About the Autumn School
A new addition to the International Digital Humanities Training Network, the 2015 Digital Humanities Autumn School hosted by Trier University and the University of Luxembourg offers an interdisciplinary introduction to and a methodological assessment of established and evolving DH practices, methods, and tools. The Autumn School will welcome more than twenty experts from research institutions in England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, and Switzerland, who represent a wide range of disciplines and academic profiles within the Digital Humanities.
During the past decades, digital technology has permeated the reading, writing, research, publication and storage platforms of humanities scholarship. As Jan Christoph Meister (2012) summarizes this phenomenon, the digital is becoming the lingua franca of the humanities. The digital humanities have emerged on the academic stage to practice all of the humanist inflections of this new lingua franca – from philology to the arts – by employing digital methods in a collaborative interdisciplinary framework. The harnessing of technology to develop novel methodological approaches to humanist research has been hailed by some members of the academic community for its galvanizing potential, but it has also raised important ideological concerns. The “Methodological Intersections” theme of the Autumn School aims to respond to recent calls for greater critical self-reflection and accountability both by digital humanists and by those scholars who remain skeptical of the contribution of digital methodologies to the qualitative questions of the humanities.
The Trier Center for Digital Humanities at Trier University and the University of Luxembourg invite PhD students and postdoctoral scholars to participate in our inaugural International Digital Humanities Autumn School. The autumn school will offer a six-day introduction in English to best practices in digital scholarship (curation, legal issues, methodology), to the interdisciplinary foundations of the Digital Humanities (philology, literary criticism, history, art history, etc.), and to commonly used DH methods, tools and technologies (digitization, document analysis and text encoding, text mining, Geodata, XQuery, visualization, enhanced publications, etc.). The autumn school will host more than twenty lecturers from academic and research institutions in England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, and Switzerland, who represent a wide diversity of expertise and career paths within the Digital Humanities. The school program consists of a three-day lecture series and a three-day workshop series, and includes a round table debate, poster presentations by researchers from the host institutions, a project brainstorming session. The program is designed to equip students with the necessary critical and technical competencies to initiate or develop a digital humanities project, and to provide a platform for future collaborations.
The number of students is limited to 30. No previous training in digital humanities is required. The autumn school welcomes scholars interested in gaining a multidisciplinary introduction to the use of digital methods for humanities research; who would like to develop an idea for a digital humanities project; who wish to gain practical skills to implement such an idea, or to advance a project already in progress. The school program should be of interest both to humanists and to computer scientists who would like to collaborate with humanists. The organizing committee will evaluate applications based on the candidates’ motivation for participation and potential to contribute to the formation of future collaborations with the other participants. The committee’s selection will aim at bringing together scholars from a variety of backgrounds who could develop shared research interests.
Application
Prospective students should apply by sending a CV (max. 2 pages) and a letter of motivation (ca. 350 words). The letter should describe your research agenda and your motivation for pursuing instruction in digital humanities methodologies. If you are already working on a digital humanities project, you have the opportunity to present a poster during the brainstorming session. If you would like to present a poster, please add a project description (ca. 250 words) to your application. The application should be sent as a single PDF file to .
No previous training in digital humanities methods is required. The organizing committee will evaluate applications based on the candidates’ motivation for participation and potential to contribute to the formation of future collaborations with other participants. The committee’s selection will aim at bringing together students from a variety of backgrounds who could develop shared research interests.
Fees and Bursaries
There is a registration fee of 100 euros. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Volkswagen Foundation, we are able to offer reimbursement for travel and accommodation expenses to all participants with financial need and will remit the registration fee for applicants based in countries with hard currency difficulties, in particular Eastern Europe. To apply for a bursary, please submit a financial statement (max. 300 words) as a separate PDF file along with your application to . The statement should provide an estimate of your travel and lodging costs and a brief description of your current employment and financial status, as well as any opportunities for expense coverage at your institution.
Important Dates
School applications and financial statements must be sent by email to by August 10th 2015.
Participants will receive a notification about their acceptance and bursary by August 24th 2015.
Participants must confirm participation by email and register by depositing the registration fee of 100 euros by August 31st 2015. Successful applicants will receive instructions about depositing the registration fee at the time of their notification of acceptance.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://kompetenzzentrum.uni-trier.de/en/dhautumnschool2015/