Digital Research Start-Up Partnerships for Graduate Students (DResSUP)
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Increasingly, humanities scholars (and scholars in humanistic social sciences) recognize the value of digital research tools and methods such as text-mining and spatial analysis. As more content is digitized these methods are becoming more useful, especially to graduate students who are at a formative stage in their careers. However, even if these researchers assemble a collection of digitized resources, these resources may not be in a format that is conducive to digital methods.
To address these needs, the UCLA Library has established a partnership program to assist UCLA graduate students with initiating and incubating digital research projects. Students are encouraged to apply for the partnerships that could be used during the summer to:
- digitize, transcribe, geo-reference, or perform OCR on materials
- write scripts to “mine” data from digitized collections (e.g. Hathi Trust)
- create metadata following appropriate standards
- convert materials from one format to another (e.g. raw text to spreadsheet)
- collect data from social media
- crawl and/or archive websites
- prepare data for storage or publication in a repository
The purpose of the partnerships is to engage librarians with researchers in the process of moving from digital collection-building to analysis to publication, partnering with new scholars as they navigate the various types of expertise needed during this process. We will hire a student assistant to work with each participant intensively for one week.
Meet the Digital Research Team
Dawn Childress is Librarian for Digital Collections and Scholarship at UCLA’s Digital Library Program. Her work and research activities include digital libraries; digital and analog approaches to bibliography, book history, and archival studies; digital scholarly editing; and translation. Dawn consults and collaborates with faculty and students on projects related to text encoding, network analysis, metadata, data modeling, digital collections, and digital scholarship and pedagogy more broadly.around those materials.