Internships in Digital Humanities

The Brown University Women Writers Project invites proposals for one- or two-semester internships focusing on methods of representing, visualizing, and analysing digital texts in the humanities. The WWP is a long-standing digital humanities research project with expertise in electronic publishing, text encoding, and scholarly communication.

We publish a digital collection of early women's writing in English (Women Writers Online, http://www.wwp.brown.edu), encoded in TEI/XML and made available by license for use in research and teaching. The WWO collection is currently used by over 250 institutions worldwide and is considered one of the foremost TEI-encoded text collections in the world. We also publish documentation and guidelines for scholarly text encoding, and we conduct regular seminars and training workshops.

The WWP's research and development currently focuses on the following areas:

• extending the range of functionality in the WWO interface, through the use of visualization tools and alternative ways of viewing and analysing the WWO materials
• enhancing our representation of persons, places, and texts mentioned in the WWO collection
• extending our encoding of the WWO collection to include thematic and interpretive markup
• exploring new markup protocols for the encoding of manuscript materials

Internship projects might include:

• development of experimental interface tools
• development of extended metadata for the WWO collection to support new forms of access
• study of usage habits in collaboration with teachers or researchers using the WWO collection, or drawing on usage statistics
• development of contextual information that would enhance readers' understanding of the WWO collection
• development of information that would enhance intertextual connections within the WWO collection, or between WWO and other resources (such as biographical references, dictionaries, maps, image collections, etc.)
• development of specifications and rationales for enhancing the encoding of the WWO collection

To apply, please send a 1-2 page proposal and a current CV to WWP@brown.edu.

The proposal should include a description of your own background and relevant skills and expertise, describe the nature of the project you hope to undertake, its relevance to your current program of study, and the anticipated outcomes of the project. Internship projects need not result in a direct, immediate practical outcome for the WWP, but they should be scaled to yield some result (a report, a plan, a prototype) within the timeframe of the internship.

If the internship is to be used for course credit at your home institution, please include the name and contact information of the faculty member who will supervise the independent study course.