Graduate Residency in Digital Scholarship

About the Program

Each year, the Sherman Centre invites applications for its Graduate Residency in Digital Scholarship. The residency program is designed to support graduate students to work on a facet of a research project in digital scholarship (related or not to their primary graduate research work), broadly defined, which expands and challenges their respective fields.

Residents are encouraged to consider digital scholarship through critical, technical, artistic and experimental purviews, and through methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks that advance digital scholarship or provoke what it means to ‘do’ it.

The collegial atmosphere of the residency is sustained through recurrent meetings during the Winter 2023 term, which facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for collaboration at the Sherman Centre and beyond.  The Summer 2023 term will feature self-directed research work.

Learn more about the program by reading this blog post, which corrals blog posts, digital projects, and video presentations by past Graduate Residents. Select projects are displayed in the gallery below.

  • Screenshot from Learning In Colour Website. Text reads Anti-Racist Education.
    Maddie Brockbank’s e-resource on anti-racist education
  • A colorized visualization of the rolled reconstruction of 1QM, courtesy of Michael Brooks Johnson
    Michael Johnson’s 3D scan of a Dead Sea Scroll fragment
  • Screenshot of Cameron Anderson's app
    Cameron Anderson’s interactive app for music analysis.
  • Akacia Propst and Brianne Morgan’s banner for their public scholarship site about scientific research.
  • Photograph of ancient pottery fragments
    A photograph from Duygu Ertemin’s digital exhibit on ancient Turkish pottery.
  • Gif of a Dead Sea Scroll fragment being 32 printed.
    Michael Johnson’s work 3D printing fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
  • Illustration of a dog wearing a sensory device
    Emmy Nordstrom Higdon’s mock-up of a biometric sensor that examined service dogs.
  • A network visualization displaying types of violence used against African Americans and the methods of resistance used in response. This visualization was created using a small subset of data from the Slave Narrative Collection.
    Sarah Whitwell’s network visualization of types of violence used against African Americans and the methods of resistance used in response in the Postemancipation South.
  • Gif of Katherine Eaton's database.
    Katherine Eaton’s SQL database.
  • Protestors hold laptops and signs that read 100 DAYS NO INTERNET
    Helen Beny’s research on politically motivated internet blackouts.
  • Screenshot of Katherine Eaton's map of the plague's spread.
    Katherine Eaton’s map of the spread of the plague.
  • Raspberry Interface for Xowa offline Wikipedia resting on the grass in a glass enclosure.
    Stephen Surlin’s work on providing off-grid wi-fi access in Hamilton’s community gardens
  • Screenshot of Mica Jorgenson's map of the flow of objects throughout the Porcupine Gold Rush.
    Mica Jorgenson’s flow map of the Porcupine Gold Rush.
  • Microscope image of Rondel phytoliths
    Specimen from Shalen Prado’s Microbotanical Specimen Database: Rondel phytoliths.
  • Screenshot of title page of Samantha Stevens-Hall's Omeka exhibit of Uganda's Intellectual History: A Digital Archive
    Samantha Stevens Clarke’s digital exhibit on Ugandan intellectual history.
  • Scanning a molcajete and temolote for 3D printing
    Stephen Surlin’s project 3D printing a molcajete and tomolote.

Residency Features

  • Cohort experience 
  • Self-directed 
  • Opportunity to showcase research in a graduate colloquium 
  • Project consulting, both with Sherman staff, as well as with other Library units  
  • Collaborative working space at the Sherman Centre 
  • This is a two-phase residency; the first phase includes recurrent cohort meetings while the second centres on self-directed research work.

Expectations  

Residents are expected to participate fully in the cohort through the following activities:  

  • Participating in recurring meetings with the residency cohort during the Winter 2023 term.  
  • Publishing project introduction and update posts on the Sherman Centre blog at the beginning and end of the residency period, respectively. Presenting their research project at a colloquium or roundtable event in September 2023.  
  • Developing a scholarly output (format to be determined by each resident)  
  • Attending Sherman Centre events throughout the Winter term, where possible.  

Eligibility 

Applicants must be current or accepted graduate student at McMaster University.

While each year’s application materials may shift, our most recent call asked applicant to provide the following information: 

1. A personal statement (~250 words) that explains: (i) how the residency compliments your graduate research and training at McMaster University; and, (ii) what you hope to get out of the residency experience. 

2. A brief project proposal (500 words maximum) that describes the project you wish to undertake during the residency. We encourage applicants to consider proposing a smaller component to a larger project. For instance, the residency project could be part of or complementary to your thesis or dissertation research.  

Possible sections to include in the proposal: (i) a description of the project, including key theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches informing the work; (ii) the form the output will take, which could include, for instance: a public installation (broadly defined), a visualization (broadly defined), a scholarly publication, a conference paper, a poster, an annotated bibliography, an interview, an artistic, creative or experimental intervention, a public data set, a digital collection (broadly defined), a database, a tool-kit, a workshop module, a syllabus, a class assignment, etc.; (iii) its intended audience; (iv) a short project timeline for the residency period; (v) a description of the technical resources and competencies that need to be developed to achieve the project goals; (vi) if applicable, a description of the materials, data or corpora required and how access to it will be obtained. 

3. A current C.V. 

4. The names of two references. 

Questions

For more information about the residency or the application process, please contact the Sherman Centre at scds@mcmaster.ca