Jefferson's University-The Early Life (JUEL) is a digital humanities project combining an online digital document archive, a relational database, 3D spatial modeling of the Academical Village, and interpretive materials about the University of Virginia from its founding in 1819 to circa 1870. It contains thousands of documents (university records, letters, diaries, speeches, student publications, images, and photographs) and we continue to add more as we are creating a thickly descriptive educational experience detailing the complexity of life and learning at Virginia’s state flagship university in its first fifty years with students driving the research and digitization process while also contributing to interpretation. Students will assist in adding new materials and in interpreting facets of the university's early history.
We seek undergraduate students with an interest in nineteenth century American history who would like to contribute on a part-time basis to this large digital humanities project. Research Assistants will work with the Jefferson’s University-The Early Life (JUEL) team on continuing to identify, digitize, and interpret source materials related to life and learning in the University’s first half century. This digital humanities initiative represents a great opportunity to participate in expanding knowledge about the birth and development of America’s first Enlightenment university. Interns will be trained to do a combination of document scanning, professional transcription and editing of historical documents, XML markup tagging important details in each document, archival research, peer-to-peer review, and writing descriptive primary document-based essays for publication on the website.
An eagerness to learn and work independently with support from a team. Good to have strong organizational and analytic skills, and clear college-level prose writing skills. No technical experience required at all (but familiarity with cursive handwriting and/or XML helpful but not expected).
• Professional Documentary Transcription Process
• XML markup
• Archival Research
• Document-based public history interpretive writing