Opportunities and Resources for Undergraduates
NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks
The NULab is Northeastern’s center for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. We are an interdisciplinary community of graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, postdocs, and researchers. Working closely with the Digital Scholarship Group, the NULab is a hub for computational and digital scholarship at Northeastern.
The Digital Integration Teaching Initiative
The Digital Integration Teaching Initiative (DITI) is a program that is designed to introduce new computational and digital methods into social science and humanities classrooms. You might have the DITI visiting one of your classes this year! You can also see the DITI’s most popular slides and handouts on this resources page.
Grants
One great way to get involved with the NULab is by applying for a grant to work with a NULab faculty member or project.
Undergraduate Research Initiative
The Undergraduate Research Initiative aims to help undergraduate students develop or enhance research competencies, including formulating research questions, developing a theoretical framework, defining the scope of a project and writing a proposal, developing a literature review, collecting data, conducting analysis, and writing up results. Students work to carry out a research project of their choosing in collaboration with a faculty member.
PEAK Awards
PEAK Awards are designed to offer students funding opportunities to engage in novel research to enhance their skills. The program contains seven levels for students at various stages of their research journey. Participants can connect with faculty mentors for lunch outings to discuss research, and receive funding for progressively more independent and substantial research projects guided by a faculty mentor.
NULab projects
The NULab is home to many exciting projects. Below are a few projects that sometimes have undergraduate positions and that might also be able to support PEAK and URI grant projects.
Women Writers Project
The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.
Digital Transgender Archive
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. By digitally localizing a wide range of trans-related materials, the DTA expands access to trans history for academics and independent researchers alike in order to foster education and dialog concerning trans history.
Early Caribbean Digital Archive
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive is an open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean.
Early Black Boston Digital Almanac
The Early Black Boston Digital Almanac is a site dedicated to highlighting the various movements, locations, art, and rhetoric of Black figures and coalitions that shaped Boston’s history, and thusly, its present. This site encourages its users to learn more about Black communities in Boston’s early history through digital exhibits using multi-media and archival material.
Resources for learning new digital and computational methods
The NULab has a Resources page with tutorials, guides, handouts, sample data and other helpful links for learning new skills and methods. We collect resources on text analysis, GIS and data visualization and network science, as well as sample datasets and resources on building digital projects
The NULab and the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative also publish slides and handouts for lessons on a number of cutting-edge digital and computational methods.
Events
The NULab hosts an exciting series of events and workshops in the Fall and Spring semesters. Past events are listed here. New events are announced on the NUDIGITAL listserv and the NUDIGITAL Community Slack.
Stay in touch!
For updates on NULab events and other information on scholarship in digital humanities and computational social science, subscribe to the NUDIGITAL mailing list. NUDIGITAL, co-sponsored by NULab and the Digital Scholarship Group, provides a space for discussion of events and issues relating to digital scholarship in all its forms at Northeastern University.
The DSG and NULab also co-sponsor the NUDIGITAL Community Slack workspace, which includes focused discussions on topics in digital humanities and computational social science, channels for posting events and opportunities, and spaces to ask & answer questions. Please fill out our request form to receive a join link for the NUDIGITAL Slack.
We also have a page with resources for getting involved with the NULab.