The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), University of Maryland’s digital humanities institute, is seeking a graduate student intern to assist with a data curation and stewardship project during the summer 2016 term to assist with the assessment, organization and curation of our collection of audiovisual recordings covering MITH’s speaker series and events. The intern must complete at least 120 hours of work over at least a six-week period between late May and early July 2016. Interns may receive academic credit (based on approval from their department) and MITH will offer a stipend of up to $1800.

Project Goals/Duties:

Under the supervision of MITH’s Project Manager, the graduate summer intern would perform an assessment of the current state of all of MITH’s audiovisual holdings related to event documentation. This includes (primarily) the Digital Dialogues series, MITH’s signature events program which features speakers from various scholarly disciplines discussing topics related to work in the digital humanities, as well as other MITH events such as the 2013 Personal Digital Archiving conference, the 2012 Topic Modeling conference, and more. The events have been recorded on either audio or video in a variety of formats. The intern will a) work with MITH staff to enact a data curation and stewardship strategy to streamline archival workflows for its audiovisual materials, b) perform migration and reformatting tasks to consolidate and normalize formats and metadata, and c) create a series of three blog posts highlighting selected content. Interns will also be encouraged to share insights about digital curation theory and practice generated byher/his work over the summer (see our 2016 Digital Humanities Stewardship series for example).

Qualifications:

This position is ideal for someone who wishes to expand her or his breadth of experience in dealing with the stewardship and curation of a variety of digital audiovisual materials, and who has an interest or knowledge in the field of digital humanities. The ideal candidate should be pursuing a graduate degree in library or archival science with a specialization or dedicated scholarly interest in data curation, digital preservation, audiovisual archiving and preservation, or similar. Special consideration will be given to candidates with coursework or field work in these areas, or in audiovisual production/editing or archiving/preservation.

About MITH:

MITH is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. Jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing. Enabling the analysis of cultural heritage collections on a large scale, we create frameworks that allow us to develop new methods and tools for the exploration and visualization of digital materials. Our applied research and practice supports curation and publication of data that contributes to improved methodologies for the organization and stewardship of humanities research.

To Apply: Email cover letter, resume, and two references as a single PDF file to MITH Project Manager Stephanie Sapienza, at sapienza@umd.edu. Type “Application for Summer A/V Data Curation Intern - ” in the subject line. For best consideration, apply on or before Wednesday June 1, 2016 at 5:00pm Eastern time. All applicants will be notified their application was received. Selected applicants will be contacted for telephone and/or in-person interviews. Start and end dates and work days/hours are negotiable as candidates’ schedules require.