Humanities & Data Science

Humanities & Data Science Faculty Institute

With the support of a Magic Grant from the Humanities Council, the Center for Digital Humanities hosted two Humanities & Data Science Institutes in 2022–23. To learn more, please visit the HDSI website. This blog post also provides more information about the first Institute.

The call for applications for the second Institute is below.


June 5-9, 2023
Application Deadline: March 10

Applied machine learning technologies—often branded as “artificial intelligence”—are now used for editing novels, assessing resumes, grading papers, and conducting psychotherapy. While humanists have been collecting data and analyzing it through computational methods for decades, the field of data science usually lacks voices from the humanities, who could bring their critical, historical, and contextual perspectives to bear on the emergence and use of these new technologies.

The Humanities & Data Science Faculty Institute (HDSI), run by the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) and supported by a Humanities Council Magic Grant, will empower Princeton scholars from the humanities or humanities-adjacent social sciences to engage with the conceptual, practical, and ethical aspects of data science. Participants will receive $5,000 summer salary.

The five-day Institute will be accessible to faculty with no experience in coding or data. Participants will gain hands-on experience in emerging methods in data science. They will become informed interlocutors who can demonstrate the potential as well as the risks of computational analysis in their own fields. The topics and format for the June 2023 Institute will be similar to the first HDSI we ran in January 2023.

The HDSI will also serve as a project incubator. Each faculty member will develop ideas to advance their own project that engages with data science methods or concepts. This could include:

CDH staff will offer regular consultations for these projects throughout the summer and following academic year, and participants will be well-positioned to apply for additional campus or external funding to continue developing their research or course-related project.

Faculty attendees may invite a graduate student partner to attend the Institute, who will assist with project development. Graduate students are expected to attend the entire Institute, and will receive $1,000 for participation.

Participants will be required to attend all five days of the Institute. In-person attendance significantly improves the learning experience for new technical skills and concepts, but the option to join the group remotely will be available if personal or public health circumstances require.

Participants will be required to do some preparatory reading and technical onboarding in advance, and, after the Institute, to attend 2-3 check-in meetings through the summer and academic year to share project progress.

Please submit a maximum 750-word proposal that includes:

Princeton faculty at all ranks are eligible to apply. Visiting faculty are not eligible.

To learn more about the HDSI, please see this write up of the January 2023 Institute on the CDH website .

Application material should be sent as a single PDF file to cdh-info@princeton.edu by 11:59pm EST Friday, March 10, 2022 with the subject line “HDSI 2023 application.” Applications will be reviewed by CDH staff and HDSI instructors. Notifications will be sent out by April 15, 2023.

Humanities & Data Science Institute