DH for Hellenic Studies

Summer Institute: Digital Humanities for Hellenic Studies – Working with Text

June 25-28 – Athens, Greece

Overview:

This workshop is for scholars curious about exploring digital humanities methods for analyzing the textual culture of the Greek world from antiquity to the present. ‘Texts’ can encompass medieval manuscripts and lyric poetry, social media posts and oral histories, graffiti and musical scores, and more. Topics covered at the workshop may include gathering textual corpora, text analysis, text encoding, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), machine learning/AI approaches, and/or others based on participant interest. Through seminar discussions, demos/instructional sessions, and individual project consultations, participants will understand the affordances and limits of emerging technologies for the study of text, while gaining hands-on experience with methods and tools to accelerate their own research.

The workshop is open to scholars with no technical background. Applicants must have a humanities research idea or project that would benefit from computational approaches and a topic engaging texts from the Greek world broadly conceived. Texts may be in Greek and/or any language relevant to the topic of study.

Participants will be required to do preparatory reading and familiarize themselves with certain tools in advance of the workshop. In addition to making progress on a research project, participants will learn about the dynamic field of Digital Humanities in Greece, and meet some of the leaders in digital studies at Greek academic and cultural heritage institutions.

Scholars from Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), Princeton’s MARBAS initiative, and the MSc Program in Digital Methods for the Humanities at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) will serve as instructors.

The workshop will take place at the Princeton Athens Center in Athens, Greece.

Application:

The following material should be combined into a single file and uploaded to the application form, which can be found here.

● a 1-page (500 words) statement of your research project and goals for this workshop. Please specify any experience with digital or computational methods, tools, or programming languages. If you have data, please describe the format it is in (spreadsheet, database, etc.) and approximately how many items it contains;

● a CV;

● for graduate student applicants, contact information for a faculty advisor who may be contacted as a reference (no letter of recommendation is required with the initial application).

Application Deadline: March 31, 2024 (11:59pm EDT).

Questions? For questions about projects and proposals, please contact Natalia Ermolaev, Executive Director of the CDH. For questions about program logistics and eligibility, please contact Chris Twiname, administrative coordinator at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies.

Applicants will be notified of their selection by April 15. The selection committee includes the faculty coordinators from AUEB and Princeton, as well as representatives from the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the UNESCO Chair on Digital Methods for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Eligibility:

Current Princeton scholars (faculty, staff, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows) in the humanities, as well as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the humanities currently enrolled at universities in Greece, are invited to apply.

Funding:

All participants attend this workshop tuition-free.

Selected Princeton affiliates, as well as those from Greek universities who do not reside in Athens, will have the chance to apply for funding to cover all or part of their travel and accommodation expenses. The funding application will comprise a short budget estimate and a statement as to whether the applicant plans to combine this workshop with other activities, as the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies will only cover expenses related to the workshop. Selected participants will be given instructions on how to apply for funding when they are notified of their selection.

This program is sponsored by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University in collaboration with the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University; Princeton’s Manuscript, Rare Book and Archive Studies initiative; the UNESCO Chair on Digital Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences at AUEB; the MSc Program in Digital Methods for the Humanities at AUEB; and the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU).