Seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Digital Humanities

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks to fill a twelve-month post-doctoral fellowship position in public digital humanities. This fellowship is a part of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, which is supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This fellowship is hosted by the UNC Digital Innovation Lab, which is administered through the Department of American Studies. The initial appointment will be for a period of 12 months. Continuation of the position for a second year is possible, contingent upon available funding.

The fellow will serve as the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholar in Residence for the History Center in the renovated and restored Loray Mill complex in Gastonia, North Carolina. This iconic structure — the largest textile mill in the South when it opened in 1902 — will reopen in the summer of 2014 as a 450,000 square foot residential (300 apartments), commercial, and retail hub for this city of 72,000 (20 miles from Charlotte, NC), which was once the center of textile manufacturing in the state. Both the mill and the surrounding 30-block mill village are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Responsibilities of this position include:

  • working with the staff of the Digital Innovation Lab to develop and deploy (on-site and online) the Loray Digital Archive: an online, multi-media, digital archive of materials relating to the social, cultural, and economic history of the mill, the mill village, and the wider community
  • working with the Gaston County Museum of Art and History, the Gaston County Public Library, other community organizations, and property managers to develop, execute, and evaluate public programming designed to engage residents, visitors, and community members with the history of the mill and the village
  • conducting original research on the history of the mill and its community, and disseminating research findings through digital and non-digital forms to academic and non-academic audiences
  • working with members of the community to recover and document their family histories and connections with the mill and the mill village
  • working with community partners and the DIL, to develop and execute a summer (2015) field experience in digital public humanities, based in the History Center
  • working with community partners and the DIL to incorporate community-contributed materials and oral history interviews into the Loray Digital Archive
  • teach or co-teach (with a UNC faculty member) a graduate level course in digital public humanities spring semester 2015.

The fellow will be based in Gastonia, but will be expected to spend some time each month in Chapel Hill on a schedule to be worked out with the Director of the Digital Innovation Lab.

The fellowship carries an annual stipend of $45,000 (plus benefits). The position is supported by a $5,000 fund for research, programming, travel and other costs. The start date for the position is negotiable between August 1 and October 1, 2014.

Further information regarding the mill renovation, the planned history center, and the Loray Digital Archive is available here.

For more information about the position, or to apply online, visit https://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/40594.

2014 DIL/IAH Faculty Fellows Announced

The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, the Digital Innovation Lab and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities are pleased to announce the 2014 recipients of the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship in Digital Humanities:  Lucia Binotti, Professor of Spanish, and Anne MacNeil, Associate Professor of Music.

Part of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship allows outstanding faculty at all ranks to explore the possibilities of digital humanities for extending their research, teaching, and engagement with audiences beyond the university. These fellowships encourage research at the intersection of traditional and engaged scholarship, the effective use of digital technologies in research and teaching, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Binotti and MacNeil will work with the Digital Innovation Lab to create and launch their own digital humanities projects by December 2014. The fellowship provides $15,000 in project funds, as well as a course release in the fall semester, and in-kind project management and technical development support from the Digital Innovation Lab.

Lucia Binotti: How Do You Say It?

Lucia BinottiA Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Lucia Binotti holds a PhD in Hispanic Renaissance Languages from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She earned her M.A. in Romance Philology from the Università degli Studi (Pisa).

Binotti’s research crosses the borders between literary criticism and cultural history. Her work focuses on Renaissance material and cultural history, and on the mechanisms that construct linguistic and cultural identity. She has worked on linguistic theories on the origin and development of the vernaculars, on the establishment of historiography as a discipline, and on the strategies that were used to synthesize the civic values of the Renaissance into the ideological tenets of the Spanish Empire. Her new book project analyzes the discourses and rituals that constituted illicit, transgressive sexuality among early modern Spanish elites.

Binotti comes to the digital humanities through her collaboration on a previous project, Gnovis: Flowing through the Galaxy of Knowledge, which was awarded a NEH Digital Startup Grant in 2011. Gnovis was envisioned as a navigation engine that would allow users to visualize semantic relationships between entities by diffusing traditional and rigidly enforced boundaries among humanities disciplines, allowing the user to visualize connections between subjects and across disciplines that would otherwise not be immediately apparent. Binotti was an early adopter of DH Press, testing it in her Honors Study Abroad in Rome last year, and she plans to use it again this summer.

Binotti’s fellowship project, How Do You Say It?, is an interdisciplinary and community service oriented project, in collaboration with Professor Cynthia Rizo of the School of Social Work at UNC. The project aims to deploy DH Press to crowd source, layer, map and visualize information about varieties of the Spanish language used to address Latino/a audiences when discussing the prevention of intimate partner violence. The project’s ultimate goal is to assess whether the choice of different varieties of Spanish targeted more specifically to a local sub-group of the larger Latino/a community might increase the success and effectiveness of textual literature (brochures, signs, advertisements) as well as spoken interactions (from support services, doctors, social workers, etc.) in preventing and educating about domestic violence. As Binotti explains, “The project’s results will have direct impact on the development of culturally appropriate interventions for this vulnerable population of survivors.”

Anne MacNeil: POPP: Parsing Ottaviano Petrucci’s Prints

Anne MacNeilAn Associate Professor in the Department of Music, Anne MacNeil holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago. She earned an MA in Music History from the Eastman School of Music and a BMus from Ithaca College.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MacNeil taught at Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialization include music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music and spectacle, commedia dell’arte, opera, performance studies and historiography. Her current research encompasses the use of boats, barges, and waterways as venues for music performance and as modes of travel, especially for noble women, to entertainments in and around Renaissance Mantua; early-modern laments; operatic settings of tales of the Trojan Wars; and the intersections of music, ceremony, and biography in the lives of Margherita Farnese and Eleonora de’ Medici.

MacNeil’s fellowship project grows out of her work on IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive. This continually evolving project is an interactive, interdisciplinary research and learning environment for scholars, students, educators, and the general public around the world. Taking as its inspiration and focus one of the most influential figures of the Italian Renaissance, Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), IDEA offers new ways to explore the history and culture of early modern Europe. IDEA’s primary materials are Isabella’s letters, music, and art collections, as they evolved during her reign as the marchesa of Mantua. These resources map a world where politics, art, music, family life, business, and social relations intertwined, prior to the modern separation of many of these concerns into separate spheres.

MacNeil’s fellowship project, POPP: Parsing Ottaviano Petrucci’s Prints, is the first music project for the IDEA environment. As MacNeil wrote in her proposal, in the typical transcription of Renaissance music, something is often lost, since modern music notation “imposes a uniformity of spacing, metric accents, and text underlay that are foreign to early modern music.” With this project, MacNeil aims to “develop a digital program for working with sixteenth-century printed music that bypasses transcription entirely and thereby preserves the metric quality and independence of parts that characterize this music in its original sources.”  She believes this will lead to a deeper understanding of the compositional techniques, theories, character, and practices of Renaissance music. Additionally, this will provide insight into the interactions between emerging print technologies and humanistic conceptions of music and music-making in early modern Europe.

MacNeil will work with the Image and Spatial Data Analysis Division of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Together, and in collaboration with the Digital Innovation Lab, they will design a prototype tool to engage with the metric structures of Renaissance music; to reveal patterns of musical gestures and suggestions of performance practices that are obscured by modern notation; and to apply, by automated process, heuristics developed from contemporary music theory treatises to the analysis of scores created by Ottaviano Petrucci, the first music printer. This tool will allow students and scholars to manipulate Petrucci’s scores visually in order to see and hear interactions among the parts, to explore differences between modal and tonal behaviors in the music, and to see analytical concepts derived from contemporary music theorists in action. This project will benefit a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students, music historians and theorists, and non-specialists in diverse humanistic fields.

MacNeil was also recently awarded an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship for Mapping Secrets, another project connected to IDEA. Mapping Secrets will develop a tool for mapping networks of secretarial practices and administrative recordkeeping in the act of letter writing, using the notes, drafts, copies, and letters from the archive of Isabella d’Este. MacNeil begins this fellowship January 2015.

Seeking Applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities

The CDHI is please to announce the availability of a two year post-doctoral position in digital humanities with a concentration in the development of online learning opportunities beginning July 1, 2014. The fellowship is co-hosted by the Digital Innovation Lab and the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education. The fellow will also hold a teaching appointment in an appropriate department of the College of Arts and Sciences.

We seek a scholar with (1) a commitment to further developing his/her own digital humanities research practice through project-based work that extends humanistic scholarship to audiences within and beyond the academy; (2) subject expertise in a humanities discipline reflected by a department or curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences; (3) desire to apply and develop his/her expertise and research interests as a contributor to the ongoing work of the Digital Innovation Lab in such areas as database creation and management, data visualization, digital mapping, text mining and mark-up, website design, plug-in development, mobile and location-aware applications, and augmented reality; and (4) a commitment to applying his/her research and technological skills and interest to curriculum development and the teaching of digital humanities methods and materials, particularly in an online environment, and for both on-campus and geographically dispersed audiences.

Read a full job description and apply at https://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/35801.

Michael Newton Joins DIL/CDHI as Technology Lead

The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative and the Digital Innovation Lab are pleased to welcome Michael Newton to our team as the Technology Lead.

Michael Newton comes to digital humanities work with strong qualifications in both information technology and the humanities. Newton graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a B.A. in Computer Science, which he earned while working at a popular computer game company. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Celtic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has published extensively in that field. In 2007 he was awarded a Digital Humanities Initiative grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a digital collaboratory for Celtic Studies which was hosted for several years by iBiblio.

As the Technology Lead, Newton will use his experience in information technology and the humanities to provide technological support for a wide range of digital humanities projects. We are thrilled to have him as a member of our team.

CFP: Digital Humanities Curricular Development Grants

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) is soliciting proposals for digital humanities course development grants to support a new graduate certificate in digital humanities (CDH) and to further the mission of teaching through and about digital developments in humanities courses at UNC. Current funds are geared toward graduate courses that support the CDH, but applicants are encouraged to develop course at mixed, graduate/undergraduate levels as well.

Grants may be used for developing full courses focused on some aspect of the digital humanities or for integrating digital humanities approaches and materials into a course–e.g., as a unit or module. Funds are available for the development of new courses or for revising existing courses. Applicants may apply for up to $6,000 funding. Awards will typically consist of a stipend ($5,000 for full course development, $2,500 for integrating a unit or module). Note that stipends are subject to reductions related to university benefits, taxes, etc. Applicants may request up to an additional $1,000 for professional development pertaining to developing the course. Applicants should include a budget detailing how any requested professional development funds will be used (e.g., for specific workshops or training).

CDHI Curricular grants might be used to:

  • Develop or revise any course focused on activities or topics associated with the digital humanities
  • Extend the reach of digital humanities course offerings beyond campus to non-degree seeking students–e.g., through hybrid or online options or through summer school
  • Explore and implement pedagogical innovation in a course through digital affordances
  • Implement digital activities to facilitate team teaching and/or interdisciplinary exchange
  • Integrate experiential work with digital materials and activities into a course
  • Develop course that explore multiple modalities of digital activities–e.g., the visual, aural, video, performance.
  • Engage the transformative potentials for digital humanities–political, social, cultural, scholarly.

ELIGIBILITY

All tenure track and fixed term faculty at the University who are eligible to teach graduate level courses may apply.

EXPECTATIONS

Award recipients commit to

  •  Create a new or revising an existing course that can be taken for graduate credit
  • Consult with the CDHI Curriculum Committee and Director regarding the development of the course
  • Work as advisors (as appropriate) with course participants pursuing the graduate certificate in digital humanities.
  • Deliver a report to the CDHI Curriculum Committee detailing the course development activities, the disbursement of funds, and the outcomes of the grant-supported efforts during the grant cycle.
  • Obtain Chair’s approval, and agree to offer the course at least three times in the five years following the receipt of the funds, starting with the 2014-15 academic year.

 APPLYING

Submit a current cv and proposal of no more than two pages to Stephanie Barnwell (stephanie.barnwell@unc.edu) with a copy sent to (iamdan@unc.edu) no later than 11:59 PM on December 6th.

For questions related to the proposal process, contact Daniel Anderson (iamdan@unc.edu)

Announcing a New Faculty Learning Community in Digital Humanities

The Digital Innovation Lab and the Center for Faculty Excellence are proud to announce a new opportunity for UNC faculty: The Faculty Learning Community in Digital Humanities (DH FLC).

The DH FLC is intended for faculty who are interested in incorporating digital technologies and approaches into their humanities teaching and research. Over the course of about 12 months, the DH FLC will learn together and from one another about digital humanities approaches and methodologies, study exemplar projects, and be exposed to a range of open-source tools for creating digital humanities projects. Participants will apply what they learn toward developing a digital humanities project to be used for hands-on, undergraduate learning.

The DH FLC will be comprised of an interdisciplinary and diverse group of participants representing a broad range and extent of DH knowledge and experience. Faculty with little/no technical knowledge are equally encouraged to apply as those with DH experience. There are no technical or experiential prerequisites for joining the DH FLC beyond an interest and curiosity in DH teaching and research. Faculty at all ranks (tenure, tenure-track, fixed-term, adjunct, research or clinical rank, lecturers, or instructors) are invited to apply.

The DH FLC is part of the Curricular Innovation and Professional Development program of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI), an effort supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a sustainable and scalable model of digital humanities at UNC.

Learn more about the DH FLC and how to apply. Applications are due Monday, January 6, 2014. Questions should be directed to DIL Manager Pam Lach.

Now Accepting Applications for DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowships

Part of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowships support UNC faculty who are interested in developing digital humanities as a significant dimension of their academic practice; pursuing an interdisciplinary, collaborative digital humanities project arising from their research, pedagogy, or engaged scholarship that is likely to be of interest to users beyond academic specialists and which raises larger social, historical, literary, or artistic issues; reflecting upon and discussing with colleagues the implications of digital humanities for their own academic practice; and applying what they have learned as DIL/IAH Faculty Fellows to their graduate and/or undergraduate teaching and mentoring.

Applications for the 2014/2015 academic year are due Friday, September 27.

Consult the guidelines for the 2014 DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship Program for details. Email DIL Manager Pam Lach for more information or to set up a consultation.

CDHI/DIL Technology Lead

We’re hiring a technical lead for the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) and the Digital Innovation Lab (DIL).

The CDHI/DIL Technology Lead will work with faculty and graduate students from across the university (and with varying degrees of digital humanities experience and expertise), DIL staff, and other cultural heritage and digital humanities organizations to provide technological support for a wide range of digital humanities projects. The emphasis will be on the leveraging of available, affordable, adaptable, and sustainable technologies and resources to facilitate digital humanities practice that can be accomplished through internal funding, as well as competitively positioning projects for external funding. The position will provide direct programming/development support for digital humanities projects and will coordinate the work of other DIL/CDHI programmers, including students and part-time programmers, in consultation with the DIL Manager and CDHI Programs Coordinator.

Specifically, this position will be responsible for providing and/or coordinating technical support and design for all CDHI projects, including those undertaken by DIL/IAH Faculty Fellows, CDHI Graduate Fellows, CDHI Postdoctoral Fellows, and CDHI-supported faculty. In addition, the position will contribute to the development and refinement of the DIL’s DH Press, a WordPress-based digital humanities toolkit (currently in Beta 1.0). This position will further contribute to and help to shape the ongoing work of the DIL.

More details, including minimum education and experience requirements as well as application instructions, are available here.

First Digital Humanities Tech Bootcamp Held at UNC

The Digital Innovation Lab teamed up with ITS Research Computing to hold the first Digital Humanities Tech Bootcamp training session on June 5-7, 2013. Part of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI)’s Curricular Design and Professional Development program, this pilot workshop brought together twenty faculty, staff, graduate students, and independent scholars from UNC, Duke, NCSU, Davidson College, and Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College for a hands-on workshop on tools and approaches in the Digital Humanities.

Will Shaw instructs the group about XML and TEI.

Will Shaw instructs the group about XML and TEI.

The entire first day was devoted to the role of markup languages in the Digital Humanities. Will Shaw, Digital Humanities Technology Consultant at Duke Libraries, walked the participants through the basics of XML (Extensible Markup Language), from its syntax/rules to creating well-formed and valid documents. From there, he introduced TEI, an implementation of XML used to represent texts digitally (for instance, to create digital scholarly editions of texts). The participants worked in pairs to markup a William Blake poem, “The Tyger,” using TEI, and learned about the possibilities of using TEI for a range of texts, from unpublished manuscripts and diaries to published novels.

Day Two was devoted to data visualization. Brad Hemminger, Associate Professor in UNC’s School of Information and Library Sciences, provided an engaging overview of data visualization, from designing for human visual perception to learning how to evaluate visualizations. He introduced the group to various open-source tools available for creating visualizations, such as Simile Timeline and TimelineJS, and guided the participants through several visualization exercises. The afternoon session was devoted to learning about GIS with Amanda Henley, Geographic Information Systems Librarian at UNC’s Davis Library. She walked participants through the process of georeferencing a historic map of North Carolina, and showed them how to geocode a data set. The session ended with some hands-on work in the open-source GIS tool, ArcGIS Explorer Online.

Participant Mark Locklear shares his work with the group.

Participant Mark Locklear shares his work with the group.

Our final day was devoted to learning how to mount a website in order to publish a DH project. Bootcamp co-planners Joe Ryan and Pam Lach taught these sessions. Joe worked with the participants in the morning to install a LAMP stack, the foundation for any web application. He then guided the group through installing the open-source content management system, WordPress, on their local machines. In the afternoon, Pam worked with the group to load and configure DH Press, the Digital Innovation Lab’s Digital Humanities Toolkit (and a WordPress plugin). From there, each participant imported data into the tool and created their own DH project.

Overall, the sessions blended introductory content with hands-on workshop experience. While no one can become a DH or tech expert in three days, we hope the bootcamp provided participants with a broad exposure to the DH world, and gave them confidence to be able to pursue DH work of their own.

Though this bootcamp was a pilot workshop, we expect it will be the first of many such training sessions, so look for future opportunities to gain hands-on experience with DH!

 

Special thanks to the Institute for the Arts and Humanities for generously donating the Hyde Hall Incubator for the bootcamp. Stephanie Barnwell, DIL graduate research assistant, provided invaluable support throughout the planning and implementation process.

Position Announcement: CDHI Programs Coordinator

The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative is looking for a Programs Coordinator!

This position will be responsible for administering and coordinating the diverse activities and programs of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative. These programs include the Digital Innovation Lab/Institute for Arts and Humanities Fellows Program, the CDHI Graduate Fellows Program, the CDHI Postdoctoral Fellows Program, and the Graduate Certificate Program in Digital Humanities. Duties associated with coordination of these program include liaising with academic departments and support units in the College of Arts and Sciences and other university academic and support units; organizing and executing selection recruitment evaluation for all programs; supporting the work of the CDHI Faculty Steering Committee Chair, serving ex officio on faculty sub-committees; and maintaining the CDHI website.

The position will also:

  • participate in and coordinate professional development and training activities in digital humanities for faculty and graduate students;
  • plan campus activities and events designed to increase interest and involvement in digital humanities across the campus in cooperation with other university units, other universities and digital humanities programs, and cultural heritage organizations;
  • develop and administer assessment impact metrics for all CDHI programs and be responsible for documenting and reporting on them to the CDHI Faculty Steering Committee, College of Arts and Sciences, and external funding bodies;
  • share project management and supervision responsibilities for digital humanities projects undertaken under the auspices of the CDHI with the Manager of the Digital Innovation Lab;
  • administer the graduate certificate program in digital humanities, including advising graduate students, and coordinating digital humanities course offerings with academic units at UNC and at Duke and NCSU;
  • work with faculty to develop new digital humanities course offerings and to add digital humanities methods and approaches to existing courses;
  • develop teaching/learning platforms and content for online and in-person online hybrid course offerings in digital humanities.

The position will work under the direction of the Co-PI of the CDHI. He/she may be assigned other related responsibilities and duties, including (but not limited to): supervision of graduate research assistants and undergraduate student workers and managing development and submission of grant gift proposals to external funding agencies.

More details and application instructions are available here.