[Asis-l] Call for Applications: Fellowship at the Digital Curation Institute, University of Toronto

[Christoph Becker]

The Digital Curation Institute (DCI) at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto is calling for applications<http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/2018/03/06/call-for-applications-fellowship-at-the-digital-curation-institute/> for a funded Fellowship in Digital Sustainability. Applications are due by April 6, 2018 (see below).

This is the third year of the 7-year Fellowship program initially called the McLuhan Centenary Fellowship at the Digital Curation Institute. The inaugural Fellowship was held by Prof. Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo (see the announcement<http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/?p=1271>). The second Fellowship is currently held by Dr. Maria Angela Ferrario, Lecturer in Digital Technology and Environmental Change at the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK (see the announcement<http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/2017/06/02/mcluhan-centenary-fellowship-in-digital-sustainability-awarded-to-dr-maria-angela-ferrario/>).

Sustainability - the capacity to endure - has become a crucial concern of our data-intensive society. It needs to be addressed jointly across multiple disciplines and perspectives around information, computing, technology and society. A very abstract concept at first, sustainability brings central questions in our information society to the fore. It urges us to take a longer-term perspective on the entanglement of social, cultural, and technical questions in systems design and strive to simultaneously advance environmental, social, economic, individual, and technical goals. These perspectives don't emerge from incremental technical progress.
The term "digital sustainability" aims to scope this fellowship in an intentionally broad sense that unites key concerns of interest for the DCI and offers connections to many disciplinary perspectives. The capacity of digital resources to endure is a key focus of digital curation activities. At the same time,  sustainability has become a central challenge in the design <http://sustainabilitydesign.org/karlskrona-manifesto/> of information systems and software-intensive systems in general, where it draws our attention to the capacity of communities, socio-technical systems, processes, or ecosystems to endure.

Curation activities in turn are crucial for data-intensive research, in particular historical or longitudinal inquiry. For example, they are central to the environmental sciences and equally at the heart of understanding social and economic sustainability. Well-curated, usable, understandable data are essential<http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/?page_id=135> in exploring our place in the universe, sustaining humanity and the environment, promoting and improving public health, engaging cultural values, enabling future technologies, preserving past and future cultural heritage, and advancing prosperity - key challenges emphasized in the Strategic Research Plan of the University of Toronto.

For this Fellowship, we are seeking a curious individual who pursues creative friction and synergies across disciplinary boundaries, especially those  between the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering, design, computing and technology.

The Fellowship is awarded on a yearly basis. It can be offered to an academic faculty member (at any level), adjunct instructor, industry professional, graduate student, or postdoctoral fellow. Each of the categories is given equal consideration. Only one Fellowship will be awarded each year.

Details are in the call at http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca/2018/03/06/call-for-applications-fellowship-at-the-digital-curation-institute/ !


Best regards,

Prof Christoph Becker
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Director, Digital Curation Institute, University of Toronto
http://dci.ischool.utoronto.ca
https://twitter.com/ChriBecker