The Library's Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program provides opportunities for current undergraduate students and recent graduates to learn digital scholarship methodologies and implement a project. Fellows develop hands-on skills, and no prior technical or digital scholarship experience is necessary, just curiosity and commitment. This fellowship is a site for exploration of diverse interests and backgrounds in a digital space, and we encourage and welcome applications from all majors and academic backgrounds. Until 2018, this program was known as the Digital Scholarship Summer Internship.

The syllabus for the 2017-2018 iterations of our fellowship is freely available online, and we welcome questions, comments, or feedback. 

Fellows will have the opportunity to work with a small group of peers, librarians, archivists, and IT specialists to develop skills such as:

  • Assessing and choosing digital scholarship methods and approaches
  • Digitization, curation, information visualization, project management, and other specific areas of digital scholarship
  • Evaluating tools for digital scholarship
  • Collaboratively designing and developing a digital scholarship project built around one of the Library’s digital archival collections

 

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In the first ever remote DSSF in 2020, fellows completed a digital humanities project, Disasters at Amherst, which investigates ways the college administration and student population have navigated disasters, using digitized materials from the college archives, particularly student publications. Visit the project website to view video recordings of student presentations, and interact with visualizations and analysis about the history of disasters at the college.

 

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Our 2018 summer fellow, Ramses Ngachoko '21, explored intersections in archival collections by making use of data-visualization tools in Reactions and Spontaniety: How Amherst College Affinity Groups Converge.

 

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2017's cohort developed a project around Early Amherst. Over the course of eight weeks this summer, the interns took a deep dive into the history of Amherst College between 1821 and 1861. Drawing from rich materials in Amherst’s Archives and Special Collections, they explored the intersections between the physical, social and intellectual environments of early Amherst. Their website provides a window into the places, people, intellectual activities and worldviews that founded Amherst College. You can also read the College's news story on their experience.

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The cohort for summer 2016 developed Amherst Reacts: How Amherst Students Respond to Their World. Making use of nearly two centuries of student publications preserved in Amherst’s Archives and Special Collections, the students immersed themselves in traditional scholarship with a digital lens to explore how Amherst students reacted to campus life and the world around them through comedy, poetry and protest.

 

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The 2015 internship cohort developed project that explores the legacy and context of Edward Hitchcock, third president of Amherst College, by drawing upon the Archives and Special Collections' Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection. The site, A Hitch In Time, uses data visualizaton, social network analysis, text analysis, and a digital exhibit to examine the life and importance of the geologist and reverend.

 

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The internship for 2014 culminated in the development of digital projects based on items from Amherst College’s Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection of Native American Books. These digital projects are presented on DH Blueprints: Teaching Digital Humanities by Example, and serve as models for students and scholars at Amherst and beyond. The website also contains documentation on the technical and research processes behind the digital projects. It is intended to serve as a resource that introduces interested users who are unfamiliar with the Digital Humanities to significant debates, concepts, terms, tools, and methods in the field.