National University of Ireland Galway invites applications for a four-year structured PhD scholarship in Digital Arts & Humanities to commence in September 2017.

Full Application Details

Deadline: 5pm on Friday 14 April 2017.

The Structured PhD in Digital Arts & Humanities at NUI Galway is a full-time four-year interdisciplinary programme from which seven students have graduated since its inception in 2011. This PhD programme provides fourth-level researchers with the platform, structures, partnerships, and innovation models to engage and collaborate with a wide range of academics and practitioners. Our ambition is for students to contribute to the developing digital arts and humanities community world-wide. The programme welcomes proposals on the use of digital tools and methodologies in the scholarly analysis of cultural texts and phenomena, and on practice-based research in digital art and media. Students will gain exposure to transferable skills in digital content creation and analysis that are academically and professionally beneficial.

Programme Structure:

• introduce students to the history of and theoretical issues in digital arts and humanities
• provide the skills needed to apply advanced computational and information management paradigms to arts and/or humanities research
• create a framework for students to develop generic and transferable skills to complete the required work for the award of the PhD. Work placements at pertinent institutions may also form part of the scholarship.

Application Process:

Entrants should have a first-class or upper second-class honours primary degree within a relevant discipline and (preferably) a completed a Master?s degree in a relevant discipline.

Digital Humanities proposals should include a strong and clearly defined digital component, either as a core method of research and dissemination, or as a subject of research in itself. Proposals may address any topic within Digital Humanities, including (but not limited to): archives & preservation; authorship attribution; classical studies; corpus analysis; crowdsourcing; historical studies; interdisciplinary collaboration; internet history; literary studies; natural language processing; ontologies; scholarly editing; stylistics and stylometry; text-mining; textual studies; visualisation.

Digital Arts proposals may examine questions such as artistic practice informed by digital media; the intersection between artistic creativity and technological innovation; or the impact of the digital on the form, structure, and function of narrative. Proposals for practice-based doctorates are welcome as well as traditional academic formats.

Previous Digital Arts & Humanities PhD students have also worked closely with researchers at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in Galway.

Prospective applicants are strongly advised to identify and correspond with potential supervisors for their research proposal before submitting a scholarship application.

Submitting an Application:

Application should be made online at the Postgraduate Application Centre: PAC code: GYG38. They must include:

• One sample of academic writing (e.g. a recent BA or MA course essay)
• Evidence of previous achievements in digital media or art practice (for practice-based PhD applicants only).
• a 1500-word research proposal structured under the following headings
  • Description of proposed research (800 words): clearly describe the subject and scope of your research, and the proposed outcomes in terms of the creation of new resources, tools, knowledge transfer, etc. You should indicate the critical problems or research questions you propose to address in the thesis component of your PhD, as well as any digital outputs that may arise from your work.
  • Context (350 words): describe, as far as you can tell, the extent of the existing academic and digital work in your area of interest. You should be able to explain how your research will challenge or extend this existing topic.
  • Methodology (250 words): specific methodologies and technologies you expect to employ
  • Sources and Archives (100 words):a preliminary indication of the primary and secondary material