IDRH Grant Recipients
The IDRH has consistently supported faculty, staff, and students through a variety of grant programs throughout our history. A record of past grant programs, awardees, and selection criteria is available below.
Seed Grants
2020
Parthenon Frieze in Color
P.I.: Phil Stinson (Classics) & Chad Kraus (Architecture)
Awarded January 2020
The working title of a planned future exhibit at the Wilcox Classical Museum is “The Parthenon Frieze In Color”. Using digital technology and the collection’s existing plaster casts, the subject of the exhibit is the original—now lost—painted decoration of the Parthenon Frieze (5th c. BCE) from the Athenian Acropolis in Greece. The fact that ancient sculptures were originally brightly colored in paint and other applied polychromatic decorations is a rich subject of research today (Abbe 2015; Talbot 2018). Experimental reconstructions into the original appearance of ancient sculptures based on scientific research have appeared in exhibits in Europe and the United States over the last decade. We aim to create the first permanent one-to-one scale digital remediation of the polychromy of the Parthenon Frieze in a teaching-museum setting.
After #BringBackOurGirls: Hashtag Feminism in Nigeria
P.I.: Stacey Vanderhurst (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) & James Yeku (African & African-American Studies)
Awarded January 2020
This project envisions an interdisciplinary and collaborative investigation of hashtag feminism in Nigeria. We propose using digital and ethnographic tools to analyze how social media technologies have reshaped political activism amongst Nigerian women, from the 2014 #BringBackOurGirls campaign to a range of more recent campaigns against sexual violence. By combining analytical tools for web scraping of social media data with immersive on- and off-line study of the people behind the content, it leverages the full tools of the digital humanities to better understand the gendered technologies of citizenship, in Nigeria and around the world.
2015
KU Editorial Branch of the American World War I Poetry Digital Archive
P.I.: Lorie Vanchena, Associate Professor, Germanic Languages & Literatures
Awarded March 2015
This project focuses on poetry written by immigrants in America during World War I (1910- 1920). These poems exist in non-digital formats widely dispersed throughout North America and Europe. The Archive creates a single resource of digitized poems, scholarly transcriptions, annotations, and contextual materials, making the poems gateways that help users understand the broader historical, national, cultural, and ethnic contexts. This project not only centralizes and makes accessible this unique poetry, it also provides scholarly analysis demonstrating how WWI shapes our world today.
2013
From The Brushes of Ancient Scribes: An Online Database and Intuitive Visualization Interface for Research into the Fifth-Century BC Wenxian Covenant Texts
P.I.: Crispin Williams, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Awarded March 2013
The grant will fund the construction and initial data entry for an online database critical to realize the full research potential of the Wenxian Covenant Texts. The website’s sophisticated search options and intuitive visualization interface will reveal complex relationships between these texts, their media, provenance, script, scribes, and language. Software will include MySQL, PHP, XHTML with CSS, HTML5. The pilot study will attract external funding, ensuring the project’s completion. This will result in publications, a public website, and a new Open Source visualization interface.
2011
Digital Resources for Second Language Acquisition Research: An Annotated Longitudinal Corpus of Learner German
P.I.: Nina Vyatkina, Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Awarded May 2011
This project aims to annotate, analyze, and make publicly available a digital longitudinal corpus of writing samples collected from American learners of German at dense time intervals over several semesters. This project will advance the digital humanistic scholarship by applying a new annotation schema developed specifically for learner language, evaluating the output of this annotation, and publishing the corpus and studies afforded by this annotation. This international project will combine the PI’s language acquisition expertise and the collaborator's computational linguistics expertise.
KanDEL: Kansas Developmental Learner Corpus
Additional publications:
Vyatkina, N. (2016). KANDEL: A developmental corpus of learner German [Journal Articles]. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 2(1), 102–120. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/26558
Teaching Grants
2019
Marcy Lascano
Department of Philosophy
Course Title: Digital Cavendish
Fall 2019 | PHIL 400
A project-based class in philosophy? Yes! This course is a class in philosophy and digital humanities.
We will have three goals: (1) to mount an open access, searchable, user friendly text of Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663). In doing so, we will discuss (2) the philosophical issues concerning the availability of 17th century women’s philosophical works and its connection to the marginalization of women’s works in the philosophical canon. We will also discuss issues in digital humanities as they relate to our choices in mounting this text for public and scholarly consumption. Finally, (3) we will study Cavendish’s work and evaluate it in context of the development of her vitalistic materialistic monism.
All students will also work on a final digital humanities project involving either the philosophical issues involved in open access text/recovery of women’s writing and/or on the philosophical content of the Cavendish text.
No prior technical skills are required.
2015
Ani Kokobobo
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
Course Title: The Russian Novel through the Digital Humanities: Decentering Russia through Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Fall 2016 | SLAV 512
In this course we rely on several DH visualization tools to challenge conventional views of the canon and foreground Russia’s regions.
2014
Bruce Hayes
Department of French & Italian
Course Title: Introduction to Graduate Studies
Laura Mielke
Department of English
Course Title: American Literature I
2013
Stephanie Fitzgerald
Department of English
Course Title: The Digital World of Louise Erdrich
Nina Vyatkina
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Course Title: Advanced German I
Utilizes an online corpus of German texts. The corpus allows students to perform database queries, the results of which can be used for language and text analysis.
2012
Crystal Hall
Department of French & Italian
Course Title: Manzoni in the Digital Age
Students create a website detailing their findings throughout the course. They employ topic modeling, visualization and mapping through such tools as Voyant Tools, Wordle and ArcGIS Explorer.
Jonathan Lamb
Department of English
Course Title: Digital Shakespeare
Doug Ward
School of Journalism
Course Title: Infomania: Harnessing information in the digital age
Promotes digital literacy and the use of digital tools for research and collaboration, with tools and sites such as Popplet, Evernote and Diigo.