Internships
INTERNSHIPS
Projects
Digital Humanities: The Diaries of Mary Berenson
Mary Berenson was the wife of Bernard Berenson, one of the most famous and influential connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings, who bequeathed his library of some 50,000 volumes, his collection of artworks, and the villa that housed them to Harvard University. Mary was herself a scholar of Italian Renaissance art, but like the wives of other prominent art historians such as Dora Panofsky and Margot Wittkower, Mary’s own professional and personal accomplishments have been subsumed by the singular focus on her husband’s achievements. Mary was involved in the women’s movement in the US and England, wrote essays and made speeches on suffrage and the role of women in politics, and published art historical journal articles and pamphlets. Mary’s diaries, written between 1891 and 1937, provide rich details about the personal, social, and intellectual life of the couple, including their friends and acquaintances, their travels, and the works of art they saw.
The diaries have been digitized and transcribed into Microsoft Word documents. These documents need to be programmatically transformed to HTML and enriched for publishing online. Dates, locations, people, and works of art need to be extracted, normalized, and linked to external knowledge bases such as Wikidata, VIAF, GeoNames, and the Getty vocabularies. This work will result in the creation of an online catalogue that allows users to explore the network of the Berensonian world and create interactive map-based visualizations that allow users to track her travels throughout time. Interns should be proficient in HTML, JavaScript, and Python. Experience with RDF, SPARQL, and NLP libraries are a plus.
Digital Humanities: Visual Search for Artworks
Digital Humanities: Named Entity Recognition tools for Historical Documents
Digital Humanities: Online Portal to the Berenson Art Collection
Digital Humanities: Web Development for the Digital Humanities
Indigenous Art in the Photo Archive
Mediterranean Cookery and Produce
Eligibility
Applicants must be currently enrolled as full-time undergraduate students at Harvard University. Priority will be given to rising juniors and seniors at Harvard College. Familiarity with Italian is recommended but not required. Unfortunately, graduating seniors are not eligible.
Terms
Interns receive $5000 to offset the cost of living and airfare. They are required to reside in Florence from June 1 through July 30 and are responsible for arranging their own travel. Housing is offered on the I Tatti estate. Interns are required to spend at least four full days a week at the Villa and to attend all academic events. Interns may not take on any other obligations, even part-time ones, during any part of their internship. Interns enjoy all the privileges of the Harvard Center, including use of the Biblioteca Berenson and lunch from Monday through Friday.
Application
Applicants will need to provide a cover letter, C.V. (including knowledge of languages), and a list of courses taken at Harvard (including grades and names of professors.) The online application form will ask applicants to indicate three projects in order of preference. References should come from a Harvard professor but will also be accepted from a TA with a co-signature from a Harvard professor. To give the referee adequate time to submit a letter of recommendation, click the reference tab and register them as early as possible. Referees will receive an email explaining how to access the system and submit their letters electronically. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2022 by midnight (Cambridge, MA time).
*The I Tatti Summer 2022 Internship Program depends on the public health situation at the time, and on travel restrictions that may be imposed by Harvard or by government authorities.
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