Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s will be hosting their first Digital Humanities Research Institute from May 14 to 17 funded by a grant through Indiana Humanities.
Saint Mary’s Medieval English literature and manuscript studies professor Sarah Noonan along with Dan Johnson, the Digital Scholarship librarian at Notre Dame, were two of 16 participants, out of over 130 applicants, who received a fellowship to attend the Digital Humanities Research Institute workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.
“It just so happened that we were both chosen from this area,” Noonan said. “We laughed that we had to go to New York to meet each other because we hadn’t met each other before. Dan and I decided that because we both were going through this program and had to implement what we learned, we decided to work on it together because that would make it more fun and interesting.”
A key requirement of the program was that the participants create a digital humanities institute at their respective home institutions.
“Much of the curriculum, that I'll be using in the digital humanities research institute here was developed at CUNY and flexibly adapted to our own community and the needs that I think need to be addressed here,” she said. “One of the goals of this program was to expand communities of practice, so they wanted us to kind of gain training in these tools so that we could then take them home, use them and teach them to members of our institutions in our regions.”
Due to the grant from Indiana Humanities, the program will be free for participants, including room and board.
“We’re very excited that Indiana Humanities is supporting this program and it will allow us to bring in some graduate students from Loyola University to help us teach sections of the workshop and to also provide some general text support, during the event itself,” she said. “It’s going to be open to undergraduate students at Saint Mary’s, graduate students at Notre Dame, faculty and staff from both institutions and then graduate students as well as faculty and staff from institutions in the surrounding areas.”
Noonan said there will be an application process of which they will be accepting 18 to 22 participants and, because it is a paired initiative between Saint Mary’s and Notre Dame, the first two days of the institute will be held at Saint Mary’s and the second two days will be held at Notre Dame.
“Digital humanities research tends to be more collaborative at its core because you have to bring a lot more perspectives and skill sets to those kinds of projects,” Noonan said. “One of the main goals is not only to provide training to these individuals but to also establish networks between individuals who are working on similar projects. It is crucial to the future of the humanities that we grabble with this change and what it means for who we are, how we read and how we understand the world around us.”
