Friday, August 5, 2011

Call for Nominations for the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) Graduate Fellowship Research Awards

Courtesy post:

Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) Graduate Fellowship Research Awards

Call for Nominations, 2011-2012

The new Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) will award 2 fellowships of $15,000 each for 8 months beginning December 15, 2011, renewable for 9 months during the academic year 2012-2013. The first round of competition will be held this Fall semester and awards will be announced October 15. Nominations in the all departments and colleges participating in the Digital Humanities Certificate Program will be considered by the selection committee, which consists of faculty in Communication, Computer Science, University Libraries, Performance Studies, and English.

The purpose of the awards is to give students the opportunity to participate in major projects underway at the IDHMC, giving them the opportunity to implement practically some of the theoretical, rhetorical, methodological, and philosophical ideas at play in their proposed dissertations.

The successful applicant will be conducting research in the following fields: information visualization, crowd-sourcing archives, interactive digital editions, global media studies, digital rhetorics, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, game studies, serious games, topic modeling, linked data, OCR development, performance studies, or digital art.

Candidates will be asked to participate in workshops held by the IDHMC, 3 to 4 per academic year, and to serve in the Applied Research Consortium as a team member. (An announcement about ARC is attached.) Finally, candidates will effectively run the IDHMC journal using Open Journal Software Systems, with technical support from staff.

Eligibility:
Candidates must be participating in the Digital Humanities Certificate program, and ideally they will have attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, sponsored by (IDHMC), for at least one summer session.

There is no limit on the number of students who may be nominated by each department, and the best candidates will be chosen without consideration of department or college.

Contents of Nomination Packet:
Students must submit the following:

1) Nominee Information: give the name and email address of the nominating professor.

2) A “layman’s summary” of the nature and significance of the dissertation project as currently imagined; this must not exceed three single-spaced pages (see detail below under evaluation criteria) NOTE: If you have already officially completed a proposal, do NOT attach the full proposal that was filed with OGS.

4) Student's curriculum vitae

5) Timeline of graduate study and completion

6) Support letter from the nominating faculty member (see detail below under evaluation criteria)

Submission Deadline:
Thursday, September 15, 2011.

Evaluation Criteria:
Though the dissertation need not be fully conceptualized at this point, the nominee should articulate clearly the importance the research questions currently motivating their graduate study and the likely contribution of the results to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of their home discipline and digital humanities. Additionally, what we are looking for in these summaries is more the ability to formulate sound and viable research questions than to prematurely propose answers.

Letters by nominating faculty should include the name of nominee and details about the contribution to the field(s) that the student’s work is likely to make.

Restrictions:
Successful candidates will be required NOT to work elsewhere in any capacity during tenure of the fellowship. The fellows’ colleges will be asked to waive tuition, and their departments will be asked to defer teaching duties to a later time.

Submit Nomination Packets to:

Professor Laura Mandell
Director, IDHMC
MS 4227
mandell@tamu.edu