2022 Graduate Research Associates


Overview: The Kentucky Historical Society (KHS) and its project the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) are proud to announce the opening of another application cycle for their Graduate Research Associates (GRAs). With the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a branch of the National Archives, CWGK is hiring three Graduate Research Associates (GRAs) to conduct editorial work for the project over the period February 1, 2022 to January 31, 2023. GRAs are compensated with a production-based stipend of $4,000 and can work remotely from their home institutions.

CWGK is an annotated, searchable, and freely-accessible online edition of documents associated with the chief executives of the Commonwealth from 1860 to 1865. However, CWGK is about more than the nominal governors; it is about reconstructing the lost lives and voices of tens of thousands of Kentuckians who interacted with the office of the governor during the war years. Collectively, the staff of CWGK identify, research, and link together every person, place, and organization found within its corpus of documents. To see the project’s work to date, visit discovery.civilwargovernors.org.

Each GRA will annotate 120 assigned documents and spend around 250 hours researching and developing biographies over the course of their year with CWGK. The new GRAs continue a successful five-year program that has involved 17 other emerging scholars and digital humanists. In their annotation work, the GRAs will be responsible for researching and writing short entries on all the individuals, places, organizations, and geographical features found in their assigned 120 documents.

Map of CWGK GRAs from 2016 to 2021

Interaction with the documents and the writing of annotations will take place in a web-based annotation tool developed for CWGK, which can be accessed from any location. CWGK will make use of online research databases to make its work efficient and uniform. Other archival sources may be of value but are not required by the research guidelines. Securing access to the paid databases required by CWGK (Ancestry.com, Fold3.com, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Louisville Courier Journal) is the responsibility of the GRA. If regular institutional access to these databases is not available to the GRA through a university or library, it is the responsibility of the GRA to purchase and use a subscription to these databases. KHS will not reimburse the GRA for any travel, copying, or other expenses incurred in CWGK research.

Eligibility: All applicants must be a graduate student who has completed at least one semester of an M.A. program in history, or a related humanities discipline (doctoral students/candidates preferred). Experience with nineteenth-century United States history or documentary editing is also preferred, but not necessary.

Application: To apply for one of these GRA positions, applicants should submit the follow materials.

  • A cover letter—that describes the applicant’s professional abilities, relevant research experience, familiarity with digital history, and professional ability
  • A curriculum vitae
  • Two letters of recommendation, at least one of which can speak to the applicant’s abilities as a researcher

Applicants may also include optional, supplemental materials, including, but not limited to examples of digital history/humanities work, a writing sample, or proof of editorial experience.  

Deadline: January 7, 2022

All application materials should be submitted to Dr. Chuck Welsko, Project Director at charles.welsko@ky.gov.

Review: The Kentucky Historical Society will evaluate the applicants based on their research ability, familiarity with the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, as well as relevant experience with digital or public history work, as demonstrated through their applications materials.

CWGK staff anticipate conducting interviews in late to mid-January and hiring new GRAs in the early part of February.


About KHS: KHS has welcomed more than 1 million visitors since its anchor building, the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, opened in 1999 in historic downtown Frankfort. Our mission is to educate and engage the public through Kentucky history in order to meet the challenges of the future. KHS is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and is fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.

CWGK Welcomes Sarah Haywood

The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) is pleased to announce the addition of Sarah Haywood to the project’s editorial staff.

Haywood’s position is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is focused on preparing both texts and annotations for publication in the newly expanded CWGK web interface.

A native of Harlan, Kentucky, Haywood studied English literature and history at Western Kentucky University, where she received her undergraduate degree in 2015. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in history from the University of Kentucky and served as a research assistant in the Department of History in 2018. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked in publishing and communications and comes to the CWGK team with editorial and writing experience.

Editorial Assistant Vacancy — Closes Feb. 8, 2019

The Kentucky Historical Society (KHS) seeks an Editorial Assistant to join the staff of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK). This nationally recognized digital humanities project that locates and publishes new stories about everyday Kentuckians navigating an unprecedented national and community crisis through documents associated with the state’s Civil War governors.

This NHPRC-funded position will edit texts and annotations. It is based in Frankfort through the end of 2019. Natalie Smith, who held the position for 2018, talked about her experience on a recent “Think Humanities” podcast.

View the Full Description here, at the KHS Careers page

Application deadline is Feb. 8, 2019.

Natalie Smith “Think Humanities” Interview

NHPRC-funded Editorial Assistant Natalie Smith’s time with CWGK drew to a close with the end of the grant year in 2018. Before then, though, Smith sat down for an interview with the “Think Humanities” podcast produced by the Kentucky Humanities Council.

Listen below to hear Smith discuss the compelling and revealing human stories that CWGK highlights and to hear her enthusiasm for the work of public humanities in the Commonwealth today. Thank you, Natalie!

2019 Graduate Research Associates

Overview: The Kentucky Historical Society seeks two Graduate Research Associates (GRAs) familiar with 19th century United States history to write short informational entries for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK). GRAs will receive a stipend of $5,000 each and can work remotely from their home institutions.

Each GRA will annotate 150 assigned documents. Each GRA must be a graduate student in at least the second year of a M.A. program in history or a related humanities discipline. These positions are funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a branch of the National Archives. This continues a successful two-year program that has involved 10 GRAs

CWGK is an annotated, searchable, and freely-accessible online edition of documents associated with the chief executives of the commonwealth, 1860-1865. Yet CWGK is not solely about the five governors; it is about reconstructing the lost lives and voices of tens of thousands of Kentuckians who interacted with the office of the governor during the war years. CWGK will identify, research, and link together every person, place, and organization found in its documents. This web of hundreds of thousands of networked nodes will dramatically expand the number of actors in Kentucky and U.S. history, show scholars new patterns and hidden relationships, and recognize the humanity and agency of historically marginalized people. To see the project’s work to date, visit discovery.civilwargovernors.org.

Scope of Work: Each GRA will be responsible for researching and writing short entries on named persons, places, organizations, and geographical features in 150 documents. Each document contains an average of fifteen such entities. This work will be completed and submitted to CWGK for fact-checking before December 1, 2019.

Research and writing will proceed according to project guidelines concerning research sources and methods, editorial information desired, and adherence to house style. This will ensure 1) that due diligence is done to the research of each entity and 2) that information is recorded for each item in uniform ways which are easy to encode and search.

All research for the entries must be based in primary or credible secondary sources, and each GRA is expected to keep a virtual research file with notes and digital images of documents related to each entry. These will be examined regularly by the CWGK team as they fact check the GRA output and turned over to CWGK at the completion of the work. CWGK will fact-check all entries for research quality and adherence to house style. CWGK projects an average rate of one document annotated per two hours of work. Each GRA may expect their workload to be similar to adding on another class for the semester. They should expect to complete an average of 4 to 5 documents per week, though this may vary.

Each GRA will work remotely. Interaction with the documents and the writing of annotations will take place in a web-based annotation tool developed for CWGK, which can be dialed into from any location. CWGK will make use of online research databases to make its work efficient and uniform. Other archival sources may be of value but are not required by the research guidelines. Securing access to the paid databases required by CWGK (Ancestry.com, Fold3.com, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Louisville Courier Journal) is the responsibility of the GRA. If regular institutional access to these databases is not available to the GRA through a university or library, it is the responsibility of the GRA to purchase and use a subscription to these databases. KHS will not reimburse the GRA for any travel, copying, or other expenses incurred in CWGK research.

In order to maintain quality and consistency as well as to foster a collegial and collaborative work culture, CWGK will conduct weekly virtual “office hours” via Google Hangouts, during which GRAs are required to dial in, ask questions of staff, share expertise and research methods, and make connections with their peers. Virtual attendance at these office hours is mandatory, and multiple sessions may be offered to accommodate schedules.

The Kentucky Historical Society will hold copyright for all annotation research as work for hire.

Evaluation Criteria: A proposal should consist of at least a narrative statement of professional ability in the form of a cover letter, a CV, and two letters of recommendation. Additional supplementary materials that demonstrate capacity in the evaluation factors may also be included.

Proposal materials should be submitted to Patrick Lewis at patrick.lewis@ky.gov by no later than February 4, 2019. Any questions about the GRA program may be directed to Lewis as well.

The Kentucky Historical Society will evaluate the proposals based on the following factors:

Research Experience (70 points): Describe your familiarity with research in 19th century U.S. history. Describe some projects you have undertaken. What sources have you used? Have you been published? Have you interpreted historical research in forms other than a scholarly peer-reviewed publication? Discuss how a digital archival experience differs from your traditional archival experience.

Project Experience (30 points): Describe any work you have done in the editing of historical documents. Discuss how a project such as CWGK maintains balance between thorough research and production schedules. Have you worked on other collaborative projects in the field of history or otherwise? Describe the importance of time management and deadlines in your work. Describe your understanding of and/or experience with the Digital Humanities. From what you know of the CWGK project, how does it fit with current trends in the field? What do you hope to gain from working on the CWGK project?

CWGK Annotates 1,000 Documents

CWGK editorial staff recently annotated their 1,000th document. They have identified and written short biographies of each person who appears in 1,000 of the more than 10,000 documents that make up CWGK. Although their work continues, they are sharing their thoughts at this milestone in three blogs published by KHS. Read excerpts below, and follow the entire series through the links.

Natalie Smith, “Uncovering Untold Stories of Civil War-era Kentuckians
Editing documents in the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) often means I’m diving headfirst into the grittier aspects of the Civil War. Crime, poverty, starvation and guerrilla attacks only scratch the surface of what Kentuckians endured during this chaotic period in our country’s history.

Emily Moses, “Staff Member Gains Insight from CWGK
Every day that I work on The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) I am in awe of how this digital collection provides insight into the lives of 19th century Kentuckians. I am not a Kentuckian, nor by training am I a Civil War historian; I am a southern historian.

Patrick Lewis, “Annotation Requires Writing for People and Machines
Our biographies work. They build upon one another to create hundreds of thousands of discrete records of historical events large and small. Each treated equally. The world we capture in our biographies can be set into motion; viewed from the perspective of a town, of a day, of people who journey together on a specific steamboat. The number of these stories that we encode, both mundane and the world-changing, are almost limitless. The scale of this data is so great that we can’t yet fully imagine how we are going to use it. Has the historian who will build the system that starts and stops this network in time or peeks into the totality of a community on a critical month or day been born yet?

CWGK Welcomes Emily D. Moses

The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) is pleased to announce the addition of Emily D. Moses to the project’s editorial staff.

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, and a 2018 recipient of an M.A. in History from Mississippi State University, Moses came to CWGK in July 2018. She is a historian of the carceral state in the nineteenth and twentieth century American South. Her interests include the agricultural, social, economic, and political experiences of convict labor.

Prior to her graduate studies, she served as a research intern and docent for Sloss Furnace National Historic Landmark in Birmingham. While at MSU she served as a Teaching Assistant for both Modern and Early United States History courses, where she lead weekly discussion sections. She continued her public history work by helping write and produce a podcast for the project, “A Shaky Truce” highlighting the Civil Rights Movement in Starkville, Mississippi.

Moses’s position is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is focused on conducting annotation research and amplifying CWGK’s outreach efforts to audiences of formal and informal learners. She is already at work with KHS’s Learning Team to develop visual learning and primary source evaluation activities scaled for elementary to undergraduate classrooms. Follow CWGK and KHS to stay up to date about Emily’s work this year!

CWGK Welcomes Graduate Research Associate Lucas Somers

With funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK) recruited two Graduate Research Associates (GRAs) from premier history programs across the United States to help annotate 300 documents in 2018.

The GRAs underscore a core principle of CWGK and KHS, that how the work of history gets done is as important as the fact that it gets done. The GRA positions allow CWGK to nurture research skills in emerging scholars as well as exposing them to digital project startup and management, collaborative work as a member of a research team, the establishment and maintenance of project policies, and the production of historical knowledge in diverse forms for audiences beyond academia. Working as a GRA on the CWGK project not only builds these students’ digital humanities skills portfolios, it makes them better scholarly researchers by encouraging them to flip their engagement with the archive and to think seriously about how research collection are built and curated as well as how they are used by audiences beyond academic researchers like themselves.

Joining Brianna Kirk of the University of Virginia as 2018 GRA will be Lucas Somers of the University of Southern Mississippi

Lucas Somers
University of Southern Mississippi

Somers is a history Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Mississippi studying the era of the American Civil War and Reconstruction under Dr. Susannah J. Ural. He received a B.A. and M.A. in History from Western Kentucky University where he served as a Graduate Research Assistant for the Institute for Civil War Studies and completed a master’s thesis in which he explored the reported dreams and visions of Abraham Lincoln. While at USM, Somers has worked as a graduate researcher for the Beauvoir Veteran Project and is working toward the Graduate Certificate in Public History. Somers aims to write a dissertation which will examine ways communities in the South dealt with the trauma and suffering of the Civil War.

NEH-Funded Research Associate Vacancy

The Kentucky Historical Society (KHS) is a state agency and membership organization that is fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The KHS mission is to educate and engage the public through Kentucky history in order to confront the challenges of the future.

The Kentucky Historical Society seeks a Research Associate to join the staff of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK), a digital humanities project which provides visual, textual and intellectual access to documents associated with the state’s Civil War governors.

CWGK successfully published 10,000 documents online from libraries and archives in Kentucky in the summer of 2016 and expanded into writing biographies of named individuals and social networking in 2018.  CWGK wants to maintain its high rate of editorial production while developing new resources for classroom teachers and community leaders to address critical issues facing Kentuckians today.

The Research Associate will perform editorial work and will also assist KHS staff in developing, publishing, and promoting a themed lesson plan scaled for K-12, higher education and public forum settings.  This will foster in the Research Associate the five key career skills identified by the Mellon/AHA Career Diversity for Historians initiative: Communication, Collaboration, Quantitative Literacy, Intellectual Self-Confidence, and Digital Literacy.

Other duties include, but are not limited to, assisting the Research Experience team with library functions including reference and promotion of KHS collections and programs, and working collaboratively with staff of other repositories.

This is a Federally Funded, Time Limited position made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Anticipated timeframe is July 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019.

Qualifications:

Masters degree in history, archives, editing, education or related field OR Bachelors degree with 2 years experience in history, archives, editing, education or related field is required.  Research specialization in 19th century U.S. history, experience with documentary editing, classroom teaching experience, and/or digital humanities is preferred.

Must be willing to travel within Kentucky and other states. Must be willing to occasionally work evenings and weekends. Must possess valid driver’s license.  Must have familiarity with internet, word processing, spreadsheets, and email.  Special training in or experience with photo editing, database use and management, XML (particularly TEI) encoding, and online exhibition software is preferred.

Must be able to complete editorial tasks with the highest attention to detail. Must be able to self-regulate work rate and complete multiple assigned tasks accurately and efficiently.  Must be able to lift materials of up to 40 lbs. Must be able to safely handle fragile archival materials. Must be able to remain stationary for extended periods.

Annual salary for this position is $32,000. Benefits include paid health and life insurance, vacation and sick leave, holiday pay, state retirement and optional deferred compensation plan.  This is a full-time position located in Frankfort, Kentucky.

To apply, e-mail a complete dossier including: cover letter, C.V., transcripts, contact information (email, telephone) for three professional references and a short (2 pp. max) statement of your experience with or appreciation of digital humanities and/or documentary editing. All files should be in Word or PDF format and sent to khs.hr@ky.gov. No phone calls please.

Application deadline is May 15, 2018.  Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D

For more information on CWGK, visit discovery.civilwargovernors.org.
To learn more about the Kentucky Historical Society, go to http://history.ky.gov.

 

CWGK Welcomes Graduate Research Associates—Scott Ackerman and Brianna Kirk

Once again, with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK) recruited two Graduate Research Associates (GRAs) from premier history programs across the United States to help annotate 300 documents in 2018.

The GRAs underscore a core principle of CWGK and KHS, that how the work of history gets done is as important as the fact that it gets done. The GRA positions allow CWGK to nurture research skills in emerging scholars as well as exposing them to digital project startup and management, collaborative work as a member of a research team, the establishment and maintenance of project policies, and the production of historical knowledge in diverse forms for audiences beyond academia. Working as a GRA on the CWGK project not only builds these students’ digital humanities skills portfolios, it makes them better scholarly researchers by encouraging them to flip their engagement with the archive and to think seriously about how research collection are built and curated as well as how they are used by audiences beyond academic researchers like themselves.

The 2018 GRA class is as follows:

Scott Ackerman
City University of New York

Ackerman is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His dissertation, entitled “Men Whose Hearts Are In The Work’: The Union Army and the Implementation of Federal Emancipation Policy, 1862-1865,” examines the links between military emancipation and the broader antislavery agenda of the Republican Party. He holds an MA in American History from George Mason University and a BA in history from Dickinson College. A practicing museum professional and public historian, he has previously worked for President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. He currently serves as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Bronx Community College.

Brianna Kirk
University of Virginia

Kirk is a history Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia studying the Civil War and Reconstruction under Dr. Elizabeth Varon. A 2015 graduate of Gettysburg College, her research interests focus on the immediate post-war period and Civil War memory. After graduating from Gettysburg, Kirk entered the public history world and worked at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia, as the Lead Historical Interpreter and Visitor Engagement Supervisor. While there, she spoke on various topics related to Civil War history and memory, and even learned how to fire a rifled musket and a cannon. Now back in the academic world, Kirk is currently writing her master’s thesis on the Norfolk Race Riot that occurred in Norfolk, Virginia, in April 1866.