1 October: FYI -- PhD funding, Galway
Index of October 2015 | Index of year: 2015 | Full index
PhD in Digital Arts & Humanities
Call for Applications
NUI Galway invites applications for a four-year scholarship in the
Digital Arts & Humanities structured PhD programme, to commence in
January 2016.
The closing date for applications is 5pm on Friday 30 October
2015. Applications are made via the Postgraduate Application Centre:
www.pac.ie/nuig (see below). A PDF copy of
this advertisement is available at http://bit.ly/dah-scholarship
Introduction
Digital Arts & Humanities (DAH) is a full-time four-year
interdisciplinary structured PhD programme. The PhD programme is
linked to an all-Irish university consortium committed to developing
postgraduate education and training in the Digital Arts and
Humanities. Consortium members include NUI Galway; Trinity College
Dublin; University College Cork; and NUI Maynooth, and includes
additional contributions by Queen’s University Belfast; University of
Ulster; the Royal Irish Academy; and by our industrial partners,
Google, IBM, and Intel.
What is DAH?
DAH is a field of study and research which develops the combined
creative potential of new computing software programmes, data
aggregation, visualisation, information management, text analysis and
text mining, and digital media of different kinds. The programme at
NUI Galway, established in 2011, enables students to carry out
research in this area at the highest level by engaging with leading
academics, practitioners, and representatives of industry.
The DAH Structured PhD programme provides the research platform,
structures, partnerships and innovation models for fourth-level
researchers to engage with a wide range of stakeholders in order to
contribute to the developing digital arts and humanities community
world-wide. It includes both practice-based research in digital art
and media and the use of digital tools in the scholarly analysis of
cultural texts.
For the student, DAH will: – promote advanced practical and academic
research in applying innovative models of arts practice and theory,
humanities research, archiving, and pedagogy, – provide coherent
exposure to transferable skills in digital content creation that will
be academically and professionally beneficial, – work with industry
partners and cultural institutions to ensure knowledge exchange and
career development.
Programme Structure
Candidates enter the programme via the Humanities or the Arts strands
(in the Moore Institute or Huston School respectively). In each
strand, students complete training and career development modules,
including main modules taught at NUI Galway as well as modules and
workshops shared with partner institutions. The overall aim of the
taught modules is threefold: 1) to introduce students to the history
and theoretical issues in digital arts/humanities; 2) to provide the
skills needed to apply advanced computational and information
management paradigms to humanities/arts research; 3) to create an
enabling framework for students to develop generic and transferable
skills to complete the required work for the award of the PhD. Work
placements at pertinent institutions may also form part of the
scholarship.
Year 1 Students select a number of educational modules from a range of
courses and workshops delivered at NUI Galway and at partner
institutions. These modules provide a grounding in essential research
skills and transferable skills together with access to specialist
topics. Years 2-3 Work on PhD research projects is supplemented with
access to elective modules. Year 4 Dedicated to completion of PhD.
Application Process
NUI Galway invites applications for four-year scholarships for the DAH
programme; scholarships are valued at €16,000 plus fees per
annum. Entrants will be expected to have a first-class or upper
second-class honours degree within a relevant discipline. Applicants
proposing practice-based research should provide evidence of their
work in the relevant area of practice.
Candidates who have applied previously to the DAH programme may apply
for this scholarship only with a new proposal.
Applications are invited in the area of Digital Humanities or Digital
Arts research.
Digital Humanities proposals should include a strong digital
component, either as a core method of research and dissemination, or
as a subject of research in itself. Proposals may address any topic
within Digital Humanities, including (but not limited to): archives &
preservation; authorship attribution; classical studies; corpus
analysis; crowdsourcing; historical studies; interdisciplinary
collaboration; internet history; literary studies; natural language
processing; ontologies; scholarly editing; stylistics and stylometry;
text-mining; textual studies; visualisation. Previous DAH students
have also worked closely with researchers at the Insight Centre for
Data Analytics in Galway (https://www.insight-centre.org/).
Digital Arts proposals may examine questions such as artistic practice
informed by digital media; the intersection between artistic
creativity and technological innovation; the impact of the digital on
the form, structure and function of narrative. Proposals for
practice-based doctorates are welcome as well as traditional academic
formats.
Prospective applicants should identify and indicate potential
supervisors for their research proposal:
http://www.nuigalway.ie/findasupervisor/
For further information please contact Professor Daniel Carey, Moore
Institute
(daniel.carey@nuigalway.ie) or Dr
Justin Tonra, Discipline of English
(justin.tonra@nuigalway.ie).
Application should be made online at the Postgraduate Application
Centre: www.pac.ie/nuig – PAC code: GYG38. One
sample of academic writing (e.g. a recent BA or MA course essay) and a
1500-word research proposal should also be submitted through PAC. The
proposal must be structured under the following headings:
1. Description of proposed research (800 words) This section should
describe clearly the subject and scope of your research, and the
proposed outcomes in terms of the creation of new resources, tools,
knowledge transfer, etc. You should indicate the critical problems or
questions you propose to address in the thesis component of your PhD,
as well as any digital outputs that may arise from your work.
2. Context (350 words) This section should describe, as far as you can
tell, the extent of the existing academic and digital work in your
area of interest. You should be able to explain how your research will
challenge or extend this existing situation.
3. Methodology (250 words) Here you should describe the specific
methodologies and technologies you expect to employ.
4. Sources and Archives (100 words) Give a preliminary indication of
the primary and secondary material you expect to work with.
5. Evidence of previous achievements in digital media or art practice
(for practice-based PhD applicants only). Closing Date for
Applications is 5pm on Friday 30 October 2015.
-- Dr Justin Tonra, University Fellow in English, School of
Humanities, National University of Ireland, Galway.
Index of October 2015 | Index of year: 2015 | Full index