No applications are currently being accepted.

What to Expect?

As a participant in the DHRI, you will receive a stipend of $3,600. We ask that you participate in all three phases of the DHRI. They are explained in detail below, but include (1) an in-person institute in New York City on June 15–24, 2020, (2) hosting your own instance of the DHRI that you attend in NYC, and (3) reporting back on your experiences, challenges, and lessons learned in a final report.

Phase 1
Institute in New York City, June 15–24, 2020

You will attend a ten day in-person meeting in New York City. In the first five days, you will attend skill workshops where you learn foundational tools in service of humanities research questions: using the command line, track versions of your work and collaborate using git, identify and manipulate humanities data types, create digital collections, write and run basic Python scripts, analyze text, create open educational resources

After the first week, you will know how each of the foundational skills taught are necessary in order to build specific DH projects. In other words, understanding the command line will make website development easier and familiarity with data types in Python will make collecting and querying data from the archive more time effective.

In the institute’s second week, a “train the trainer” approach will provide dedicated time and resources for you to begin developing your own institutes.

Want to see an example of what the schedule will look like? See last cycle’s schedule here.

Phase 2
Hosting Your Own Institute

You will lead a local institute based on the DHRI model but adjusted to your local context some time between August 2020 and April 2021.

During this time, you will receive 20 hours of dedicated support from our Institutes Coordinator Kalle Westerling, the GC’s Digital Fellows, and the project's Director Lisa Rhody.

Over the course of the year, you will also have the ability to attend bi-monthly virtual meetings, “follow-up workshops,” facilitated by the GC’s staff. The workshops will enhance activities from our in-person meeting. These meetings will be hosted on Zoom, include a guest “mentor” speaker, and will also include a review of a workshop module of participants’ choice.

Want to see examples of what past participants’ institutes have looked like? Read about past institutes on our Network page.

Phase 3
Evaluation

At the end of the Spring semester 2021, as you have hosted your institute, you will be invited to participate in a remote conference with all the other participants from the June 2020 institute.

You will also contribute with a “white paper-style” evaluation of your institute, which will aid us in the final report from the grant, Guide to Leading Digital Research Institutes.

What is needed to apply?

1. Application form

If you want to prepare your answers for the application form offline, you can download a PDF with all the questions for the form.

The form includes questions about:

  • Full name, email address, phone number, mailing address (in the U.S.). Collecting all this information makes it easier for us to make sure that your submission is legitimate as well as ensure that we have all of your information immediately available if you are selected and we need to set up stipend payments etc. to you.
  • Gender identity, pronouns, ethnic origin. We want to make sure that we address you in a manner is respectful and that feels authentic to you and your lived experience. It also aids our efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have based this demographic section on work done by the HumetricsHSS (http://humetricshss.org/) project, which included studying industry best practices and surveying peers of various identities. We are continuing to work on and refine the choices and welcome your commentary and feedback—especially any observations you may have on how to improve these question-and-answer options for future applications.
  • A selection of options about where you heard about DHRI. We want to know (approximately) what percentages of our applicants heard about the application from which source, in order to better evaluate our communication strategies and make sure, for future projects, that we know how to best communicate our application and any other information about the Institute.
  • Your job title, professional role, or the nature of your relationship with the local DH organization where you intend to run a future DHRI. Since we are looking to put together a diverse cross-section of humanities professionals, we want to make sure that we fully understand what your job entails at the relevant organization for the DHRI. You are asked to fill out a long answer text field with this information, so try to keep it longer than only your title.
  • Your current professional role, especially relating to community building, pedagogy, mentoring, research, technical support, or administration; or, a description of the role you would like to grow into using the skills learned at DHRI. The questions in this section are to make sure that we are drawing from a diverse range of professional experiences and from a similarly diverse range of organization or institutional types.
  • Your research interests as well as a description of how your participation in DHRI will benefit your personal research and professional goals. We want to have a good sense of the kind of digital projects you might be interested in working on and how we can help you achieve those with your participation in the DHRI.
  • A description of the institutional need and/or interest for a week-long institute to promote foundational technical learning, and a description of your orientation towards that need and how you will be able to identify collaborators and lead participants through a Digital Humanities Research Institute in 2020-2021. We want to make sure that you have a community who is interested in and committed to supporting your efforts to run a local DHRI.
  • A description of a technical problem that you once ran into and how you overcame it, as well as what type of role you feel most comfortable taking on when working in a group. We ask those two questions to make sure that we gauge where you are standing in terms of collaborating in a larger group as well as what your current approach is to solving technical issues. The DHRI model is built on a particular pedagogical idea and in order for us to be able to evaluate whether our pedagogical model works, we want to see what your response is to this question in advance of participation in the DHRI.
  • Commitment to all days of in-person DHRI meeting in June 2020. DHRI participants are expected to commit to the full 10-day experience from June 15–24, 2020 and to attend all of the workshops, seminars, and events during this time. If, for some reason, you have a scheduling conflict, we want to make sure we know about it as early as possible.

2. A CV/resume (2 pages, maximum)

We request a CV/resume in order to better understand where you are situated within your institution as well as in your larger field of research and digital humanities (if at all).

Submitting the application will require you uploading a CV/resume of maximum 2 pages.

3. A letter of support

We require a letter of support from the group the applicant proposes to run a DHRI for, which acknowledges the relationship and the group's willingness to publicize and run the workshop. It needs to be signed by a person in a decision-making role in the organization (and not be yourself). If you intend to run a DHRI at your place of employment, please include a letter from your direct supervisor stating their agreement and support of your efforts.

Submitting the application will require you uploading a letter of support.

Currently no applications are accepted.

Evaluation of Applications

Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

  • Commitment to attending all 10 days of the June 2020 institute and the virtual follow-ups throughout the year;
  • Demonstrated interest in and responsibility for “digital humanities community building” (This can be through a regional digital humanities group as a volunteer, as a post-doc in a university library, a visiting scholar at a liberal arts college, a faculty member creating a DH reading group, a curator or archivist at a historical society, library, or other humanities-oriented organization. Position title is not important. What is important is your ability to explain your responsibility or interest in building communities of DH practice.);
  • A letter of support from a group, organization, or institution stating they will support your efforts to run a Digital Humanities Research Institute (Support does not have to be financial. It should simply recognize that your activities are recognized and welcomed by the organization.);
  • Interest in helping to build a network of institute leaders through sharing of curricular materials and engaging in online community-support;
  • An articulation of a DH project idea that you find interesting and would like to pursue or have already begun;
  • An explanation of how you confront and overcome technical difficulties you have experienced in the past.

We are looking for participants who represent diverse DH areas of interest (disciplines, methods, project-types), who work at a wide range of institutional types (universities, community colleges, libraries, archives, museums, historical associations), and who reflect an array of professional roles from graduate students to experienced faculty to librarians, administrators, museum curators, archivists and more. Ideal participants will be able to demonstrate strong communication and collaboration skills and a willingness to confront and overcome frustration. No previous technical experience is required. Applications will not be evaluated based on familiarity with existing technologies, though we are happy to hear about your aspirations and the skills you would like to develop for future work.

Applications must be received by March 2, 2020 March 6, 2020.

Questions and comments can be directed to info@dhinstitutes.org.

FAQ

The application form is available here.

We have outlined a couple of case studies to help identify the participants that we are looking for:

  • Michael is associate professor of history and associate dean at an HBCU who has been tasked with teaching a methodology-focused graduate-level course. He has previously explored digital methods for creating oral and public histories (particularly Omeka and OHMS), and he collaborated with the library to offer students short, tool-based workshops to record and organize the oral histories with Omeka. Teaching and administrative duties in an interdisciplinary humanities degree program leaves Michael with little time to deepen his technological knowledge of digital humanities methods, which is necessary in order to expand his digital oral history archive project or to integrate digital methods more explicitly into the course syllabus. During the application process, his institution agrees for him to commit time for training and curricular revision. After attending the DHRI, Michael's new understanding of the command line, data, and HTML/CSS help him use Omeka more effectively and advise student projects with confidence. Together with students, Michael begins to build an oral history archive for student civil rights protests and redesigns the introduction to doctoral studies course with DH assignments.
  • Arden is Assistant Professor of English at a small midwestern liberal arts college and interested in promoting DH pedagogy and teaching in her department and in her scholarship in ecocritical approaches to medieval poetry. She would like to learn about project development and creating maps. She’d also like to feel more confident answering student questions on DH assignments. At the DHRI, she meets Da who is a digital scholarship librarian at a nearby R1 institution. Da is building a digital humanities center in the library and will use DHRI’s curriculum to develop programming. During the workshop, Da and Arden realize that they could combine their community-building efforts and institutional commitments. Together, they draft funding proposals and win funds from the state humanities council and matching institutional funds to support their DHRI. With those funds, they hire graduate students from a third nearby university to workshops at a shared 5-day regional institute which attracts 20 participants.
  • Jean is a tenured professor at a rural community college who wants to work with local historical societies and museums to develop digital mapping and archive projects. After attending DHRI with the support of staff and fellow participants on discussion forums and teleconferences, she gains the confidence and knowledge to teach introduction to the command line, version control with git and GitHub, introduction to Python, and mapping. Twenty curators, local faculty, and archivists participate in Jean’s on-line institute, which she hosts on GitHub, Blackboard, and Slack. With skills that she learns at DHRI combined with new material, Jean’s participants develop shor mapping projects by the end of their 4 week institute, which Jean uses to submit a grant proposal to support their continued collaboration.

We are only able to support one representative from 15 different institutions. We have received interest from other applicants who would also like to have a collaborator or partner attend. You may want to ask your institution to see if they would be willing to support this collaborator. If so, they could include in the letter of support that they are interested in sending a second participant whom they will pay a similar stipend separately.

Should you be interested in such an arrangement, we will be happy to discuss with you. Reach out to info@dhinstitutes.org with an email to get the conversation started. You may also want to have a look at Binghamton's DHRI or South Bend's DHRI where such collaborations have been very successful in the past.

The institute, however, is designed with only one participant from each institution in mind. As a result, we will spend time during the institute thinking about how to work with collaborators, share responsibilities, and build networks of support both locally and within the cohort of participants. Much of our time will be spent trying to make connections across institutions and forging collaborations and relationships that you can continue to draw from throughout the year.

The nature and scope of the institute is intentionally vague because we have very different types of organizations interested in applying. For example, a small, regional digital humanities organization may not have much financial backing, but there may be someone who has space they want to donate, and someone else willing to donate their time. In the end, there's no budget, but there are people who are willing to help advertise, support, and even work at the institute. However, other institutions might find it easier to give you a budget to work with for food, money to pay an outside trainer, and a computer lab that you can use. For that reason, we've tried to keep the requirements for "how" to do the institutes loose enough that it can be adapted to a variety of organizational types. In the proposal, a letter simply stating that the institution is interested, that it's willing to pay for time, space, and encourage faculty or staff to participate (by giving them the time to do so) would be a good start. If you can do more, that's fantastic. If not... we'll help you try to think through how to work with what you've got.

Browsing the Network page on this site, which contains information about the institutes that have run previously as part of the project, might give you some ideas of what an institute could look like.

In order to be accepted into this year's program, you must be able to receive compensation for services rendered in the U.S. To receive the designated $3,600 stipend, we are required to provide the CUNY Research Foundation with (1) a U.S. social security number or an Individual Taxpayer ID (ITIN), and (2) a routing number and an account number to a U.S. bank.

If you are unable to provide this information, we are not able to accept you into the program. However, the materials created to run institutes, our reports and our curricula are available for others to use, which means that you have the ability to run an institute despite not being able to join the program officially.

If you choose to run an institute on your own, reach out to us. We would love to hear about it and promote it through our channels as well.

The DHRI is open to anyone, including independent scholars, who has a relationship with a local DH organization where they intend to run a DHRI. In the application, you have to describe your relationship with said organization and how you plan to work with them. The application process also requires you to submit a letter of support from the group that you propose to run a DHRI for. The letter should acknowledge your relationship and the group’s willingness to publicize and run the workshop. It needs to be signed by a person in a decision-making role in the organization (and not be yourself). Support from the group does not have to be financial. The letter should should simply note that your activities are recognized and welcomed by the organization.

For those applicants who are employed by the sponsoring organization (ie. if you are a librarian and the library you work for is the one that is writing the letter of support), then simply having a letter from your supervisor will suffice. The purpose of the letter is to let us know that your supervisor and your institution are aware of your application and supportive of your efforts. The letter from the supervisor should explain how this work fits within your responsibilities, or how the organization recognizes this work as an important contribution. Though not required, they may also explain that they are willing to provide rooms, time, or similar resources to support your institute.

The wording for the letter of support is designed to be open-ended to accommodate those applicants who may not be employed by the same organization who is writing to say that they will agree to allow the applicant to run a Digital Humanities Research Institute.

At this time, we are unable to review materials in addition to those requested as part of your application.

Yes, the materials that we create for the institute and the curriculum that we will use will be available on GitHub for others to use, which means that should your application not be successful, you will still have access to the materials we produce.

Unfortunately, we are unable to offer childcare.