Several digital humanities projects in the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program have extended their deadlines to Friday, September 12th. Projects do not require extensive knowledge of subject matter, but will offer undergraduates opportunities to work with digital tools, databases, and archives. Additional URAP projects with extended deadlines can be found here.
Digital Catalogue & Research Site for Outsider Artist Sister Gertrude Morgan
Art History: Margaretta Lovell
Students will use digital tools to generate new insights into the career of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980). She was a self-taught painter, musician, and street preacher in New Orleans, who, starting in the 1970s, became renowned in the field of self-taught art (also known as contemporary folk, outsider, and vernacular art). The project will focus on organizing data on the artist’s visual and musical production (i.e., produce a searchable catalogue of her visual art, performances, writings, and auction prices – much of this information is already gathered), identifying and/or developing digital tools for examining Morgan’s artistic sources (visual culture, blues and gospel music, popular texts), subject matter, and the circulation of her art within the art market and public/private collections. Students with experience and/or interest in programming, web design, data mining and visualization, GIS mapping, and/or high-resolution imaging & presentation are encouraged to apply.
Jan Brueghel & Pieter Bruegel Research Websites
Art History, Elizabeth Honig
Janbrueghel.net, is an open-access, limited-input wiki-type website centered on the works of the baroque painter Jan Brueghel. In the coming year, the project will also be adding the work of the famous painter Pieter Bruegel to the website. Students will work on tasks such as building pages and adding data, fact-checking information currently in professor's database, finding bibliographic information on images, searching for better quality images, and communicating with museums and art dealers.
Apprenticeship in Historical Geographical Information Science in the College of Environmental Design
City & Regional Planning: John Radke, Daniel Viragh
Students participating in this apprenticeship will help create the first-ever historical GIS of one of the fastest-growing cities in Central Europe in the late nineteenth century: Budapest. This GIS will be based on a digitized map of the city from 1896 and on a book-length listing of the city's commercial, industrial and government resources. Students will learn how to create a Geographical Information System from the bottom up. They will learn the fundamentals of manipulating maps and spatial data in ArcGIS. They will learn how to digitize streets; how to geo-code addresses; and how to create a network analysis dataset. They will learn how to query this data and how to run large-scale spatial analyses of it, including location-allocation and interpolation techniques. At the end of their apprenticeship, students will be confidently able to assemble their own GIS (historical or not) for their personal research projects and to run spatial analyses.
Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, Database and Archive
Classics, Kim Shelton, Professor
The Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology is a research unit in the Department of Classics for our excavation and research program at the Sanctuary of Zeus in Nemea, Greece. The Center archive houses a photographic and text archive that is in the process of being re-organized and digitized. The apprentice would assist in the organization of the archive, the digital database management of slides and photographs as well as in other archival projects such as web site production. Assistance in research and reports on various topics connected to the conservation and publication of materials from the archaeological site is also a possibility. Depending on interest and performance, there is also the opportunity for the apprentice continuing the research program in Greece during the summer. Knowledge of ancient and/or modern Greek is not required.
Petsas House: archaeological excavation and research in Mycenae, Greece
Classics, Kim Shelton, Professor
Apprentices will assist in the organization of archival material from recent excavation seasons, help create a digital database of images and especially digitally "ink" artifact drawings using Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Assistance in research and reports on various topics connected to the conservation and publication of materials from the archaeological excavation is also a possibility. Depending on interest and performance, there is also the opportunity for the apprentice continuing the research program in Greece during the summer. Knowledge of ancient and/or modern Greek is not required.
Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition
Slavic Languages & Literatures, Ronelle Alexander
Originally conceived of as a complex digital object comprising audio clips from field dialect recordings made in Bulgarian villages over a 15-year period, coordinated with text files containing analysis on several levels, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition project is now being prepared as an interactive database, built using open-source software. Students will work on data entry of text and linguistic information and analysis of dialectal texts for thematic content.