Summer Internship in Digital Humanities

Notice about Summer 2022:

The Center is redesigning this program and will not be offering these internships this summer.


Summer 2020

Internship Dates: June 1-July 31, 2020
Application Deadline: February 19, 2020
Recommendation Deadline: February 21, 2020

Eligibility: Undergraduate students from US Institutions (details below)

The application is currently closed.

The CHS seeks undergraduate students to work as interns for eight weeks in Washington, DC on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project, a self-standing subset of the Open Greek and Latin Project and on Homer and the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri.

Interns will work primarily with XML files, editing them to meet the projects’ standards, and uploading the corrections to a GitHub repository. Additional tasks will include correcting OCRed texts, as well as contributing to other digital humanities projects as they arise.

No prior technical skills are needed. Instruction will be provided on site.

About the Projects

Free First Thousand Years of Greek

The goal of the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project is to make freely available the corpus of the first thousand years of Ancient Greek as attested in manuscripts. The project aims to incorporate a modern search engine, the ability to download works, the capacity for including textual variants, and numerous other features.

Homer and the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri

Hundreds of Homeric papyri survive from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. They constitute our earliest, pre-Medieval witnesses to the Homeric poems and contain much information about the life of Homeric texts in the Graeco-Roman period and ways in which readers interacted with them. While individual readings from them have factored into print editions and have been captured by the CHS’s Homer and the Papyri project, there has never been an attempt to record electronically full transcriptions of these texts, including variants and extra-textual features such as lectional signs etc., partly because of the absence of a tool to do this. The Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP, www.litpap.info) now offers an open access platform for editing ancient literary papyri in a form of TEI-XML. One aim of the summer internship is to train participants in editing Homeric papyri within the DCLP. A second one is to consider ways of repurposing this textual information, once it has been fully recorded, in order to advance Homeric scholarship by making it available for research initiatives at the CHS.

Other Projects

There may also be occasional work in other online publication projects of the CHS, such as A Homer Commentary in Progress or Particles in Ancient Greek Discourse, which will include archiving publications, editing texts, and entering data into bibliographic databases.

Life in Washington, DC

The work schedule is relatively flexible and provides ample opportunity to explore the metro DC area. Interns will have access to the CHS library and will have many opportunities to engage with the scholarly community at the CHS.

Interns will reside on the CHS campus from June 1-July 31. During that time, they will work approximately 20-22 hours per week, at an hourly rate of $16.00. The CHS will provide shared housing on campus; the apartments are fully furnished and equipped with necessary household items such as eating utensils, cookware, and linens. The CHS will also provide MacBooks with necessary software installed for interns to use during their time at the CHS.

Interns will be responsible for the costs of transportation to and from Washington, DC, meals (excluding lunch on weekdays), and incidentals.

Eligibility

This program is open to undergraduate students from US institutions. Due to the nature of training and scheduling for project collaboration, applicants must be able to work for the entire duration of the aforementioned program dates. One semester of ancient Greek is required, though intermediate knowledge of ancient Greek is strongly preferred. A minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 is required. No prior professional experience is necessary for this internship; interns will be trained in all necessary technologies. Applicants must demonstrate the internship’s relevance to their studies and future career plans.

If you are ineligible for this internship but would still like to get involved with the project, contact the Open Greek and Latin Project team.

The CHS does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status in any of its activities or operations.

Application Process

The application is now closed.

Application Deadline: February 19, 2020
Deadline for Recommendations: February 21, 2020

Students interested in applying should:

  • fill out the online application,
  • include in the application contact information for two references,
  • include a transcript as a PDF attachment,
  • include a résumé as a PDF attachment.

The applicant’s references may be professors, employers, or advisors. References should be able to comment specifically about the applicant’s academic record, capacity to carry out the responsibilities listed above, and ability to work effectively and cooperatively with other interns, the staff at the Center, and scholars visiting the Center. Students should inform their references that the CHS will contact them directly.

The CHS will contact finalists to schedule an interview.

Please note: Application attachments must be in PDF format or the system will reject them.

Questions

If you have any questions about the program or the application process, please contact us at internships(at)chs.harvard.edu.