Humanities Institute | College of Liberal Arts
skip to content The University of Texas at Austin

DH Apprenticeships

IDH Research Apprenticeships are mixed-level, undergraduate and graduate, research experiences that include opportunities to work on faculty and staff-led digital humanities projects at UT for credit and a small stipend ($250 for each undergraduate student and $500 for each graduate student). Faculty and staff sponsors can support one undergraduate student and one graduate student. 

The research apprenticeship seeks to

o   Be a model for engaging graduate and undergraduate students together in collaborative, vertically-integrated research and thus of wide interest by faculty in other departments and colleges across UT and beyond

o   Help students successfully complete the requirements for the undergraduate Digital Humanities (DH) certificate, the graduate Digital Studies (DS) portfolio offered through COLA and the MSIS/MA dual degree in the School of Information and English, among other programmatic requirements   

The program will include

  • matching project leads with interested students through an application process
  • pre-course consultations with students and outside advisors from the UT gems to conceptualize manageable projects and to craft achievable goals
  • providing development support in platforms for images, text, and AV such as Omeka, Scalar, and AVAnnotate
  • training in digital research and methods, project management support, and grant funding

Course Credit

Undergraduate Students will receive 3 hours of credit and letter grade for one lecture hour per week and 100 to 120 internship hours over the course of the semester by enrolling in L A 325: Topics in the Liberal Arts (Topic: Digital Humanities and Social Justice Archives). This course will also count towards the DH Certificate capstone requirement.

Graduate Students will receive 3 hours of credit for one lecture hour per week and 100 to 120 internship hours over the course of the semester by enrolling in L A 381: Advanced Methods (Topic: Digital Humanities and Social Justice Archives). This course will count towards the Digital Studies Graduate Portfolio

Attendance is mandatory for successful completion.

 

The Spring 2024 topic will be “Digital Humanities and Social Justice Archives.”

As a model for engaging graduate and undergraduate students together in collaborative, public-facing projects within a pedagogical framework that encourages experiential learning, this course will focus on projects in the special collections at UT and beyond that advocate for intersectional justice by recognizing overlapping or intersecting social identities and the related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.

Key activities and learning objectives

Students will learn

o   about the active relationship between archives and social justice, bringing an open mindedness to learning and sharing authority

o   to plan a project, how to collaborate and communicate, project management, among other topics. 

o   to exhibit and share their work for the UT community and future employers through an e-portfolio and events such as COLA’s poster session as part of research week the library’s Graduate Research Showcase.

o   learn professional skills that will make them feel more confident and prepared for entering the workforce and/or moving on to graduate study

o   produce public-facing projects within a pedagogical framework that might 

  • encourage experiential learning and provide better access to materials that increase our knowledge about issues in our culture that are typically less well represented in digital or data work such as histories of class, gender, LGBTQ, nationality, and race among other topics
  • help inform the community about these issues as they relate to digital projects and cultural equity 
  • show critical perspectives about policy recommendations and records of past misconduct
  • advocate for appropriate policies and practices 
  • support community-based documentation and archiving work
  • generally affirm the importance of intersectional identities in the historical record

Partial readings list

Carter, Rodney GS. “Of things said and unsaid: Power, archival silences, and power in silence,” Archivaria, 2006.

Gillespie, Tartleton. “The relevance of algorithms.” Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society, 2014.

Hughes-Watkins, Lae'l. “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices.” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 2018.

Imarisha, Walidah. Transcript of Walidah's Liberated Archives Keynote. Walidah Imarisha, 2017.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, 2018.

Sutherland, Tonia. Archival amnesty: in search of black American transitional and restorative justice

Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 2017

Trouillot, Michel- Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 1995.

 

If you are an undergraduate or graduate student in good standing, you may apply for this opportunity on the following form: https://forms.gle/q28ACYQUTJiuJGUy6 

Please note that the above application asks you to send a confirmation form to your proposed faculty advisor: https://forms.gle/7jszDSLnhLQSMN7H9 

Tab Option 4. Add body text in this space.
Tab Option 5. Add body text in this space.