Scott Paul McGinnis, Mentor
The SMART mentoring program pairs doctoral students with undergraduate students to work as a two-person team on a research project during the summer semester. The projects are proposed by the graduate students and then advertised to undergraduates, who may apply to whichever projects fit their major and interests.
Two summers ago, I participated as a graduate mentor in the pilot program, with an industrious undergraduate, Joo-hyeon Oh. We worked on a digital humanities project, so DH@Berkeley invited us to share our experiences.
I was one of several history graduate students who proposed digital history projects, and I think the mentoring program is well-suited to the collaborative nature of such projects. Also, I think our project fit the mentoring program well because we were experimenting with ways to use digital technology for research in early Chinese history. This made the project exciting, because there was plenty of room for creativity and learning, both on my part and on the part of my research partner.
The project was a visualization of geographic and prosopographic data which we collected from an early Chinese historical text, the Shiji 史記 of Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c. 145 - c. 86 BCE). We set up a database and populated it with names and locations, data which we used to create an interactive browser-based map collection and a set of social network visualizations. By the end of the summer we had developed a working proof of concept. Some of the digital skills involved were new to me, as well as to my partner, so we both learned a great deal during the program. Since then, I’ve learned more, and I’m currently planning a new version of the project with some different methods. Nevertheless, though I am changing my approach, I think we accomplished much over that summer, and I personally learned a lot.
In short, the SMART mentorship program is a great opportunity for graduate students, and especially suitable for DH projects. (On top of that, it offers generous summer funding—a much coveted thing among graduate students.) For more information, see the program website (http://smart.berkeley.edu/). Applications are due November 24, 2014.
SMART 2012 Participants, Photo credit: Andrea Sohn
Joo-hyeon Oh, Mentee
In the summer of 2012, I participated in the SMART program as an undergraduate mentee. My mentor was Scott McGinnis, a doctoral student in the history department. The objective of our project was to create an interactive website that displays maps and character counts for individual chapters of an ancient Chinese historical text.
For the first month, I read and searched through the pages of the text every day, a task history students know very well. I wrote weekly reflections and had weekly meetings with Scott. This way, after doing so much reading, I was able to stop and reflect on what I had learned that week. In the meeting, Scott and I would discuss my reflections. These activities helped me to form some ideas for my own future research.
Participating in the SMART program, however, I did more than just reading and writing. While reading, I used Microsoft Access to compile a database designed by my mentor. Using the program, I recorded the names of people and places found in chapters of the historical text, as well as how frequently they appear. After a month of compilation work, I then embarked on an adventure to learn and use two programs I had never heard of before. One was a GIS program, and the other was a network visualization program. Although the process of learning and figuring out what to do with them was a great challenge to me at first, taking a part in Scott’s digital history project really was an eye-opening experience for me--in my history classes, I had never learned about these things. It really expanded my idea of what historical research could be. I learned that there are more tools available to historical researchers than books and MS Word, and with all of these, so many interesting things can be done.
The SMART program provides a great opportunity to see how graduate-level research is conducted (and what the graduate students are experimenting with). You get to be a part of the process, while doing some research of your own. SMART gives generous funding, which helps a lot in covering the cost of living in Berkeley over the summer while doing research. The program also offers a number of workshops, which are especially useful for undergraduate mentees who are considering applying for a graduate school. These sessions provided an ample amount of information and tips about things like scholarships, graduate school, and the application process. For more information, please visit http://smart.berkeley.edu/.
Scott Paul McGinnis is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation topic is early Chinese historical practice. He has also been active in the Berkeley DH community, he maintains a DH-themed blog at majining.com, and he can be found on Twitter: @majining.
Joo-hyeon Oh is a recent graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Department of History. This year, she is studying modern and classical Chinese language in Xi'an, China.