The Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi will be hosting a summer residency program for undergraduate students enrolled at any Mississippi two- or four-year institution of higher learning. The students selected for the program will have individual projects they can continue working on after the residency ends.

The residency will take place over six weeks from June 15 to July 24. The residency will cover topics such as the basics of using scanners, creating data to make records locatable, and narrating the records into a coherent story.

“Digital humanities are the use of computer tools in fields that have not used computers extensively, like history, English, philosophy, and social sciences,” Andrew Haley, the director of the Hub, said. “Digitizing humanities can help visualize data, and then you can see something that was not as obvious before.”

The participants will work with digitization tools and work with mentors to understand the basics of digitizing the humanities. The students will then be working on their own projects. The projects will be to produce digital data to be able to narrate a story. The projects will have clear goals, objectives, and audiences.

During the residency, the students will learn to develop research questions and apply research skills to interpret, analyze, and synthesize information. The students will also learn when and how to apply the skills they learn during the residency. In addition to their technical skills, they will also learn communication skills.

“We have had instructors reach out to us who want to incorporate digital humanities projects into their classrooms,” Jamie O’Quinn, the outreach liaison for the Digital Hub, said. “We work with them to ensure that they can utilize the projects in their classrooms.”

The students will own their work and will be able to continue the project with another academic program, for example, for their honors project.

The residency is funded by the Mississippi Digital Humanities Hub, which is a three-year grant. The grant was given by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to encourage institutions throughout the state to digitize humanities to make documents more accessible and train ambassadors for digitizing humanities. The Mississippi Digital Humanities Hub has also provided grants to 12 institutions across Mississippi in addition to its own programs to digitize the humanities.

The residency program is open to current freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. The application for the program will close on March 31.