Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities and Penn Libraries are piloting a program this summer that employs student interns to help with new “incubation” grant projects.

The Project Incubation grants, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provide up to $5,000 for assistance on digital humanities projects in the early stages of development, or in need of retooling.

This summer, several Penn undergraduate students are in paying internships to work on the incubation projects, through a partnership with the Penn Libraries’ Digital Scholarship group.

The Lab is accepting applications for the incubation grants from Penn faculty and students in the School of Arts & Sciences on a rolling basis.

“This is a new direction,” says Stewart Varner, managing director of the Price Lab. “By using library resources and connecting with experts to build a project, we are playing a vital role in helping faculty and students imagine together how to best use technology.”

The Price Lab will help advise researchers on how to best structure their projects, to identify existing digital tools and resources, to coordinate with librarians and specialists on campus, and estimate project costs and duration.

“In these projects, they are using technology to tell a story, and we help with the decisions on how to tell that kind of story,” Varner says.

The pilot internship program involves 11 Penn students with specialized interests or skills, including website development, computer programming, and design.

The students are working full-time from mid-May through mid-August, through the Digital Scholarship group at Penn Libraries, says Laurie Allen, its assistant director. Digital Humanities specialists Scott Enderle and Sasha Renninger supervise the students’ work.

The interns are involved in most of the 13 current incubation projects, she says, which include creating a database of information from 18th-century English playbills, making digital maps of urban renewal in Philadelphia’s Society Hill neighborhood, and documenting trends in the Persian diaspora.

Part of the challenge for the team this summer is to define and narrow approaches to projects. For example, out of the myriad choices and technologies available, this means deciding and standardizing the three best ways to construct a website, or a map, or a digital database of random research facts.

“We are making these projects manageable, sustainable, and scalable,” Varner says.

Rising junior Nia Hammond of Philadelphia is a psychology major working as a content management and web design intern on several projects, including the design of researchers’ websites used for collecting and digitally archiving items, such as seeds, historical documents, and personal cultural items.

“I’ve always wanted to learn more programming skills than just the basics of a few languages,” she says, adding that she is a fine arts minor interested in design. “I am learning useful skills and gaining experience in a work environment and field that I am considering entering after graduating.”

Cognitive science major Sophia Heiser, a rising junior from Naperville, Ill., says she also has been learning computer coding through her work to create a Digital Humanities Tool Selector, a questionnaire on the Penn Libraries website to help users decide what software to choose for their projects.

During her internship, Heiser is working on the research by English professor Michael Gamer on the playbills, setting up a database organized by editions, copies, authors, and the physical copies of the books.

“Most of the time I’m on my computer writing or reviewing code and trying to fix the inevitable issues that arise,” she says, noting that she has become comfortable with more than six coding languages. “I think this internship has also helped me develop some of my problem-solving skills, because it usually takes creative thinking to figure out how to work our way around challenges.”