Hello NYCDH Community; my name is Benjamin Goldstein and I am a former staff member of the Columbia Digital Humanities Center under Bob Scott and a recent Columbia University Graduate in History. Alex Gil from Columbia University suggested I reach out to this group with a particular Digital Humanities opportunity I am involved in.
This upcoming summer, I will be co-teaching a summer boot camp on Digital Humanities for high school students along with Haripriya Mehta, a recent MIT alum and co-founder of MehtA+ Tutoring.
The company expanded massively over the last summer, as high school students looking for extracurricular enrichment turned to online courses due to the pandemic; this summer the company ran a 6-week intensive Machine Learning course where 40 high school students got to apply advanced computer science techniques to such projects as analyzing George Washington’s handwriting style and COVID-19 tweet analysis.
For the upcoming summer, we are looking to run a Digital Humanities specific course for interested high school students. We are still very much refining the idea, but as of now we are hoping to teach a broad array of basic digital humanities skills (OCR, database organization, Python, etc.), and then put students into groups to confront a specific Digital Humanities task. Ideally, we would like students to be able to work on real Digital Humanities problems, and are reaching out to the DH community to find scholars with early and mid-stage projects in need of additional help or “people power” in implementing digital projects. If our high school students could get the experience of working with a high-level academic project supervised by a real scholar, and the professors/DH centers could get help in completing tasks, this could potentially be a mutually beneficial situation. Our staff will mentor students on technical aspects of the project. The scholars’ level of involvement with the high school students would be up to them.
If you think you would be a good fit for this, please feel free to reach out to me at bg2572@columbia.edu. Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Goldstein
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