Congratulations to our Spring 2019 Seed Grant Winners!

Congratulations to the recipients of Spring 2019 CDH Seed Grants! This semester, awards were given to faculty and librarians to support a variety of endeavors related to digitally-inflected scholarship and inquiry.

The Buddhadhamma as Sets, Functions and Variables

Jonathan C. Gold, Associate Professor, Department of Religion and Director of the Program in South Asian Studies

Early Buddhist philosophy was focused around the many lists of key terms that could be extracted from the Buddha’s teachings called the Dharma ( dhamma in Pāli), and Prof Gold’s project will fund a team of graduate students to collaboratively investigate these lists (or “matrixes,” mātikā) as sets of variables that, by being fed through definite functions, generate the scriptures we have.

Qualitative Analysis of Oral Histories on the African American Library Experience

Steven A. Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies

Steven A. Knowlton’s project is a qualitative study of oral history of the African American experience with public libraries. Knowlton will use the The HistoryMakers database , which contains interviews with more than 2,600 “historically significant” African American subjects, and mentions at least 3,300 libraries in the collection, in order to identify notable themes in these interviews and compile names of libraries mentioned along with their demographic, temporal, and spatial data.

Digital Humanities and Dance Working Group

Andrew Johnson, Public Services Librarian, East Asian Library

In continuation of a previous initiative, Andrew Johnson’s seed grant funding will be used to foster a cross-disciplinary community at Princeton that integrates digital humanities theories and methods with the performance arts, namely dance. Johnson will focus on organizing a series of campus events highlighting topics such as collecting dance data, challenges faced in collaboration, and understanding how performance can become digital.

Geocoding Whaling Voyages

Barbara Coffey, Finance Research Librarian

Barbara Coffey's project will create an animation of international whaling voyages in the 1800's, from the home harbor to the whaling grounds and back, marking when and where vessels did not return on account of being lost, abandoned, burned, condemned or seized. This animation would show the shifting dominance of the harbors from Nantucket to New Bedford to San Francisco.