What is the Digital Scholarship Summer Internship?
This website is the final project of the 2017 cohort of Digital Scholarship Summer Interns in Frost Library at Amherst College. The internship program is designed to introduce students (and recent graduates) to tools and methods in the digital humanities, with an end goal of producing a website that draws on Amherst’s archival collections to produce a work of digital scholarship.
What is the Digital Humanities?
The digital humanities (or “DH” for short) seeks to combine contemporary technologies and modes of thinking with various means of scholarship–everything from the access and preservation of archival materials to the exchange of scholarly ideas via social media. In the universe of DH, concepts like accessibility, diversity and inclusion, modern technology, transparency, and the open sharing of knowledge and resources are of utmost importance. In a world where both technology and scholarship are rapidly developing, DH is rapidly developing, too.
What is the focus of this project?
The focus of the 2017 Digital Scholarship Summer Internship was the early history of Amherst College, from the founding of the college in 1821 to the year 1861. This website concentrates on the intellectual, architectural, and social landscapes of Amherst College and town during these four decades, using various digital scholarship practices in order to present them to the public through this website, which we designed ourselves via WordPress. We hope that, as you explore this project, you will come to have a deeper understanding of Amherst College’s early years and a deeper awareness of the digital humanities.
What should you be aware of as you explore this website?
As the creators of this site, the interns want to make it clear that this project is a small snapshot of 19th Century Amherst that, at this point in time, is not exhaustive and leaves much to be uncovered in regards to understanding Amherst’s collective identities, struggles, and failures. Due to the abbreviated timeframe for the creation of this website, they acknowledge that much more research must be put into understanding the racial, social, economic, gender, and other identities that characterized early Amherst than they had time to pursue. The interns highly encourage their viewers to be mindful of this and to pursue further research in order to more fully comprehend the true 19th Century Amherst.
Learn more about the 2017 interns.
Learn more about the process of creating this project.
View the selected bibliography and resource page.
