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Johns Hopkins University

NOTE: All postdoctoral fellowship positions are contingent upon funding. Applications are accepted via CLIR's online application system. Review of applications is already underway, but applications will be accepted until all positions are filled.

Digital Medieval Manuscripts Fellow, Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University’s Digital Research and Curation Center (DRCC) seeks a Digital Medieval Manuscripts Fellow to engage in the strategic development of tools and resources related to Medieval Studies scholarship and teaching. The Fellow will pursue this goal both at the national and international level (through collaboration  with our partners in the United States, Canada, England, Central Europe, and Europe), and at Hopkins by participating in developing the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts (DLMM). Since the DLMM involves research clusters situated at local, national, and international locations, the Fellow’s work will naturally have a broad strategic focus. Working in consultation with local colleagues, but in contact with those at the remote locations, this fellow will test, employ, and help to improve tools under development for the curation, annotation, and analysis of manuscripts hosted in the DLMM, but many of which (Christine de Pizan, Machaut, the Kaiserchronik, and medieval Latin manuscripts) form the basis of research projects by colleagues in the US and abroad.  The Fellow will play a critical role in the refinement of this multi-portal repository for hosting medieval French, Latin, and Middle High German manuscripts in an interoperable environment. The Fellow will:

  • Serve as a liaison between the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts project and humanities faculty and graduate students interested in learning and testing such tools as the T-Pen web-based transcription tool (Center for Digital Theology, www.slu.edu/x27122.xml), DM Digital Tools for Annotation and Linking (http://ada.drew.edu/dmproject/).
  • Collaborate with the globally-based members of the Johns Hopkins Project for Innovative Research on Medieval Manuscripts in an Interoperable Environment to develop prototypes of dynamic and comparative electronic editions of multi-manuscript works in the DLMM.
  • Collaborate with faculty, graduate students, and DRCC staff to define requirements and protocols for to enable the comparison of manuscripts both within the portals of the DLMM, and also between the DLMM and external digital repositories like the Parker Library on the Web (http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/).

Besides being a member of the Digital Research and Curation Center, the Fellow will be integrated into the Hopkins academic community through a joint appointment with the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, including participation on the editorial staff of our scholarly, online publication: Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Culture (http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/digital_philology/).  Besides interacting with faculty in seminars, lectures, and colloquia, the fellow will have the opportunity to teach medieval digital humanities related to his or her specific area of expertise.

The Fellow will also be included in the Mellon Post-Doc group or seminar hosted by Professor Gabriel Spiegel (http://krieger.jhu.edu/research/mellon/mellonfaq.html).  This group meets for dinner and to discuss participants’ research regularly throughout the semester. Jointly with Professor Stephen Nichols, the Fellow will help to organize colloquia or workshops with other faculty, researchers, and library staff engaged in digital research.

Position Responsibilities

  • Teach workshops and/or courses in medieval studies using digital tools and resources;
  • Curate and editing newly produced data for the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts (DLMM), including manuscript intake, metadata, manuscript descriptions, to enhance the scholarly and pedagogical dimensions of the repository.
  • Collaborate with programmers, designers and metadaticians to set priorities, define requirements, and conduct usability testing for new or enhanced functionality for the repository;
  • Liaise with off-site collaborators of the JH Project for Innovative Research Using Medieval Manuscripts to understand, interpret, and help to implement their requests for functionality (the collaborators are in Central Europe, the United States, Canada, England, and Germany);
  • Organize workshops and colloquia related to the use of digitized manuscript resources for teaching and scholarly research.

Skills and Expertise

A. Required

  • PhD with a specialty in Medieval Studies or Medieval Literature completed within the last five years;
  • Reading knowledge of Old French and Latin;
  • Experience working with digital medieval manuscripts and related tools and resources;
  • A demonstrated ability to organize, present lucidly, and communicate research and technical material effectively;
  • A demonstrated ability to research and publish original material.
  • An ability to collaborate effectively with others.

B. Desired

  • Familiarity with (or interest in learning) Website design using WordPress as well as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS;
  • Some experience with developing use cases and translating use cases into functional requirements;
  • Programming skills;
  • Familiarity with metadata standards.