Hi there, my name is Ada, and I completed a three-month research internship at Leiden University Institute for History in the final year of my bachelor’s. I’m sharing my experience as an academic nomad moving from Amsterdam to Leiden and across disciplines such as communication science, cultural anthropology, and computational linguistics to follow the digital networks of the largest nomadic group in the world, the Fulani, under the simmering conflicts in their homeland, the Sahel region in Africa.
If you’re interested in interning at a research institute and curious about working on an interdisciplinary project, please take a look at this Q&A blog!
Q: Why Leiden University Institute for History and how did I obtain the internship?
A: First, to briefly introduce my background, I studied BSc Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. Before my sophomore year summer, I never thought my path would lead me to the oldest university in the Netherlands, nor did I expect to embark on a fascinating journey to witness the history of a faraway land in Africa. However, thanks to serendipity, I applied for a research assistant position at Leiden University that summer through a friend’s recommendation. The supervisors of the interdisciplinary research project, Prof Dr. Mirjam de Bruijn and Dr. Jelena Prokic welcomed me with open arms to join their team. Therefore, I was lucky to receive a part-time undergraduate research assistantship and a research internship at the Leiden University Institute for History.
Q: What’s the research project about?
A: My internship was launched around the interdisciplinary project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), “Digital warfare in the Sahel: popular networks of war and Cultural Violence.” The project studies the social networks of the Fulani, a large nomadic group living in the Sahel region, by tracing their digital and physical footprints with historical-ethnographic and computational methods. The researchers are interested in finding whether the increase in ethnic violence since 2012 was a result of the increased use of social media in the region.
Q: What were my duties and what did I do during the internship?
A: As I’ve been working as an undergraduate research assistant with the team since the second semester of my sophomore year, my responsibilities for the internship did not differ too much from those for my research assistantship. During my internship, I was responsible for helping with the social media data collection, quantitative analysis of collected social media and survey data, and project website updates. Besides, I attended an interesting bi-weekly workshop on applying computer vision to digital humanities.
Q: What are the challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration?
A: Interdisciplinary collaboration could be inspirational and challenging when researchers study the same topic with different approaches. For example, communication science researchers usually follow top-down approaches, whereas anthropology researchers often adopt bottom-up ones. My first interdisciplinary shock occurred when my anthropology colleagues designed a survey with a hundred questions without using measurement scales from existing literature. As a communication science student, I never experienced developing surveys with so many questions and starting data collection before formulating specific research questions or hypotheses. Consequently, when my colleagues finished the survey data collection, I struggled with the quantitative analysis, as I felt lost about where and how to start.
Q: What is my biggest takeaway from the internship (and the research project)?
A: Surprisingly, the most important message I received during my internship was actually from the Fulani people. Although I still know little about their culture and life, I’m deeply impressed by their courage to travel from place to place and the wisdom of staying connected even under harsh living conditions and political oppression. In a way, I believe researchers share many similarities with nomads. This is not only because both groups need to travel constantly but also due to the reality that their lives are filled with uncertainty and unpredictability.
Want to learn more about the project and opportunities?
- Our project website: https://nomadesahel.org
- Leiden HumAN website: https://leidenhuman.github.io/
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