CDH Awards Fall 2018 Seed Grants

Congratulations to the recipients of Fall 2018 CDH Seed Grants! This semester, awards were given to faculty, graduate students, and staff from English, History, Sociology, the Office of Population Research, and the Princeton University Library to support a variety of endeavors related to digitally-inflected scholarship and inquiry.

Hold:Space

Kimberly Bain (PhD student, Department of English) will use the CDH Seed Grant begin developing a digital component of her dissertation. Kimberly plans to research the augmented reality capability of the digital humanities to project lenticular images (poems, statistics, etc) onto 3-D surfaces. The Seed Grant will allow her to build the groundwork for an expansive project that comments on and is also affected by the politics of accessibility.

Digital Humanities and Dance Working Group, Practice as Research

Andrew Johnson (Princeton University Library) will use the Seed Grant to establish a working group that explores the interaction between dance and the digital humanities. Moving first beyond the limits of single instances of a dance performance and second, the recordings of such moments, Andrew wants to explore the narratives created out of the union of digital humanities and dance performance.

Discontinuous Technological Change and Entrenched Institutions

Jason Windawi (PhD student, Department of Sociology) will use CDH funds to continue building a dataset that will be part of his dissertation on how social organization emerge out of the collision between discontinuous technological change and entrenched institutions. Building on his use of topic modeling and vector operations in building his large corpus of data, Jason will expand his searches and recognize the dimensions of variations in how entrepreneurs write about their technological proposals.

Herbert Spiegelberg’s Workshops in Phenomenology, 1965-1972

Gayle Salamon (Professor of English and Professor of Gender and Sexuality) will use her Seed Grant to digitize a series of audio recordings of workshops run by the phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg held between 1965 and 1972 on experimentation in philosophical method. These recordings will make a unique contribution to the study of phenomenology, specifically for those interested in techniques of observational close attention and “mindfulness.” It is possible that these tapes have never been listened to and they are unplayable in their current reel-to-reel tape and cassette form.

Pacific Northwest Maritime Trade

Sean Fraga (PhD student, Department of History), who is will be a CDH Postgraduate Research Associate (PRGA) in Spring 2019, will use the Seed Grant to launch a new project based on his extensive dissertation research on maritime networks. With the aims of creating an openly accessible dataset, Sean will hire students to transcribe, encode, and verify data from a handwritten ledger of U.S. Customs data from the Puget Sound Customs District. This research will shed light on the significance of maritime trade in creating the U.S. West, and contribute to debates on American westward expansion, national incorporation, and borders and borderlands.

A Dataset of Human Trafficking of Children in China

Wanru Xiong (PhD student, Program in Population Studies) will use the Seed grant to study trial document data for the purposes of understanding demographic factors influencing human trafficking in China. Wanru will analyze hundreds of records from a public official uniform platform called “China Judgments Online.” This will make a unique quantitative contribution to the study of human trafficking.

Correlates of War in Ancient China

Lai Wei (PhD student, Department of Sociology) will use the Seed Grant to study the outbreak of violent conflicts in pre-modern China. Lai also plans to build a comprehensive data set that distinguish potential factors of war, focusing on the attributes of states, rulers, and the elite. The Seed Grant will be used to encode the book Chronology of War in Ancient China (People’s Liberty Army Press, 2003) into an analyzable data format.

Keep an eye out for these exciting DH projects, and apply for CDH funding to launch your own! The deadline for Spring 2019 Seed Grants will be announced early in the Spring semester.

Graduate students are eligible to apply for Travel Grants, which are accepted on a rolling basis. For more advanced projects, consider applying a Dataset Curation or Research Partnership grant.