Earlier this week, the fine folks at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)--friends of ProfHacker, all--announced a new initiative, the Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI). DHWI will run from Monday, 7 January through Friday, 11 January 2013. The event will be a companion to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), which takes place at the University of Victoria annually. Julie provided a great report from this “Academic Summer Camp” in 2010.
Like its cousin, DHWI is a week-long, training opportunity on different topics in the digital humanities. Each participant will take a week-long course on a single topic, getting intensive training from experts in the field. The courses are broken up into differing skill levels: Core Courses, Intermediate Courses, and Advanced Courses.
If you’re new to the field of the digital humanities, you would most likely want to start with one of the core courses: project development or humanities programming. While I’ve previously told you about the 12 basic principles of project management, a week with MITH’s Jenn Guiliano is going to be much, much better than a blog post in helping you write your first grant proposal and manage your project budget. And I can’t think of many people that I’d rather get started with programming--both the general concepts and actually deploying a small-scale web application--than Wayne Graham and Jeremy Boggs of the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab.
But while these Core courses would be great introductions to work in the digital humanities, don’t let the names “Intermediate” and “Advanced” courses scare you. Doing “Large Scale Text Analysis with R” might sound intimidating, but no programming experience is required to get started. (You are encouraged to be comfortable with the command line, but ProfHacker has you covered with our Guide to the Command Line series.) There are no stated prerequisites for the other Advanced course, “Publishing and Using Linked Open Data.” The Intermediate courses--"Data Curation for Digital Humanists,” “Exploring Image Analyses,” and “Teaching through Multimedia"--similarly appear open to ProfHackers of all skill levels.
Registration for the DHWI is already open and discounted rates are available for students and for those who register prior to 1 September.
Of course, there’s a lot more than the digital humanities that you might want to learn in a week’s time. If you could pick one skill related to your work in the academy to hone in seven days, what would it be? Let us know in the comments!
Lead Image: Snow Camping at Lake Easton State Park / Todd Nappen / CC BY 2.0
