MITACS opportunity

Through the MITACS program, up to two undergraduate students could receive CDN$6,000 for coming to Montreal for 3 months in the summer of 2020 (the money is intended to cover travel and accommodation expenses), in exchange for working in my DH center during the week. Students need to apply by September 18th 1pm PST, with a choice of 3 projects in 3 different provinces, along with a brief letter of support from a professor.  

A general description of the MITACS program is available online. 

My project (to be found under the name “Sinatra” on the project page) is the following: Reading Leigh Hunt Anew

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was one of the most prolific and influential writers on British culture and politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was an essential member of the literary circle that included Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron, and John Keats, and he knew everyone from William Wordsworth and Henry Crabb Robinson to Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. “Reading Leigh Hunt Anew” will investigate in great depth Hunt’s interactions and networks. Because Hunt’s career involved a number of literary and political circles and genres which are usually treated in isolation, a new study of the range of his critical work during his career will provide valuable insight into the links between the Romantic and Victorian movements and the growth of an expanded and more socially diversified audience for critical essays and serious literary journalism. Although he is now most often remembered as the editor of the radical weekly newspaper “The Examiner” (1808–22) and the leader of the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, Hunt’s contribution to Romantic literature was as wide-ranging as it has proven to be durable, in matters as various as prosodic experimentation and the modernization of the magazine essay. “Reading Leigh Hunt Anew” consists of two tightly interrelated projects on Hunt, one of the key figures of the Romantic period in England, known for his work as editor, journalist, poet, and facilitator. The first is an online database devoted to Hunt’s critical writings called “The Leigh Hunt Archive”, which will enhance accessibility and usability of Hunt’s works (along with an experimental exhibition component). The second part of this research program is a new book entitled “Reading Leigh Hunt’s Critical Essays Anew through Digital Humanities Tools”. 

Student’s role:

Students can be involved in the following tasks: duties will include collecting criticism on the literary and cultural texts that form the corpus of the project; tracking down reviews and references in newspapers and periodicals concerned with Leigh Hunt, as well as contextual information relevant to the project; examining materials on site at selected archives; developing a critical bibliography of these material; developing and refining a high-performance database system that allows for flexible search on full-text and metadata (people, places, times and other semantic entities). Students will also integrate existing visualization components from Voyant Tools into the website as well as developing custom high-density visualizations (suitable for the large, interactive datawall) that will allow the team to explore and analyze the interconnectedness of Leigh Hunt’s circles. Students will also be able to claim real expertise in working with electronic documents, from scanning, proofreading, and XML mark-up knowledge, with a site available in open access. 

Required skills:

Students should have a background in literary studies, and/or some technological knowledge in digital humanities. They can be working on any literary period as the required skills are applicable on the Leigh Hunt corpus. Alternatively, they can have some knowledge of digital humanities and focus on the Voyant tool integration, or XML-coding of the texts.

This content has been updated on September 12, 2019 at 17 h 55 min.