If you are interested in books as well as digital tools and techniques, this Master will probably meet your expectations! Indeed, the MA Rare Book and Digital Humanities is an innovating, interdisciplinary degree which will give you a real culture of the book and at the same time train you as digital humanists. This original combination makes this Master unique! During the two years of classes, yo
u will have the opportunity to attend seminars in Besançon at the Faculty of Arts, in Dijon at the Faculty of Languages and Communication and at Besançon Municipal Library, which, as France second oldest public library, has a large collection of rare books and manuscripts. About thirty university instructors, curators, and professionals of the book will help you get highly specialized knowledge of book history and descriptive bibliography with classes in bibliography, history of books and writing. They will also help you become real digital humanists mastering both digital curation and digital humanities techniques such as XML, programming, creating relational databases, data cleaning, topic modelling, mapping, digitization and image processing. You will therefore be a highly qualified person that would be able to do bibliographical research by relying on digital humanities tools and would be able to work on specific manuscripts or rare books for digital humanities projects. On a global scale, more and more Data Librarians are required in libraries today, especially academic ones, for scholars and researchers to maximize their use of these collections. Yet, very few Master Degrees in the world are offering such a combination between rare books and digital humanities, even though there is a growing need to hire such specialists. You will therefore be able to work as assistant to a rare book dealer, both in France and abroad, rare book specialist in libraries, museums, and other institutions holding rare books, especially in the English-speaking world and in countries with an established use of English in the profession, where such jobs are not subject to public service recruitment examinations. You will be also able to start your own rare book business.