{"id":1077,"date":"2015-04-21T13:51:34","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T17:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/?p=1077"},"modified":"2015-04-21T19:59:25","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T23:59:25","slug":"mellon-grant-interim-report-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/2015\/04\/21\/mellon-grant-interim-report-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Mellon Grant Interim Report 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dickinson College received a $700,000 grant in December 2012 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for use over approximately four years to support faculty and curricular development in the digital humanities. The Mellon Foundation provided project funding to support the following: 1) a one-course reassigned time for the faculty chair of a digital humanities advisory board to guide the initiative; 2) a postdoctoral teaching fellowship to help introduce the latest digital technologies, link Dickinson\u2019s efforts to a larger community of scholars, and assist our Library and Information Systems (LIS) staff in defining needed future capabilities; 3) competitive internal grants for faculty to incubate significant expansion of existing digital projects and\/or pilot the use of new tools in teaching and research, including providing student-faculty research opportunities; 4) an intensive program to better train undergraduate students for robust collaboration with faculty on complex digital projects; 5) a virtual \u201cdigital studio\u201d to provide accessibility, visibility, and outreach for the best work being done at Dickinson in this field, 6) workshops with representatives of all humanities departments and with key all-college committees to enhance their capacity to support and evaluate digital work in the humanities and across the curriculum; and 7) work toward defining learning outcomes expected for Dickinson students with regard to digital humanities skills.<\/p>\n

Here are some excerpts of the report prepared for the Mellon Foundation on activities completed in the second\u00a0year of the grant, prepared by Chris Francese, Patrick Belk, and Cheryl Kremer:<\/p>\n

Digital Humanities Advisory Committee<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past year our Digital Humanities Advisory Committee (DHAC), which is the key planning committee for this initiative, continued to meet regularly to guide and oversee all aspects of the project. The committee is currently comprised of seven faculty members: Chris Francese, Asbury J. Clarke Professor of Classical Studies (Chair);\u00a0Susan Rose,\u00a0Director of Community Studies Center and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology;\u00a0Matthew Pinsker, Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History;\u00a0Lynn E. Helding, Associate Professor of Music; Gregory Steirer, Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies; Sarah Kersh, Visiting Assistant Professor of English; and Patrick Belk, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities. Also serving on the committee are five administrators who have a strong interest and\/or connection to digital humanities work and to this grant project: Patricia Pehlman,\u00a0Director of Academic Computing;\u00a0Jim Gerencser, College Archivist;\u00a0Todd Bryant, Language Technology Specialist;\u00a0Ryan Burke, Web Development Specialist;\u00a0Sarah Sheriff, Director of Online Marketing; and Cheryl Kremer, Director of Academic and Foundation Relations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The chair of DHAC (Professor Chris Francese) receives one course reassigned time each academic year through this grant to coordinate this multi-faceted initiative. Over the past year, he has used his reassigned time to organize and lead the committee\u2019s work, to regularly update a robust portal for Dickinson digital humanities efforts, and to maintain an active blog with news and notes about ongoing DH projects and events.<\/span><\/p>\n

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Our first Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, Matthew Kochis, accepted a tenure-track position at another institution last fall. We conducted a successful search for his replacement and hired Patrick Belk (Ph.D. in English from the University of Tulsa, 2012) who began at Dickinson in August 2014. Professor Belk organized and executed our second successful Digital Boot Camp in January 2015, established a Textual Studies Lab, collaborated on a number of faculty-led projects, and taught a course called Early Science Fiction in the Magazines (ENGL 101) for 22 students in the spring semester of 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Belk has maintained an\u00a0active scholarly career during his time at Dickinson.\u00a0 In February 2015 he delivered the manuscript for his first monograph,\u00a0Empires of Print: Adventure Fiction in the Magazines 1899-1919<\/span><\/em>, which will appear in print from Ashgate. He also continues to enhance the\u00a0award-winning digital archive of early twentieth-century pulp magazines,\u00a0The Pulp Magazines Project<\/a>,<\/span>\u00a0using funding from our Mellon Foundation digital humanities grant to hire students to help him tag and create metadata for his magazine scans in TEI-compliant XML. In November 2014 he delivered a paper at the Modernist Studies Association Conference entitled \u201cBaroness Orczy\u2019s Eldorado (1913) in Africa.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Our postdoctoral fellow also has been busy helping Dickinson faculty develop their own digital humanities projects and ideas. An excellent example of this work is a project with Jacob Sider Jost, Assistant Professor English, who is developing a web site entitled \u201c18th Century Poets Connect<\/a>,\u201d which documents patronage, printing, and literary affiliation networks using data compiled over many years. Professor Belk helped Professor Jost and his student\u00a0research assistant Mary Naydan \u201915 reimagine the possibilities of his data, and he built an elegant interface in Drupal. He also helped faculty in the Departments of History and English\u2014in addition to forging a new and productive partnership with Associate Professor of Computer Science Grant Braught to help steer senior computer science majors towards collaborative digital humanities projects for their senior theses. On the strength of his work with the Boot Camp and with faculty development, he has been invited to serve as a consultant for Guilford College as they plan to make the most of their own Mellon grant.<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Belk also helped to organize a two-day visit by Cliff Wulfman to Dickinson in April 2015. Wulfman is the co-founder of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which has attracted an extraordinary amount of interest. During his visit to Dickinson he presented on the topic \u201cThinking Big: Five Steps to Successful Digital Project Development.\u201d Approximately 60 people attended, including representatives from other colleges in our surrounding area (among them Gettysburg, Bucknell, Lafayette, and Franklin and Marshall Colleges). \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, Professor Belk also worked with Professor Francese to submit a proposal to Dickinson\u2019s Space Utilization Committee advocating for a physical space for textual editing distinct from Dickinson\u2019s existing Media Center. As a result, the college was able to commit space until the end of summer 2015 for a Textual Studies Lab, which is currently located in a room within our Waidner-Spahr Library. This space contains three\u00a0work stations equipped with software for XML editing and OCR processing, and a digitization cradle manufactured by Professor Belk himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Digital Humanities Fund<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Another major component of our digital humanities grant has been to review and award internal grants to support Dickinson faculty members interested in beginning or advancing their digital humanities efforts. The following is a list of grants awarded to Dickinson faculty through our Digital Humanities Fund since our last report, the vast majority of which have involved students in substantive ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Art and Art History<\/strong><\/p>\n

Melinda Schlitt<\/em><\/p>\n