The Svoboda Diaries Project is an ongoing collaborative research and publication effort headed by the project Principal Investigators, Selim Kuru, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, and Annie T. Chen, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, and Nowf Abdul-Majid Allawi, our collaborating partner in Iraq. It combines the work of experienced professionals, skilled graduate students, and a large cohort of talented and committed undergraduate research interns.
Our interns are engaged in all aspects of our work. They work in teams and take on leadership positions. With the guidance and assistance of staff, they have done much of the painstaking work of transcribing, marking up the text, researching for notes, creating our web presence and programming our project software. The accomplishments of our project would not have been possible without our undergraduates some of whom have worked with us for three or more years.
Moving Forward to Shape the Future of Digital Humanities
Digital technologies and projects represent a shift from the solitary humanities scholar working on individual research to be presented in a published article or monograph, towards a project-based, collaborative environment utilizing cross-disciplinary expertise and resources. The nature of these networks of diverse scholars fosters the atmosphere of creativity and community that we find among the SDP interns.
We believe that team and group-based project work such as ours will ultimately redefine the ‘traditional’ humanities learning environment, offering students and faculty alike the opportunity work productively in team environments. The experiences reported by our undergraduate interns after graduation strongly indicate that the skills acquired in this kind of environment are valued by employers in many workplaces.
Please reach out if you are interested in working with us!