami Libraries are also internationally known and provide rich sites for digital humanities projects.

The Modern Languages and Literatures Department, the English Department, and the University of Miami libraries have all made recent hires in the digital humanities, expanding the possibilities for DH work at the University. Furthermore, our faculty, with a particular interest in transcultural and transnational connections across the hemisphere and the Atlantic world, fills a gap in digital humanities scholarship at large by utilizing digital methodologies to approach literature, culture, and history from across the Americas and beyond.

Department of English

Lindsay Thomas publishes and teaches on contemporary US literature, cultural and media studies, and the digital humanities. She is a co-director of the WhatEvery1Says project, a digital humanities project that uses methods in machine learning to discover large-scale trends in contemporary public discourse about the humanities. WhatEvery1Says has received a 3-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation for $1.1 million (2017-2020) and is currently employing five graduate student research assistants from the Departments of English and History.

John Funchion is currently working on two digital humanities projects: [alt]periodicals, an online archive of 19th -century radical publications; and "CONNECT: Countering Online Networked Extremist Conspiracy Theories," a project funded through the U-Link program, which currently has an English PhD student serving as a full-time research fellow.

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Alongside Lillian Manzor's ongoing work on the Cuban Theater Digital Archive and her expertise in digital humanities scholarship, two recent tenure-track hires in the department have brought additional pedagogical and research training in digital humanities to UM.

Susanna Alles-Torrent specializes in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, translation studies, textual scholarship and philology, and she has expertise in several aspects of digital humanities, especially, scholarly digital editions, electronic text analysis, and digital lexicography. She has already collaborated with several DH certificate programs in Digital Editing, at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has participated in multiple DH projects and secured two grants from the European Association for Digital Humanities, and, conjointly with prof. Thomas, has recently organized a Pedadogy Workshop on GIS in the classroom, supported by the College of Arts & Sciences at UM.

Allison Schifani has worked on developing curriculum in the digital humanities both here at UM and at her previous post as the Postdoctoral Scholar in the Digital Humanities at the BakerNord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. She has incorporated GIS and StoryMaps projects specific to Miami in her undergraduate courses and has taught both digital humanities and media studies at the graduate level during her tenure here. Dr. Schifani also works in a collaborative she co-founded with architects and visual artists, SPEC, which is devoted to urban studies, and through which she employs several digital methods. She is a literature and media studies scholar and has published on digital literature as well.

Beyond the Departments of English, History, and Modern Languages and Literatures, students pursuing the graduate certificate will be able to take graduate courses in other departments that may be relevant to their research (see appendix B). The School of Communication has many courses in digital methods, design, programming, and data visualization that are relevant to practitioners of digital humanities, while the Department of Geography has courses in Geographic Information Systems relevant to students interested in geospatial humanities.

UM Libraries Resources in Digital Humanities

University of Miami Libraries have established a Digital Scholarship Unit consisting of Elizabeth Gushee (Associate Dean of Digital Strategies), Abe Parrish (GIS Librarian), and Dr. Cameron Riopelle (Data Services Librarian). Members of this unit work both individually and collaboratively to support students and faculty engaging with digital humanities research.

The UM Libraries are active participants in several ongoing national projects that support digital humanities research. They are active contributors to the Digital Public Library of America through the Sunshine State Digital Network and are part of the Hathi Trust Partnership. UM Libraries faculty members collaborate with the Department of Communications and the Center for Computational Science to host the Digital Humanities + Data Journalism Symposium each year. In spring of 2017, the Libraries released the La Gaceta dataset in conjunction with the Institute of Museum and Library Services-supported Collections as Data project.

Other Resources in Digtial Humanities at UM and in Greater Miami

Beyond the strengths of these CAS departments and the UM Libraries in Digital Humanities, other university resources plus our location in Miami make UM an ideal site for this graduate certificate. Graduate students will have the opportunity to take part in the work of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, which includes faculty and library staff from the University of Florida, Florida International University, and eight other institutions of higher education across the state, including UM.

Graduate students participating in the graduate certificate program will also have the chance to take part in lectures, workshops, symposia, and conferences sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and its Interdisciplinary Research Group in Digital Humanities.

The annual Digital Humanities and Data Journalism conference, hosted at the University of Miami, is an additional resource to students pursuing the graduate certificate and interested in digital scholarship. It brings leading thinkers and practitioners in both fields to UM under the direction of Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the university's School of Communication.

The Center for Computational Science is also a resource which students and faculty may take advantage of as they engage in digital humanities scholarship, broadening possibilities for collaboration across not only humanities departments, but across the sciences as well. Through the College of Arts and Sciences’ UGrow (Graduate Opportunities at Work) Program graduate students have the opportunity to apply for nine-month placements in non-teaching units at the university or in off-campus organizations, in place of their regular teaching assistantship assignments. These placements provide training and experience in fields that will appeal to future employers both inside and outside academia, including librarianship and archive management; museum curation and collection development; and data analysis. Since 2015, students have worked on Digital Humanities projects in the University of Miami Libraries, through the Center for Computational Science, and in the History Miami Museum.

UM is also a partner institution with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, allowing students great access to digital materials specific to the Caribbean. Given our graduate students’ and faculty investment in the region, these collections and digital humanist approaches to them will prove fruitful resources and scholarship. UM will be hosting a UGrow fellowship at the Digital Library of the Caribbean in 2019-2020. In addition, graduate students have the chance to take advantage of the rich permanent collections of the Lowe Art Museum.

Our graduate students are also eligible to take courses at FIU — extending the digital humanities focused offerings available to them — and to take advantage of FIU’s rich library resources. There is also a long history of UM faculty and graduate student collaboration with institutions in greater Miami such as the Black Archives History & Research Foundation, HistoryMiami Museum, Little Haiti Cultural Center, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Wolfsonian-FIU. Students pursuing the graduate certificate will find that their opportunities for study and research extend well beyond campus borders, particularly as they will gain new skills and methodological approaches to a broad range of cultural texts.

Current Graduate Course Offerings in Digital Humanities in English and Modern Languages and Literatures

PhD students in English pursuing the doctoral certificate in Digital Humanities (DH) must take as part of their required course credit hours a minimum of three DH-focused and/or digital methods courses (9 credit hours) from the DH course offering below. All students pursuing the certificate must take and pass the DH practicum course (ENG 613) as part of these 9 hours of credit. Students must create and receive faculty approval for an online portfolio showcasing projects and research utilizing digital humanist methodologies.

● ENG 611: Introduction to   Digital   Humanities   (same as MLL 771)  

● ENG 612: Topics in   Digital   Humanities   and Media Studies (same as MLL 772)  

● ENG 613: Practicum in   Digital   Humanities   (same as MLL 774)  

● ENG 682: Contemporary Criticism and Theory (when the topic is expressly under the realm of   digital   humanities )  

● ENG 695: Special Topics (when the topic is expressly under the realm of   digital   humanities ) 

● MLL 714: Readings in Critical Theory  

● MLL 721: Special Topics in Literature  

● MLL771: Introduction to   Digital   Humanities   (same as ENG 611)  

● MLL772: Topics in   Digital   Humanities   and Media Studies (same as ENG 612)  

● MLL 773: Topics in   Digital   Humanities    

● MLL 774:   Digital   Humanities   Practicum (same as ENG 613)  

Additional Courses in  Digital  Methods Applicable to the  Certificate    

● GEG 691 GIS I  

● GEG 693 GIS II  

● GEG 692 Remote Sensing  

● GEG 680, Spatial Data Analysis I  

● GEG 681, Spatial Data Analysis II  

● GEG 645 Special Topics: Python for ArcGIS  

● CIM 613: Mobile Application Development  

● CIM 616: Building Virtual Worlds  

● CIM 624: Augmented Reality.  

● CIM 640: Intro to Creative Coding  

● CIM 661: 360 Immersive Storytelling  

● CIM 693: Dynamic Data  

● JMM622 - Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization  

● JMM629 - Advanced Infographics and Data Visualization  

● JMM638 - Infographics and Data Visualization Studio 

 *Students may petition the  Digital   Humanities  Faculty Committee to receive credit toward the  certificate  for a) non-DH courses for which they complete a DH project; b) non-credit training external to the University of Miami, (for example, students who have attended the  Digital   Humanities  Summer Institute may petition the committee to have training they received there count toward the completion of the  certificate ).

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Digital Humanities PhD

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Apply now to this course

Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary subject area that brings a range of computational, quantitative and other innovative and collaborative methods to the study of texts, images, histories, languages and cultures, while also being critical about methodology, disciplinarity and pedagogy.

Digital Humanities in the School of Advanced Study demonstrates the value of digital research to the wider humanities community and fulfils the School’s remit to promote and facilitate digitally enabled research across the disciplines. The School’s multidisciplinary DH team comprises academics with strong connections to subject areas including Classics, English, History and Modern Languages and Cultures, as well as researchers and practitioners with technical backgrounds.

Undertaking doctoral research in the digital humanities allows you to develop in-depth knowledge, while making a meaningful contribution to your chosen field.

With guidance from our expert supervisors, you'll carry out extensive independent research culminating in a thesis of up to 100,000 words. 

This degree presents the opportunity to gain expertise in your area of interest while also honing a range of transferable skills. On completing this course, you'll be well prepared for specialist career paths both within academia and beyond.

Subject Areas and Supervision

PhD students are based in the Digital Humanities Research Hub, which has strong connections with the Institutes in the School. Academic staff in the Hub has expertise in Classics, English, History and Modern Languages and Cultures. Students will also have the opportunity to work with technical experts and other digital humanities practitioners. It is also possible to secure co-supervision from a supervisor based elsewhere in the School who can offer additional disciplinary expertise.

All of the digital research in the School has a strong humanities focus and brings together technical expertise with a strong foundation in specific disciplinary approaches. Recent research in the Hub has included: •    Humanities approaches to the archived web •    Analysing COVID misinformation on social media •    The transnational comparison of parliamentary proceedings •    Computational text analysis of the 1921 Census records •    The application of digital methods to papyrology •    Digital resources in cultural heritage institutions •    Multilingual analysis of contemporary news coverage using natural language processing

Before submitting an application you are advised to contact a member of academic staff who has interests in your proposed field of study to discuss your proposal. A list of academic staff and their interests can be found below.

Key Information

Digital humanities at the school of advanced study.

Digital Humanities  is an interdisciplinary subject area that brings a range of computational, quantitative and other innovative and collaborative methods to the study of texts, images, histories, languages and cultures, while also being critical about methodology, disciplinarity and pedagogy.

Digital Humanities in the School of Advanced Study demonstrates the value of digital research to the wider humanities community and fulfils the School’s remit to promote and facilitate digitally enabled research across the disciplines. The School’s multidisciplinary DH team comprises academics with strong connections to subject areas including Classics, English, History and Modern Languages and Cultures, as well as researchers and practitioners with technical backgrounds.  

The School of Advanced Study

The  School of Advanced Study  at the  University of London  brings together  eight internationally renowned research institutes  to form the UK's national centre for the support of researchers and the promotion of research in the humanities.

Course structure

Full-time study for the PhD degree entails three or a maximum of four years' independent research, culminating in the writing of a thesis of not more than 100,000 words. Part-time students complete the same programme in five, or a maximum of six years.

After submission of the thesis, you will attend an oral examination conducted by an internal examiner, from the University of London, and an external examiner, normally from another British university.

There is no formal coursework, but you will be expected to participate in a weekly seminar on Work in Progress and to present a paper every year from their second year onwards. In your first year you are required to attend a weekly class on Techniques of Scholarship. You are also encouraged to participate in the regular seminars held at the Institute during the academic year.

Distance Learning 

The School of Advanced Study will offer students with an appropriate topic and level of local resource the opportunity to undertake a PhD by distance learning. These students are required to attend our London campus at set intervals to complete an intensive research training module, for upgrade, and for the viva but will otherwise study at their own location. This option is available to UK, EU and international students on the same basis as our on-campus PhD programmes (three years full time, six years part time). Fees are the same as for our on-campus PhD programmes. Please note that not all institutes and supervisors offer this option, and that some topics are not appropriate to be studied this way.

If you would like to be considered for our Research Degree programme via Distance Learning, please download and fill out the  Research Degrees by Distance Learning form , to attach to your online application.

Opportunities and facilities

The Digital Humanities Research Hub conducts cutting edge research and collaborates on a number of well-established digital projects. These include a number of online databases; directories; bibliographies; catalogues; and collections. The Hub also runs the Senate House MakerSpace , which provides facilities for 3D imaging and printing, digitisation, and computational experimentation.

The Hub hosts a lively intellectual environment that includes an active seminar series and visiting research fellows . Students are also welcome to participate in digitally-focused seminars hosted by other Institutes within the School. Members of the Hub are also active in digital humanities organisations including the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association .

The  School of Advanced Study  itself offers excellent resources for inter-disciplinary research by bringing together  eight internationally renowned research institutes  that support the promotion of research in the humanities. The Hub also has strong relationships with  Senate House Library , which runs a number of digital programmes in addition to its range of historic library reading rooms and collections. 

The School offers a broad range of  events, seminars and conferences  that we encourage our research students to engage with. This includes opportunities to participate in the annual Being Human Festival , the flagship festival of the humanities in the United Kingdom.

Our research students can also take advantage of a varied and challenging  research training programme , with general research skills training and research methodologies courses provided through the School and subject-specific training provided within the institutes.

How to apply

Before submitting an application you are advised to contact a member of academic staff who has interests in your proposed field of study to discuss your proposal. Please speak first to  Valerie James , manager, Central Academic Initiatives, School of Advanced Study. Your particular research interest may be able to be supported, even though it is not listed. A list of academic staff and their interests can be found  here .

Before agreeing to accept you, the School will require you to submit a research proposal, so it is worthwhile having this drafted ahead of a formal application.  Guidelines on drafting your research proposal .

Candidates will normally receive an initial response to their application within 28 working days. Those who have been formally interviewed will normally be informed within one week as to whether they are to be offered a place.

Note : in accordance with regulations research students will be registered for the MPhil degree in the first instance. Upgrading to PhD will be considered in the second year for full-time students and in the third or fourth year for part-time students.

Supervisors

Professor jane winters.

Professor of Digital Humanities (On research leave through September 2024)

Dr Kaspar Beelen

Technical Lead, Digital Humanities

Dr Gabriel Bodard

Reader in Digital Classics

Dr Christopher Ohge

Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature (On research leave through April 2024)

Dr Naomi Wells

Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities Acting Director, Digital Humanities Research Hub

The School of Advanced Study is a unique environment in which to study the humanities.  The School strives to reflect the latest developments in thinking across the humanities disciplines it supports and to ensure that its programmes reflect this.   We are also aware that the needs of our students are constantly changing.  With that in mind, the School continually reviews the its programmes and, as part of that process, reserves the right to alter or discontinue them. 

We assure you that we carry out these exercises at no detriment to any enrolled students. Students enrolled on any programme that we discontinue will be able to complete that programme within a reasonable timeframe and with all the necessary resources at their disposal. The School will communicate any anticipated changes with students as early as possible.

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Doctorates at UCLDH

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities facilitates the work of students carrying out PhD or EngD research, both from the UK and abroad.

PhDs at UCL are normally extend over three years full-time or five years part-time study (there are no taught components prior to writing a thesis). General information on pursuing a PhD at UCL, and what it entails, can be found in the UCL Doctoral School pages . View our UCLDH-affiliated students on our People page.

How to apply

Most PhDs at UCLDH will, depending on their supervisor, be based in the Department of Information Studies (DIS), and UCL DIS provides further information about research degrees . 

Those interested in more technical areas should also look at the UCL Engineering Doctorate (Virtual Environments Imaging and Visualisation) pages, where funded EngD places will be advertised.

Funding for PhDs is limited and competitive, and potential students are expected to pursue all avenues themselves in attracting funding. The Graduate School provides further information about fees, costs and funding , and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) website lists their current  postgraduate funding opportunities .

UCL is a partner in the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, an AHRC funded Doctoral Training Partnership offering studentships. Please see the LAHP website  for further information and details on how to apply.

UCL is also a partner in the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA) , which offers studentships to those interested in pursuing a PhD in heritage science.

Fully funded PhD in Digital Humanities

Applications are invited to apply for a PhD candidate position to perform research in the field of digital humanities methods at the Ghent Centre of Digital Humanities in collaboration with LT³ - Language and Translation Technology Team at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University. Ghent CDH specializes in the field of Digital Humanities bringing together experts in geography, history, literature, linguistics and cultural studies, working on DH research projects, teaching activities and infrastructure projects. LT³ conducts fundamental and applied research in the domain of language and translation technology and has extensive expertise in the use of machine learning for a wide range of language technology problems, int.al. part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization, anaphora resolution, word sense disambiguation and named entity recognition. Job description You will be embedded in the Horizon 2020 INFRA Research project - Computational Literary Studies . This European project will develop a shared resource of high-quality data, tools and knowledge needed for literary studies using artificial intelligence and other computational methods. The PhD candidate will research new natural language processing toolchains to facilitate research in literature and history. Specifically, the candidate will address the development of digital humanities methods in the following ways: Research the development of a NLP toolchain in literary research with enhanced multilingual workflows; Develop with a team of researchers a suite of workflows and prototypes to facilitate common research tasks within literary studies using NLP enrichments; this includes: named entity recognition, relational extraction, and sentiment analysis; Work to optimise the availability of fundamental NLP tools within a workflow for historical literary texts using case studies from KBR (the Royal Library of Belgium) multilingual serial publication collection. The candidate will perform academic research in preparation of a doctoral dissertation. You will be enrolled in the doctoral training program of Ghent University. The PhD student will have the opportunity to attend international conferences and to spend a research stay abroad in other research labs.

Job profile

Given these tasks, we are searching for a candidate with a background in computer science or computational linguistics, with an interest in literature and cultural heritage.

• You hold a Master’s diploma or certificate that is recognized as equivalent (Article V.20 Codex Higher Education) in computational linguistics, computer science or in information and library sciences OR a Master’s diploma in human or social sciences with additional certifications in computer science by 01/09/2021. (When assessing a foreign (non-EU) diploma, an equivalence certificate may still have to be requested from NARIC; we advise you - if necessary - to start the recognition procedure at NARIC as soon as possible. You must have this recognition no later than the date of appointment. You have a proven interest or experience in working in the digital humanities and implementing digital workflows using cultural heritage resources.)
• You have interest in improving your knowledge of the intellectual, cultural or literary history of the 19th and 20th century in Belgium specifically.
• You have technical and digital literacy, for example in-depth knowledge of programming languages ​​used in the humanities (Python, R, etc..), or web and metadata standards, interoperability and data exchange.
• You have good oral and written communication skills in English, as well as knowledge of Dutch, or French, or German, and a willingness to learn Dutch if not spoken.
• You take initiative in searching for new research ideas.
• You are not afraid to be critical about your own work.
• You are a highly motivated, hardworking, flexible, able to face complex issues and you have an appropriate problem-solving attitude.
• You are able to take on responsibilities, work independently but also as part of an interdisciplinary research team.
• You have strong communication and interpersonal skills.

Conditions of employment This position after approximately four years of successful research results in a PhD title in Digital Humanities. We offer a position for 4 years with yearly evaluations, in an exciting research environment, working on the intersection between theory and application in the multi-disciplinary research environment of the Faculty Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University. Remuneration will be determined according to salary scale AAP3 (more information about our salary scales). All Ghent University staff members enjoy a number of benefits, such as a wide range of training and education opportunities, 38 days of paid leave, bicycle commuting reimbursement, ecocheques, etc. The exact start date of the position is negotiable, preferably as soon as possible but no later than 01/09/2021. Candidates that will graduate soon (before the starting date 01/09/2021) are encouraged to apply.

How to apply

How to apply To apply please send your full application before 25 June 2021 to Prof Dr. Julie M. Birkholz -  [email protected] ) and Prof Dr. Christophe Verbruggen -  [email protected] , which includes the following documents as pdfs and with appropriate file names (i.e. FAMILYNAME_FILETYPE): - Your application letter in English (max. two pages) that indicates why you wish to pursue a PhD? And why in digital humanities? What is your -if any- prior experience?; - Your curriculum vitae, including two referees; - A copy of your Master’s thesis; - A copy of your Master’s diploma. After an initial screening, interviews will take place online in the week of 5 - 9 July 2021 through Zoom or MS Teams. For more information about this vacancy contact: Julie M. Birkholz, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities at Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium & Lead of the Royal Library of Belgium's Digital Research Lab  [email protected]

Related projects

Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA)

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PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge

The PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge is sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute . The lab is led by Philip Stern (History) and Victoria Szabo (Art, Art History & Visual Studies). Graduate students affiliated with the PhD Lab are invited to join an interdisciplinary community of practice, and are encouraged to share their work in periodic in-person and online gatherings. Our home base is in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, Room C104.

Spring 2023 Events

The Digital Humanities Initiative and the PhD Lab sponsor periodic events related to the Digital Humanities. Recent and upcoming events include:

• A talk by recent CMAC PhD graduate Evan Donahue, current postdoctoral fellow at the U of Tokyo on his current research (20 January 2023)
• Digital Culture and Literature Working Group (first meeting on 26 January 2023)
• A talk and workshop series by current postdoctoral fellow Yuan Julian Chen on Historical GIS (9 February 2023)
• A UNC/Duke Critical Games Symposium to be held at UNC (24 February 2023)
• Open discussion sessions on digital humanities research, pedagogy, and curriculum (March and April 2023)
• DH Summer Grant Recipient Symposium Sessions (Thursday 11:30-1; dates TBA in April 2023)
• In addition, Duke Libraries and other campus programs frequently sponsor events of DH interest. Follow the Events page on our website, as well as our PhD Lab Twitter Feed for more information on the latest news.

Working Groups, Projects, and Events

The DHI@FHI helps support discussions, working groups, seminars, events, and more. Visit our website, contact the Lab Co-Directors or contact FHI Associate Director Christina Chia for more information on current opportunities. If you apply through FHI directly for working groups, course development, event support etc. do be sure to mention the PHD lab in your application so it gets flagged for our attention and support.

Digital Humanities Summer Research Grants

In Summer 2022, 17 PhD students received $2750 grants to support independent research in the digital humanities. During the 2022-23 academic year the grant recipients are reporting back on their experiences in periodic group symposium sessions.  In addition, PhD Lab grantees are encouraged to join events sponsored by the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative, to self-organize into working groups, and to suggest additional activities for the graduate DH community as a whole.

In response to feedback on this year's program, we anticipate offering a revised, variable-amount summer research grants program to PhD students again in 2023, and with optional additional support to sponsor workshops, working groups, and events during the academic year following the award. Potential applicants will be invited to an information session in February 2023, where will we provide further details on grant amounts and expectations; a call for applications will circulate mid-February.

Digital Humanities Summer Graduate Assistantships

In addition to our summer grants program, the PhD Lab plans to partner with the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Humanities Unbounded, and North Carolina Central University on a small number of Summer Graduate Assistantships focused on the development of digital humanities curriculum and training. More information coming soon!

Digital Humanities TA-ships

Depending on common interests and resource availability, some students may also also be offered the opportunity to TA for a digital humanities course at NCCU or Duke in future semesters. More information on this potential program will be available later in Spring 2023 and Fall 2023.

Courses and Training

Depending on student interest, the PhD lab may organize workshops and tutorial sessions for graduate students. If you would like to suggest - or offer - a workshop, contact us!

Graduate students are also encouraged to take classes such as ISS 580S: the Interdisciplinary Humanities Proseminar (required for the MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media), and to sign up for the Information Science + Studies Graduate Certificate. The ISS Program offers and cross-lists a variety of courses relevant to students with digital humanities interests. Students may also be interested in courses and opportunities associated with the Computational Media, Arts & Cultures program and labs. FHI is a co-sponsor of the interdisciplinary CMAC PhD, and hosts speakers and events related to critical digital humanities in conjunction with CMAC offerings.

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Four PhD Positions in AI, Digital Humanities, and Cultural Heritage

Do you want to become part of a dynamic community that is at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence, Digital Humanities, and Cultural Heritage?   

Our experts from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation ( ILLC ) and the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture ( AHM ) are looking for four talented and ambitious PhD candidates.  Your research will be part of the Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities unit of the ILLC (Projects 1-3) or the Digital Heritage research group of the AHM (Project 4).  

We are working with leading universities, key technology partners, and core archives, libraries, and museums in the national NWO NWA project HAICu , to realise a very ambitious multidisciplinary research agenda together. Are you ready to become part of this exciting ecosystem, and take your career to the next level? If so, we would like you to apply for one of our four PhD positions described below.

What are you going to do?

You are an ambitious PhD student working on one of the four projects: 

Project 1 : LLMs for Cultural Heritage Access

Your focus will be on large language models for information access. How can we search specific collections, including full text, metadata, and multimodal content? How can we support complex search tasks and practices, such as scholarly research on cultural data, and the research and workflow of investigative journalism?

Supervisors: Jaap Kamps (ILLC)

Project 2: XAI from Artificial Intelligence to Digital Humanities

Your focus will be on applying AI explainability (XAI) in digital humanities and examine its value for the analysis of cultural-historical collections. How can we aggregate evidence in order to explain AI decisions but also how do AI models use evidence and uncertainty? How do we need to modify current XAI to meet the needs of humanities research? 

Supervisors: Tobias Blanke (ILLC), Jaap Kamps (ILLC)

Project 3: XAI from Digital Humanities to Artificial Intelligence

Project 3 is complementary to project 2 but focuses on XAI from a historical-cultural perspective to analyse changes to humanities practices and epistemologies. How can we aggregate evidence to explain (past) human decisions and what are the limitations of current XAI techniques to do so? What are the cultural and theoretical conditions of XAI to explain historical materials? 

Supervisors: Tobias Blanke (ILLC), Julia Noordegraaf (AHM)

Project 4: Constructing Polyvocal Cultural Heritage Narratives

Your focus will be on “polyvocality,” the current movement towards the inclusion of multiple perspectives in and on cultural heritage collections. Can we obtain reliable data to capture perspectives of different stakeholders and the relationships between them? What theoretical framework do we use to define perspectives and their relations with the underlying data sources (i.e., who created the data: experts? citizens? AI?). What perspectives are missing?

Supervisors: Julia Noordegraaf (AHM), Tobias Blanke (ILLC)

These four PhD students will be part of the digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Heritage (HAICu) project, a large national science agenda project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO NWA funding 10.3 million euros, hiring 27 PhDs,  Postdocs, and other researchers). HAICu deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to make digital heritage collections more accessible. It allows users to more easily interpret events from different perspectives and assess them for authenticity.

In HAICu, AI and Digital Humanities researchers collaborate with various partners and interested citizens on scientific breakthroughs to unlock, connect, and analyse extensive digital heritage collections. The extraordinary challenges of cultural heritage provide a unique opportunity to push the boundaries of AI. Future techniques must be able to be used outside the laboratory, learn from as few examples as possible and continuously learn from users. These techniques must take into account the societal demand for accountable and explainable methods for creating multimodal narratives of our cultural heritage that extend beyond current major language models.

Your tasks and responsibilities

You are expected:

• to perform research on artificial intelligence, digital humanities and/or cultural heritage;
• to publish and present the results in leading international conferences and journals;
• to complete a PhD thesis submitted within the period of appointment;
• to participate in meetings of the four PhDs,  the hosting research groups, and the broader national research project (also with work package groups);
• to participate in knowledge dissemination activities with external stakeholders;
• to contribute to our teaching activities by (co-)teaching courses at the BA-level in the 2nd and 3rd year of the appointment and/or guiding students in their thesis work (max. 0,2FTE per year).

What do you have to offer?

We seek ambitious PhD candidates to work on a dynamic area of research, where new opportunities are expected to arise during the projects. 

Your experience and profile

We are looking for a candidate with:

• a completed master's degree in artificial intelligence, digital humanities, and/or cultural heritage. You may apply if you have not yet completed your master's degree only if you provide a signed letter from your supervisor stating that you will graduate before September 1, 2024;
• a demonstrable interest in socio-technical research, and affinity with cultural heritage; 
• a strong academic performance in university level courses in the relevant subjects (see below), and excellent research skills demonstrated by an outstanding master's thesis;
• a strong cooperative attitude and interest in working collaboratively with other researchers and external stakeholders; 
• a professional command of English and good presentation skills.

A candidate with cross disciplinary background (or interest in developing this) is a clear plus.  Demonstrable interest and experience:  

• with artificial intelligence, natural language processing and information retrieval is crucial for Project 1 and desirable for Project 2;  
• with science and technology studies and digital humanities is crucial for Project 3 and desirable for Project 2;  
• with cultural-historical research and/or critical heritage studies is crucial for Project 4 and desirable for Project 3.  

Please note that if you already hold a doctorate/PhD or are working towards obtaining a similar degree elsewhere, you will not be admitted to a doctoral programme at the UvA.

What can we offer you?

We offer a temporary employment contract for the period of 48 months. The first contract will be for 16 months, with an extension for the following 32 months, contingent on a positive performance evaluation within the first 12 months. The employment contract is for 38 hours a week. The preferred starting date is as soon as possible.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and relevant experience, ranges from € 2,770 up to a maximum of € 3,539. This sum does not include the 8% holiday allowance and the 8,3% year-end allowance. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

What else do we offer?

Apart from your salary and employee status (no tuition fees) and an inspiring research environment, we offer you many fringe benefits:

• 232 holiday hours per year (based on full time) and extra holidays between Christmas and 1 January;
• multiple courses to follow from our Teaching and Learning Centre ;
• a complete educational program for PhD students, including those offered by the Dutch National Research Schools ;
• multiple courses on topics such as time management, handling stress and an online learning platform with 100+ different courses;
• 7 weeks birth leave (partner leave) with 100% salary;
• partly paid parental leave;
• the possibility to set up a workplace at home;
• a pension at ABP for which UvA pays two third part of the contribution;
• the possibility to follow courses to learn Dutch;
• help with housing for a studio or small apartment when you’re moving from abroad.

The University of Amsterdam is the Netherlands' largest university, offering the widest range of academic programmes. At the UvA, 42,000 students, 6,000 staff members and 3,000 PhD candidates study and work in a diverse range of fields, connected by a culture of curiosity.

The Faculty of Humanities provides education and conducts research with a strong international profile in a large number of disciplines in de field of language and culture. Located in the heart of Amsterdam, the faculty maintains close ties with many cultural institutes in the capital city. Research and teaching staff focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and are active in several teaching programmes. 

The  Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)  is a research institute at the UvA in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. Its central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission, and comprehension of information. Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, natural language processing, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, music cognition, and philosophy.

The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) is a research institute and doctoral school at the UvA’s Faculty of Humanities, committed to the analysis of the remnants and narratives of the past in the present, as well as of the remaking of pasts into heritage, memory and material culture. Research at AHM seeks to integrate all branches of research focusing on the material and intangible remains of the past, the reciprocal relations between objects and meanings, and the dynamics of memory, from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, concept-oriented, object-oriented, and user-oriented approaches.

Want to know more about our organisation? Read more about working at the University of Amsterdam.

Do you have any questions or do you require additional information? Please contact:

• Dr.ir. Jaap Kamps:  [email protected]

Job application

If you feel the profile fits you, and you are interested in the job, we look forward to receiving your application. You can apply online via the link below. The deadline for applying for this vacancy is May 15, 2024 .

Applications should include the following information (submitted in one .pdf by uploading in the required field ‘CV’):

• A detailed letter of motivation, explaining which project(s) interest you, why you are interested in that position, and how your background and experience fits the project.
• A detailed CV including the months (not just years) when referring to your education and work experience. 
• A list of all university courses you have taken, with an official transcript of grades.
• A list of publications (in case of joint authorship, clearly indicate your own contribution) and/or a link to at least one writing example available online (e.g., your master’s thesis in a university repository, or a direct link).
• The names, affiliations, and email addresses of two references, including your advisor, who may be approached by the selection committee (please do not include reference letters in your application).

Only complete applications received within the response period via the link below will be considered.

The interviews will be held in the course of May and June 2024. A trial assignment or presentation may be part of the application procedure.

The UvA is an equal-opportunity employer. We prioritise diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for everyone. We value a spirit of enquiry and perseverance, provide the space to keep asking questions, and promote a culture of curiosity and creativity.

No agencies please.

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The Humanities PhD Project

Category: Digital Humanities

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Suggested search, usc mellon humanities in a digital world ph.d. fellows, congratulations to our 2022-2024 ph.d. fellows, julia brown-bernstein.

Julia Brown-Bernstein is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of History. Julia’s research examines the relationship between neoliberalism, citizenship, and belonging in the post-World War II era. Her dissertation is a history of the Eastern San Fernando Valley as it underwent demographic shifts and economic restructuring from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It examines how immigrants not only made the region a transnational crossroads, linking communities from the Southern Cone to South Korea but also how they shaped US political life and culture. Her work sheds light on how neoliberal policies of the latter twentieth century altered who belongs and what it means to be a citizen in a privatizing world. Julia’s article, “Under the Canopy: Finding Belonging at the San Fernando Swap Meet, 1976-2019,” was published in the Journal of American Ethnic History fall of 2021. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Julia was a public school teacher in the San Fernando Valley. She holds an M.Ed. from UCLA and a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

Curriculum Vitae

Grace Franklin

Grace Franklin  is a Provost Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in English at USC. Her dissertation, which traces the rise and decline of the gaslight network as told through transatlantic literature and culture (1807-1946), explores unprecedented relationships to power initiated by the first fossil fuel utility. Through digitizing archived materials and infrastructural mapping, she brings the history of our entanglements with fossil fuel into sharper focus, accentuating forgotten aspects of extraction-based life and elucidating how coal continues to figure in our imaginations (through the metaphor of psychosocial gaslighting, for example). In 2020, Grace co-organized the GREEN Conference, a national, carbon-neutral event, and coedited a corresponding issue of  Nineteenth-Century Contexts . Grace received her M.A. in English from UVA, where she collaborated on  Collective Biographies of Women , an NEH-funded digital humanities database. She has worked in marketing, arts & culture reporting, and instructional design.

Dissertation Title: “Power Play: Gas Infrastructure in Literature and Culture”

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Sarah ciston.

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Sayantani Jana

Sayantani Jana  is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Southern California. She specializes in Comparative Genocide Studies with particular interest in the history of the Holocaust and the history of 20th century South Asia. She is currently developing a comparative project on the Kristallnacht of 1938 in the city of Berlin and the 1946 Great Calcutta Killings in India during the Partition era. Her project undertakes close micro-historical research on each event to understand the relationship of the urban landscape to violence, victim and perpetrator behavior, gendered experiences of violence, and the memory cultures that have developed around each event in the aftermath. Sayantani is particularly interested in using oral testimonies and police reports, along with mapping methods, to understand how victims and perpetrators navigated urban space during each event, as well as the conditions within the urban landscape that enabled, influenced and sustained the momentum of violence. On a macro historical comparative level, her project juxtaposes these two events to raise questions and complicate the existing international discourse around riots and pogroms. Sayantani currently holds research fellowships from the German Historical Institute and the Central European Historical Society. She received her Masters in English Literature in 2016 from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.

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Dissertation Title: “Wild Grammars”

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Michelle Vasquez Ruiz

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Zachary M. Mann  is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Southern California with certificates in Visual Studies and Digital Media and Culture. Zach has additionally received fellowships from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Harry Ransom Center; the Hagley Library; and the Mellon-Council for European Studies (2020-21). Currently he is working on a dissertation which traces the co-evolutions of punch card technology and conceptions of authorship. The project combines technology histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with twentieth-century computer history and the digital humanities. Previously, Zach served as the founding managing editor of  The Offing , a literary magazine, and the noir & mystery editor for the  Los Angeles Review of Books . Before that, he worked in the tech and video game industries. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from California State University, Long Beach, and a BA in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

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2017-2019 ph.d. fellows, melissa mei-lin chan.

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Christopher McGeorge

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Ambra Spinelli

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Current Position:   Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Culture, University of Notre Dame

Humanities in a Digital World

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I. practices.

1. The PhD in Digital Humanities

Texte intégral.

The dream of every cell is to become two cells. —François Jacob

1 The PhD in Digital Humanities was established at King’s College London in 2005. By 2010 experience had persuaded us that collaborative supervision of interdisciplinary work is the norm for doctoral research in our subject. This, you might think, is obvious, but we had created the PhD deliberately without constraining what students might make of it. (More on origins and developments later.) Discussion with students and colleagues led us to suspect that—despite the obvious popularity of nearly anything that the adjective “digital” may be attached to and despite the relative success of the degree program in attracting students—its title remained an impediment. We reasoned that as the identifier for a doctoral program in a departmentalized world, “digital humanities” implies its own subject and so by implication excludes others. In a sense, creating this problem in categorization is a positive result from many years of struggle for recognition, but at the same time, it leads to a serious issue. In effect, the rubric requires a potential student to infer that the humanities subject that most interests him or her can be studied with critical involvement of digital tools and methods. No amount of qualifying prose, we thought, could overcome what the rubric seems to imply. The name of our degree was in effect hiding the interdisciplinary collaboration that our experience had shown was of the essence—and the most compelling, indeed innovative aspect of the degree.

2 Hence, in Autumn 2010 I began negotiations with the academic departments in the School of Arts and Humanities to create multiple synonyms of the “PhD in Digital Humanities,” one for each discipline or disciplinary area: thus PhD programs in Digital Classics; Cultural Research; English and American Studies; Film; French; Hispanic and Portuguese Studies; History; Late Antique and Medieval Studies; Musicology; Theology and Religious Studies. (Creating multiple names for the same program rather than multiple programs was a far simpler and quicker to accomplish administratively.) The idea was to make the possibilities of the PhD in Digital Humanities explicit, rather than keep them concealed under a name that is paradoxically both popular and obscure.

3 The resulting programs were launched with the renaming of my department, from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities to the Department of Digital Humanities—CCH to DDH—in Spring 2011. At the same time we retained the “PhD in Digital Humanities” to denote studies of technical, methodological or behavioral subjects mostly in our field—or in subject-areas for which a collaborating department is not available but which we could support internally. The scheme was designed so that applications to all the degrees share the same process of evaluation, described below. Since the scheme of one degree under many names began a year ago, it has chiefly brought in new students for the collaborating departments but in one instance taken on a student who began in another department but discovered he needed a significant digital component to his degree.

• 1 Ulla M. Holm and Mia Liinason, “Disciplinary Boundaries between the Social Sciences and the Humanit (...)

4 In 2005, the CCH established its PhD program when an MA student of the department showed keen interest in pursuing doctoral studies. In comparison to the process in some other countries, this happened quickly and with very little effort, since administrative procedures for creating a doctoral program in the UK are much simpler than they are, for example, in North America. In the UK, as Holm and Liinason have noted, “it is easy to set up courses and degrees in disciplines that can demonstrate market demand.” 1 Indeed, anticipated market demand may be sufficient if a plausible case for such demand can be made.

5 As it happened the initiating student dropped out after a year, but two others joined in 2006. Since then, the program has grown at an accelerating pace, especially within the last academic year (2011–12). At the time of writing there are fifteen students enrolled and in progress, two of which are likely to finish before the end of 2012; seven who have been offered a place in the program and are expected to enroll in Autumn 2012; eight in the final stages of application, all of which are highly likely to be offered a place and subject to funding to accept for Autumn 2012; and fifteen in the initial stages. In total, therefore, there are currently forty-five students and potential students involved. I will review the projects undertaken by the cohort of fifteen students below. The queue of seriously interested students fluctuates but tends to maintain the current level.

The Process of Application and Admission

6 The nature of the British PhD has necessarily shaped the degree program. In particular, unlike the North American PhD, the British is research-only, spanning a maximum of four years full-time (eight part-time). Students begin with MPhil status; after approximately a year of full-time work or its equivalent, they submit application for upgrade to the PhD. The upgrade interview does not constitute a comprehensive examination of the student’s disciplinary knowledge, as in North America, rather the ability to carry out doctoral-level research within the scope of his or her project, or as the Australians denote it, a confirmation of candidature. Throughout the program, before and after the upgrade, reports of progress are now required biannually.

7 The brevity of allotted time for a research-only degree means that a well-developed, cogent research proposal is the primary focus for admission. Partly because the subject is new and partly because it is highly interdisciplinary, we have found that most students need a significant amount of help developing their proposals before formal application. Usually a student contacts the Director of the Doctoral Program with little more than a notion, sometimes not even what might be called a research problem. If the notion is plausible and the student undeterred by the commitment to doctoral work and its costs—approximately 20% survive to this point—he or she is encouraged to write a draft of roughly two pages (reduced in size from the much longer document formerly required). Through a cycle of commentary and revision, often iterated several times, perhaps over months, either a cogent proposal emerges or the weakness of the idea becomes obvious. If the proposal is sufficiently strong and if adequate supervision can be provided within or beyond the Department, the student is encouraged to apply. The process is laborious and may indeed be trimmed with the greater number of applicants we expect, but to date it has pushed us to discover potential dimensions of the PhD that we might not otherwise have seen.

8 In a few cases to date informal arrangement for co-supervision has been made with academics in institutions beyond the College. Arrangements with cultural institutions in London or nearby are certainly possible though none have yet been successfully made. A mechanism for formalizing such arrangements is now being put into place with the approval of the School of Arts and Humanities. Discussion is also ongoing with a Canadian institution about the possibilities for close ties that would establish cross-institutional co-supervision, perhaps a joint degree. Although paid employment cannot be directly related to the degree, part-time students can benefit more than financially from a job in an organization whose work is in the same area. Currently, for example, one student has such a job with an open-access publisher in parallel with his PhD at King’s.

• 2 I teach one of these courses, on interdisciplinary research, which emerged from my experiences in p (...)

9 In the UK the PhD is slowly moving somewhat closer to a North American model by providing instruction in research-related skills for the first year, e.g. at King’s through the UK Doctoral Training Centre scheme and through courses offered by the Graduate School. 2 For the PhD in Digital Humanities and its derivatives the department itself offers modules in its MA programs to which new students may be assigned by their supervisors.

10 No minimum requirements for a specific level of technical knowledge have been set, thus leaving room for a merely instrumental use of existing tools and for a purely speculative or theoretical project. Where such knowledge is absent, demand is placed on critical use of off-the-shelf tools or meticulously careful, intellectually sophisticated reflection on manifestations of computing. An acceptable dissertation must contribute to the digital humanities as a whole, at minimum by surveying previous work in an area, extending it to new areas of application and reflecting critically on what the dissertation has achieved. Speculation on computing in its cultural significance and influence, without engagement with past and/or current research in the digital humanities, is discouraged.

11 The norm for the PhD remains full-time study. Typically the student is resident in London, but compelling cases for non-resident study have resulted in the “semi-distance PhD,” as we have called it. The practice would seem to be quite common now, especially for an institution located in an expensive city—but even more for a minority discipline that needs doctoral students in order to grow. Basically, a student wishing to take up the semi-distance option must agree with his or her supervisor on a schedule of visits, which of course can include those carried out on the internet or by telephone.

3 For more information, see “GradFunding”, http://www.gradfunding.co.uk/ .

12 Funding remains a problem for many students. One of ours who has been especially clever raising funds from unexpected sources has co-authored (and sells) a booklet, The Alternative Guide to Postgraduate Funding , to help address the problem. 3 Otherwise, we are actively looking into building studentships into research project applications (as a staff member, Dr Peter Stokes, has already done for a digital palaeography project—further information on this below) and other fund-raising ventures. But the fact that all but a few of the students, past and present, have funded themselves or come with non-UK funding underscores the level of students’ commitment to the idea of this degree. From the beginning, it has been demand-driven. But what is the idea?

The Originating Idea of the PhD

13 Unaware of any precedents, we began more with questions than with a scheme or set of criteria, as I indicated earlier. We wanted to discover if a PhD on the subject was possible, indeed, if the idea itself made sense, and if it was both conceivable and possible, what it might involve and how it might be structured.

14 From the outset, its primary objective was clear: to produce culturally literate and critically as well as digitally adept scholars. Furthermore, we knew we wanted to equip them to pursue compelling research questions with computing, and whenever possible to do this not just in their disciplines of origin but wherever those questions might lead, including into the methodological heartland of our subject. We were much less clear about the kinds of knowledge and experience we might require of applicants, about existing models of research we might adapt and about the mixtures of practical, conceptual and theoretical work that might prove best. We did not proceed strictly from our competencies and interests to specify the range of subjects a student might undertake, nor did we limit applications to pre-existing studentships, but rather deliberately left the boundaries undefined and the possibility of self-funding open. We preferred to see what might happen, then adapt ourselves to the demand, if any, and perhaps eventually make these boundaries explicit.

15 The openness of the PhD in Digital Humanities already puts considerable demand on the teaching and research staff of the DDH to match incoming doctoral research projects with adequate technical and non-technical support. But in a market-driven academic economy, as ours is, this demand creates exactly the kind of problem one wishes to have, whatever the temporary discomfort.

Current Projects

16 At the time of writing collaborative supervision is ongoing within the disciplines of these Departments and Programs: Classics; Culture, Media and Creative Industries; English and American Studies; Hellenic Studies; History; Music; Philosophy; Portuguese; Theology and Religious Studies; with a professor at University College London, Translation Studies; with a researcher in the Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge; with the Director of the Women Writers Project, Brown, and a professor in Communication and Media Studies at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; and with a lecturer in History, Brasenose College Oxford. The cohort of enrolled students whose projects are sketched here numbers fifteen, as I noted above. In addition, I include some mention of the projects likely to begin in Autumn 2012.

17 Of the projects of enrolled students, seven center on or are seriously involved with verbal language (one with gender), ten history, one musicology, one social anthropology and historical geography, one philosophy, one palaeography and two computational methods. Of these five involve textual encoding, two textual editing, three relational database technology, four corpus-linguistic methods and one statistical analytics. In two projects, the students are designing and building their own modeling software. The projects yet to begin include interests in digital literature, gendered language, music, museums, social networking and communications.

18 For the sake of brevity, the following includes only the projects of enrolled students.

Projects in Language

19 The first of seven projects under this heading is a detailed analysis of how a translator’s awareness of linguistic features in the original text affects his or her strategies of translation and so alters the meaning of the rendered text. It considers three twentieth-century American novels recently translated into Lithuanian. Corpus linguistic techniques and XML markup are certain; as of yet the extent to which statistical tools will prove relevant is unknown. For support on the Lithuanian side a senior professor in Vilnius has agreed to collaborate, and for support with translation theory another senior professor from University College London, as just noted. From the digital side the primary question here remains the powers and limits of text-analysis, which despite several decades of work are still not entirely clear and indeed still capable of surprising us.

20 In another project, stylometric analysis is applied to possible co-authorship of Titus Andronicus , usually attributed solely to William Shakespeare but possibly involving George Peele. Sentence-patterns are to be used as the primary discriminator. A senior professor and his research associate in the Institute of English Studies, London, have agreed to collaborate informally on the supervision, as has another senior professor in Australia. Colleagues in stylometrics were involved in evaluating the research proposal for admission. It is at first glance a fairly standard kind of authorship study, but as always the devil is in the detail: what patterns are revealed with what approaches, and how persuasively?

21 A project in what might be called interoperable bibliography is underway in collaboration with a professor of computational linguistics in the Department of Philosophy. The primary question is the extent to which fully automated techniques can pick out canonical references to classical Greek sources from secondary literature. Here the student is writing the software, which is an integral part of his research; it has potential use well beyond the doctorate, e.g. with bibliographies such as L’Année philologique . Further questions pertain to the effects of the tight interlinking of resources that could result from application of such tools across the discipline. The hard problem of interoperability is central, as noted.

22 An editorial project, co-supervised with Classics, is comparing current work on the digital side with editorial practices in printed critical editions of Homer, using the first book of the Odyssey as its focus. The student is considering The Chicago Homer and Homer Multitext as well as other digital products. The questions here are obvious but difficult: what do scholars of Homer want from an edition that the digital medium can better provide than the codex? What does Homer have to teach designers of digital editions? What accomplishments of the printed critical edition are at least currently beyond the reach of a digital edition? The specific focus on a single work places the questions of design precisely at the level at which scholars work.

23 A project in the analysis of gendered language takes as its data Swedish dramatic texts from a large archive of historical literature. Its central research problem is how questions of gender can be explored in this archive. Two obvious technical approaches are corpus linguistic methods to discover the workings of gendered language and text encoding to provide for retrieval.

24 Developing tools for aggregation and analysis of textual corpora is the object of another project. It begins in a survey of current corpus tools in light of the uses to which they are put and their perceived limitations, then moving on to implementation of prototypes designed to overcome these limitations and iterative trials. The audience for these trials will be researchers with a range of computing skills working in a variety of languages and disciplines. The project will take into account previous iterations of questioning the state of text-analysis but, unlike so much of previous debate, is undertaking its questioning of possibilities systematically.

25 The final project under this category is probing the interconnections between changes in publishing and changes in the humanities that stem from digital transformations of the book. It examines not only effects on text and how we relate to it when reading but also how the processes and mechanics of the publishing industry shape the digital text. What is needed, the student argues, is grounding in the concrete realities of the publishing industry, the situations of authors and readers and all the ways in which text is made available for reading. The problematic notion of de-materialized text—of information that moves unchanged through various media—plays a central role in this research.

26 Two additional projects in analysis of language are primarily historical and are described below.

History by Prosopography, by Text-Analysis and by Palaeography

27 Of the ten projects that work with historical materials, seven are chiefly historical studies. One of these involves a study of political language; one of language used to characterize a particular subculture; two involve prosopography, i.e. history derived from the historical actors, and two manuscript studies. The prosopographical and one of the manuscript projects use relational database technology, and one of these uses mapping software. The two studies of language use corpus techniques. All are co-supervised with colleagues at King’s.

28 One of the prosopographical projects focuses on the fourth- to early fifth-century Ecclesiastical History by Socrates Scholasticus. Its aim is to analyze biases and interests of the author and to chart the embedded geographical information. This project continues in the footsteps of the Prosopography of the Byzantine World, developed at King’s, and seeks on the computing side to refine our understanding of digital prosopography by critiquing earlier ones as well as by exhibiting new approaches.

29 The other prosopographical project concentrates on high officials of the Portuguese court under the reign of John III (1521–57). It uses correlated assertions about these officials to enquire into the commonplace but incompletely understood notions of courtly service, social mobility, power and social reproduction. It asks if the group of individuals in service constitute a homogeneous group, whether patterns of social promotion can be discerned and a number of other questions to which answers are currently unknown. Categories of roles and typologies of interrelation, enforced by database entry, are themselves research questions. As with all such projects, the question of technological adequacy is forced by the normal intractability of historical data. This project also uses relational database technology.

30 One of the two manuscript projects is palaeographical; the other is concerned with illuminations.

• 4 For the project, see “Digital Resource for Palaeography,” King’s College London News and Events, De (...)

31 The palaeographical project involves analysis of 6000–7000 Norwegian manuscript fragments from the period c.1000–1300 in order to investigate ecclesiastical connections between England and Norway. To date, the corpus has proven too large for manual analysis. For this reason the student will use digital methods under development in the department, as part of Dr Stokes’ DigiPal Project, and within Scandinavia. These methods will be applied to suggest heretofore-unnoticed relationships, such as between letterforms and layout, and to identify fragments that were likely produced by the same scribe or scriptorium, or indeed were once part of the same book. In turn, these relationships will help to address key questions about English influence in Norway, ecclesiastical links between the two countries, and English script types in Norwegian scriptoria and their influence on Norwegian vernacular styles. The student is also planning to create an online resource that makes some of this research available to scholars and the general public. The dissertation is also intended to promote links between the digitization projects in Scandinavian and at King’s College London. 4

32 The project on illuminations centers on Hebrew manuscripts in medieval Portugal, questioning the originality and identity of specifically Portuguese illumination. It is investigating the iconographic features of Hebrew-Portuguese illumination, the salient features of the known illuminators and/or scribes, the iconographic relation between Portuguese and Castilian Hebrew book illumination and the connection between documented technical knowledge of pigments and other painting materials and the corpus under investigation. Using analytic and descriptive computer-assisted techniques it is attempting thus to characterize the main features of the ca. thirty manuscripts of the corpus.

33 Of the two corpus-linguistic projects, one is studying late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century grassroots politics in East Anglia through an analysis of speeches as transcribed in local newspapers. The student has laboriously built his own million-word corpus of election speeches, 1880–1910, and has to hand two larger reference corpora. From his corpus, using simple concordancing tools and elementary statistics, he argues quite persuasively for the close fit between the language of electioneering and the capabilities of the tools we have. He shows the inadequacy of remembered instances and broad generalizations drawn from long familiarity with historical data. Here, digitally, is an extension of known methods to a relatively unexplored kind of language, demonstrating their utility and power. Historically it demonstrates how close attention to the data upsets received knowledge.

34 The other corpus project focuses on perceptions of the Irish immigrant population in London from 1801 to 1820, in the period between the Acts of Union and beginnings of the campaign for Irish emancipation. Its central question, to be pursued by a corpus-analytic study of text from London newspapers and magazines, is how the historical print media shaped the vulnerable local communities of the Irish in London for better or for worse. It asks how were the Irish perceived in the relatively quiet period before emancipation became a prominent issue? What roles did the popular media play?

Musicological Editing

35 The question here begins with the same dilemma as the Homeric edition: the still fluid and hotly debated nature of digital textual editing. The focus, however, is on the strongly performative dimension of musicological editions; several difficult but fascinating technological issues are faced, including development of recommendations from the Music Encoding Initiative. The student has begun with these recommendations but is writing his own software to model forms of the musical text. As expected, this project involves collaborative supervision with the Department of Music, but the student is also working closely with the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe or WeGA project ( http://www.weber-gesamtausgabe.de/​ ) in Paderborn on a digital edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz .

Narratological Geography

36 In this project, the student is investigating the differences between verbal and cartographic information for geographical purposes, asking, “What is the difference between a text and a map?” His project is supported informally by three scholars in Norway as well as by colleagues in the department at King’s. He is using testimony of Norwegian and Sami people along the border with Sweden/Finland in the mid 18th Century as collected and transcribed by an army major at the behest of the Danish government. From this testimony, which was printed in the mid twentieth century, he has produced an XML-encoded text. He is using the encoded text to model the kinds of information contained in the verbal testimony to see if, as he suspects, words tell more than maps, or at least do so differently. Historical, philosophical, geographical and anthropological investigations thus sit alongside software modeling techniques. Each informs the other.

Socio-Philosophy of Digital Traces

37 The basic premise of this project (currently in suspension while the student completes engineering-related doctoral work in Japan) is that a new meaning of identity has arisen out of the prevalence of mobile digital devices and the frequency with which they are used. On the social scientific side, the student proposes to track the actual behaviors of selected people; on the philosophical side, he is examining the idea of personal identity phenomenologically; on the technological side, he has been involved in designing and constructing devices. He has also written software for the iPhone to monitor such behaviors. Originally, the philosophical questions had priority, but with the engineering work it has become obvious that these questions need to be postponed until the behaviors they seek to illumine are more adequately manifested.

Philosophical Questions of Performance

38 In research begun about a year ago, the student is examining the ontological questions raised by the involvement of dance with digital technology. Considering the multiple technological interfaces with which we engage when watching recorded performance, she is investigating the ontological repercussions for dance of this new mode of watching. She is concerned with the metaphysical nature of online performances in their multiple forms. Looking at full-length documentations, edited representations, performances made for the screen and specifically for the Internet, she is assessing the differing ontological status of these multiple formats and working towards an understanding of how multiplicity of representations impacts on the ontology of dance.

Conclusions

39 What may we conclude from these last seven years of the PhD in Digital Humanities? Again, it seems obvious that the degree is defensible from a scholarly perspective as well as attractive to students, who from the outset have driven its development. By the end of the 2011–12 academic year, however, only one student had completed this degree; only two are in the final “writing up” phase; and only seven of the current fifteen enrolled students have converted from initial MPhil to PhD status. In other words, as should be clear from the discussion, we still have quite a bit to learn, perhaps even more than our students do.

40 One lesson we have learned concerns what one student has called “the openness of the program,” that is, the license it gives to do research of any kind that involves critical work with digital tools and methods. The generosity of this license is by design, which is in turn a response to the plasticity of computing studied methodologically. However, it would not be practical to offer were it not for the supervisory talent provided by a major research institution located in one of the principal cities of the world. It would never have flourished were it not for the remarkably collegial academic culture in the School of Arts and Humanities at King’s and the understanding built up over many years that the discipline we now call digital humanities is no less nor more than one among many.

41 Taken together, the projects I have described (and a number of others likely to begin in Autumn 2012 that I have not mentioned) show no sign of providing a map of the digital humanities. Rather their variety suggests, like Turing’s design, an indefinite expansiveness. Inevitably, as the program grows, they will show the limitations of subject and approach that the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London can properly cover and that British academic culture favors. Such a program in Australia, for example, would look rather different; so also would one in Germany. Nevertheless, the openness of the program to anything that we can support and that the culture favors, placing no other restrictions on it, seems appropriate for such a young and expansive discipline.

42 It is also perhaps worth mentioning that approximately half of the current students in the program are women.

• 5 John Ziman, “Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas,” in Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas: Occasional Pieces on (...)

43 So far the results of the program are largely unsurprising though very gratifying, especially to someone who has been arguing for the last quarter century that our subject is genuinely and independently academic at the highest levels. Perhaps the most important result is that a PhD in the digital humanities makes sense. But, crucially, the sense-making has in its first six years been almost entirely the work of the students. Earlier I said that the development of the PhD has been from the outset demand-driven, but neither “demand” nor “driven” are the right words to describe these students’ contribution to our discipline. It is not demand that has driven but desire that is creating. “Real scientific research,” John Ziman has written, “is very like play. It is unguided, personal activity, perfectly serious for those taking part, drawing unsuspected imaginative forces from the inner being, and deeply satisfying.” 5 Partially subtract “scientific” and, for now, “unguided” to name what our students are doing.

44 What, then, is the PhD in Digital Humanities, exactly? The simple fact is that we do not have a stable answer, but all the evidence suggests that the intelligent desire powering its evolution will provide us with one. The simple fact is that this PhD is not just a framework for research, providing supervisory support and ensuring quality, but is itself empirical research into the best framework to adopt in order to further develop the intellectual culture of the digital humanities. Meanwhile, advertised jobs in the field are proving difficult to fill because qualified applicants are in short supply. Demand, need, desire and ability to produce them are not, however. It is too early to say anything useful about placement of students in jobs. Watch this space.

1 Ulla M. Holm and Mia Liinason, “Disciplinary Boundaries between the Social Sciences and the Humanities: Comparative Report on Interdisciplinarity” (report prepared for the Research Integration: Changing Knowledge and Disciplinary Boundaries Through Integrative Research Methods in the Social Sciences and the Humanities project, University of York, May 2005), 7.

2 I teach one of these courses, on interdisciplinary research, which emerged from my experiences in pursuing the digital humanities wherever it might lead. Interested readers should contact me for more information.

4 For the project, see “Digital Resource for Palaeography,” King’s College London News and Events, December 7, 2010, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2010/Dec/DigitalResourceforPalaeography.aspx .

5 John Ziman, “Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas,” in Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas: Occasional Pieces on the Human Aspects of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3. Ziman’s essay originated as a BBC Radio broadcast in January 1972 as part of the science curriculum of the Open University.

Du même auteur

• Text and Genre in Reconstruction , , 2010
• Acknowledgements in Text and Genre in Reconstruction , , 2010
• Contributors in Text and Genre in Reconstruction , , 2010
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2024 east asian studies/ critical asian humanities annual workshop, april 20, 2024.

East Duke Parlors

Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan); Florian Schneider (Universiteit Leiden)

APSI and AMES invite members of our scholarly community to attend the 2024 EAS-CAH workshop focusing on the theme of "Digital Asia."

Except where otherwise noted, all sessions take place in the Pink Parlor, East Duke Building.

~~please note, the following agenda is subject to change~~

WORKSHOP AGENDA

9:30-10:00am.

Breakfast (provided)

10:00-10:15am

Opening Remarks & Welcome: Eileen Cheng-yin Chow & Shai Ginsburg

10:15-11:30am

KEYNOTE LECTURE: Lisa Nakamura "The Queen of Myspace: Tila Tequila and the Asian American Roots of Social Media Infrastructure"

11:30am-12:30pm

12:30-1:45pm.

KEYNOTE LECTURE: Florian Schneider (Leiden) -- “Gamified Politics: The Quest for Digital Social Governance in Xi’s China"       Introduced by: Carlos Rojas (Duke)

2:00-3:30pm

EAS/CAH Student Panel

• CAH students: Karen He, Qiwen Li, Danni Xu
• EAS students: Kenan Gu, Zoey Liu

     Moderator: Ralph Litzinger (Duke)

3:30-3:45pm

Refreshments/Break

3:45-4:30pm

Breakout Seminar Sessions with Lisa Nakamura & Florian Schneider ( Blue & Pink Parlors )

4:30-5:15pm

Final Roundtable + Future Directions (plenary session)

5:15-5:30pm

Concluding Remarks

Following the workshop, registered participants are invited to a reception hosted by Professors Eileen Chow and Carlos Rojas.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Lisa Nakamura  is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her fields of study include Asian American studies, digital media theory, digital game studies, feminist theory, film and television studies, and race and gender in new media.

Florian Schneider  is a professor of modern China at Universiteit Leiden. His research interests include questions of governance and public administration in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, political communication strategies and political content of popular Chinese entertainment, recent Chinese economic developments, as well as Chinese foreign policy. He is also managing editor of the academic journal ‘Asiascape: Digital Asia.’

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