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Announcement DH Event on campus Incentive Grants Pedagogy Speaker Series

Day of DH at Fall Academy 2018

DH @ W&L is holding two Fall Academy sessions this year. Don’t forget to register and check out all the other amazing-looking sessions. Join us on Thursday, August 23rd, 2018 in Hillel 101 for the following:

10:45AM-11:45 AM Creating Open Course Websites
Course websites are a great way to increase access to your courses, share your teaching strategies and materials with colleagues, and organize information for your students. Creating a course website is also an opportunity to re-evaluate the structure of your class and imagine how a student will navigate the different parts of the course. Learn about the benefits of making course materials open and accessible to audiences beyond the university, hear how other people in DH are using course websites, and learn strategies for organizing your own course into an easy-to-navigate website.

Presenters: Sydney Bufkin, Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow; Mackenzie Brooks, University Library; Sarah Horowitz, History.

12:00 PM – 1:45 PM DH Incentive Grant Panel
Come learn about DH funding opportunities for research and the classroom. Hear from current grant holders how they incorporate DH tools and methods in their classrooms. Presenters include Paul Youngman, Chair of Digital Humanities; Ricardo Wilson, English; Shikha Silwal, Economics; Stephen Lind, Business Administration; Stephanie Sandberg, Theater.

Come learn about DH funding opportunities for research and the classroom. Hear from current grant holders how they incorporate DH tools and methods in their classrooms. Presenters include Paul Youngman, Chair of Digital Humanities; Ricardo Wilson, English; Shikha Silwal, Economics; Stephen Lind, Business Administration; Stephanie Sandberg, Theater.

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Incentive Grants Pedagogy

DH Incentive Grant Report: Writing a Digital Argument

img_3402This semester, Sascha Goluboff, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, was awarded a DH initiative grant for her course titled “Writing Seminar for First Years: Terror and Violence.” I was invited by Professor Goluboff to view her students’ final DH projects in Stackhouse Theatre. The class was tasked with analyzing the popular video game “Grand Theft Auto” in terms of the racism and violence portrayed. Professor Goluboff asked students to pair up to create an iMovie that would analyze the depiction and their reactions to the violence in the game.

After completing a four page paper, the students were told to read their papers as narration in their iMovie project. While many of the students grumbled about disliking the sound of their own recorded voices, the students generally preferred creating a movie over writing a paper. “I liked iMovie more than the traditional paper. Images and scenes from iMovie can convey concepts and ideas in ways that are hard to describe on paper,” said first-year student Mikki Whittington. Most pairs came to the conclusion that the game promoted various sexist and racist stereotypes. For example, the students found that drug dealers were typically Hispanic, while more violent criminals were portrayed as black. The central, hyper-masculine male character was typically surrounded by highly sexualized women dressed in minimal clothing. One group argued that behaviors in this game could even lead gamers to believe this game is a mirror of reality.

The students incorporated images and clips from the video game into their iMovie project, which reinforced their arguments about the offensive stereotypes and harsh violence. “Their arguments about violence against women and minorities within the game were much more persuasive when paired up with actual footage. So, in a sense, the topic lent itself to a digital argument,” Professor Goluboff said.

Students said that they spent many hours on the project, but I felt that many of them really enjoyed the process of creating an iMovie project. The students were able to creatively manifest their ideas in the digital sphere and the video clips also strongly supported their argument. Since students often don’t get the chance to experience each other’s work, it was fun to see the students engaging with and enjoying one another’s final products (with some help from popcorn and soda provided by Professor Goluboff!)

-Hayley Soutter, DH Undergraduate Fellow

This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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Announcement Incentive Grants

CFP: DH Incentive Grants for Winter/Spring 2017

The DH team is now accepting proposals from faculty interested in developing a digital humanities project for a course to be offered in Winter or Spring 2017. We want to promote hands-on projects that foster critical thinking through research-based digital methods.

Applications are due by November 18th!

All faculty developing and assigning projects that relate to the humanities, broadly defined, are eligible. Projects that carry the weight and significance of the traditional term paper are eligible for a $1000 award. Projects that amount to the equivalent of an assignment are eligible for a $500 award.

Please contact the Digital Humanities action team at DHAT@wlu.edu for an initial consultation. All applicants must meet with the DHAT prior to submission.

Download the incentive grant proposal form to learn more about the application process.

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Event on campus Incentive Grants Speaker Series

Day of DH @ Fall Academy 2016

With the fall semester looming, the W&L campus is abuzz with preparations, including the annual Fall Academy. Two weeks of workshops on technology and pedagogy help faculty and staff get up to speed for the new academic year. We have chosen August 31st as our “Day of DH” – a chance to hear from our colleagues and guests about their DH course projects and methods. Don’t forget to register!

10-10:15am The Mellon Grant and You!
Come hear about the $800,000 Mellon Digital Humanities Grant and learn about new ways to fund your innovative teaching ideas, conference travel, research and undergraduate research assistants, as well as graduate student teaching support from UVa.
10:30-11:30am Incentive Grant Winners Panel
Owen Collins, Holly Pickett, Laura Brodie, and Claudette Artwick will discuss the nature of their projects, how the projects were structured, and what the outcomes were.
11:45am-1:30pm Writing: A Digital Humanity
The history of writing is intertwined with the history of it as technology, and its history as a humanity is intertwined with that of rhetoric and literature. Patricia Suzanne Sullivan and James P. Ascher offer a range of a easily adoptable assignments and activities to prompt experimentation, exploration, and reflection on writing as a technology in first-year (and other) writing courses.
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DH Incentive Grants Pedagogy

Kelli Shermeyer on “Using DH to Explore Movement and Meaning”

Enjoy this guest post by Kelli Shermeyer, Doctoral candidate in the UVA English department, in which she describes her work with Professor Holly Pickett’s English 380 course at W&L. This work is supported by an ASC grant expanding collaboration between W&L and the Scholars’ Lab. Cross-posted on the Scholars’ Lab blog.

“Playwrights write plays for the stage, not the study,” or so Roland Broude reminds us.[i] Yet in my field of English literature, it’s quite common to study a play primarily as a textual object rather than a performance whose final form, tone, and affect all rely on extra-textual features. We don’t typically account for changes in play’s text during its first rehearsals (often these changes are implemented after the play text has been sent to print!), refinements in timing and intonation that occur during a show’s run, or even accidental line drops, forgotten words, or ad libs contrived by actors in reaction to something that happened during a particular performance. The reality of theater is that plays are constantly rewritten in a multitude of ways and we don’t have a lot of good ways to talk about that beyond acknowledgement.

In our world of the single-author study and the copyright, one of the consequences of seeing dramatic texts primarily as “literature” is the following assumption that the play is entirely the property of its author, who, as Broude argues, “exercises over it a droît moral: his is the sole right to establish the text, and, once it has been established, to alter it.”[ii] Teaching from this paradigm limits engagement with the performer or designer’s role in creating the play’s affect or meaning.

My work as a teacher, researcher, and theater director is to employ the digital humanities to help create ways that empower students to see a play as a complex nexus of decisions rather than a static textual object (for even the text itself is not stable). The problem that quickly surfaces is that performance (in many of its forms) is actually rather tricky to write about, because while we may have access to many versions and editions of the textual object (script), each enactment of that script is essentially ephemeral—a portion of it remains unrecoupable.

Peggy Phelan has claimed that the ontology of performance is essentially its irreproducibility[iii] and she acknowledges the difficulty this presents in analyzing performance art. We can try to fix parts of performance in a variety of non-performative forms such as narrative, photograph, or video recording, but those other media can only offer ekphrasis, not full reproduction. The ephemerality of performance gives it much of its affective weight and political potential. While we may not be able to entirely recapture performance outside of ekphrasis, my hope is that we can develop tools and methods for examining dramatic texts and performances that can help us to translate some of the harder-to-capture elements of performance into forms on which we can engage in various kinds of analysis or reflection.[iv] One of the questions I am currently thinking through is how can we “read” movement?

There’s some interesting work from the dance world that begins to think through these issues. Choreographer William Forsythe’s work with the Ohio State University (called Synchronous Objects) is particularly fascinating. Earlier work by choreographers such Rudolf Laban developed notational systems for dancers based on certain ideas about the body in space (Labanotation, for example).[v] But I’ve been struggling to try to find a way that connects movement and text (like a script) in a meaningful way. How do certain textual features invite us to think about certain movements? What in the text tells us to move to a particular place or in a particular way? Asking students these questions is also a way of approaching the critical practices like the close reading and formal analysis which still remains important to much (but not all!) of our work in literary studies.

As a way to experiment with the relationship between movement and language, I worked with Holly Pickett’s English 380 class on two activities to help us discuss the relationship between the text and blocking of a scene. (Blocking is both a noun and a verb: it describes both the pattern of movement in a given scene and the act of directing/designing those movement patterns in rehearsal). First, I gave them the “to be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet Act 3, scene 1. I selected this text because I thought it was one they may be marginally familiar with and one that doesn’t contain many stage directions within the language (for example, when a character says “come here,” cuing another actor’s movement).

I instructed them to draw Hamlet’s path throughout the monologue—where does he start, end, and where does he move throughout the speech? I did not give them any instructions on how to notate pauses, changing positions or how long Hamlet took to walk somewhere as I was interested in seeing how they would choose to notate this.

I also asked them to use Prism to mark up the monologue, indicating where Hamlet started moving, stopped moving, or changed position in their blocking. I did not tell them in which order to do these tasks just that they had to do both of them. At the end of the allotted 20 minutes, I taped all of the drawings on the board and pressed the visualization button on Prism to see what we found. The Prism results revealed that there was a great variety in blocking styles, yet there were definable loci of energy around certain parts of the text. (Here’s the full visualization)

In this first image, you can see that a lot of students notated something around “end them? To die; to sleep,” but there disagreement as to what Hamlet was doing at those moments.

prism 1

We zeroed in on the word “end” as Prism showed there was some debate as to what movement happened on that word. The Prism showed that students either had Hamlet change position without changing location (indicated by the blue) or stop moving all together (indicated by the red). No one had Hamlet begin moving on this word (which would have been indicated by green).

prism 2

Throughout the whole monologue, “die” and “death” continued to appear as words where students thought some kind of movement or position change should occur, but we couldn’t agree as to what that movement should be:

prism 3

prism 4

I have no definitive way to explain this: only a director’s hunch that there’s some sort of affective energy around the word and concept of death that we associate with anxiety that incites us to movement—we (or at least most of us) do not want to be still when facing death. Part of my future work is figuring out how to interpret these results.

The other part of the activity—the drawings of Hamlet’s path—are much harder to read. Most drawings started Hamlet out on the center of the stage, not accounting for the first bit of text printed in the monologue directing that “Hamlet enters.” To me, this suggests some kind of connection between what we know about Hamlet, the role of this speech in the play, and center stage—we know Hamlet is the central figure and associate this important monologue with the center stage. But aside from that, the patterns varied. Most were well-balanced with Hamlet spending time on both sides of the stage (my mentors would be proud that both sides of the audience would get an equally good view of the actor). Some incorporated gestures or moments of intentional stillness. Many contained loops. Professor Pickett explained that she chose to do this in her drawing because of how she views the speech as rhetorically winding and wanted to create a movement pattern that reflected her reading.

Several of the students actually marked words on their drawings as well connecting the text directly to their movement patterns:

student hamlet

student hamlet 2

Some used no text at all and focused on the shape of Hamlet’s movements:

student hamlet 3

And here’s one that was purposely playing with Hamlet’s winding rhetoric:

student hamlet 4

So how do we make meaning out of all of this data?

I’m in the process (the slow, painful process) of developing a tool (or likely, a set of tools) to help students visualize the connection between play text and movement patterns. By considering the way language suggests movement will, I hope, allow for a richer consideration of the formal stylistics of particular plays, but also in the long run create corpus of data on the way people see theatre texts. I’m interested in what new areas of inquiry open up if I can use a digital tool to process many blocking patterns of the same scene (i.e. perform a kind of distant reading on the movement patterns that I had the students create). At the least, we can get students to think more deeply about the way that the dramatic text is a living document brought to life, challenged, and enriched by a consideration of the ways its interacts with the body, and embodiment.

This is important work for me both as a literary scholar and a theater director because of the reciprocal relationship between movement and interpretation. The director interprets the text to find places to block movement, and then the audience uses those movements to interpret certain moments on stage. Thinking about the relationship between movement and interpretation helps us to counter the belief that the playwright alone fixes the meaning of his or her “original text” and to recognize the larger networks of people, practices, traditions, and texts that make theater mean something.

[i] Broude, Roland. Performance and the Socialized Text. Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, Volume 6, Number 2, 2011, 24.

[ii] Ibid. 25.

[iii] Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked : The Politics of Performance. London ; Routledge, 1993.

[iv] It’s entirely worth noting that there should be a lively debate about if there are elements of performance that should not be recorded or analyzed as well. Is the kind of work we’re doing creating a richer context for talking about performances, or are we violently decontextualizing aspects of performance that can’t be understood without the full (but sadly unrecoverable) picture? (Many thanks to Purdom Linblad for first asking me a version of this question!)

[v] I was made aware of this interesting work in dance through sitting in on “The Art of Dance” taught by Kim Brooks Mata in the summer of 2015.

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Incentive Grants Pedagogy

Michelle Brock on “Choose Your Own Witch-trials”

Enjoy this post by Michelle Brock, Assistant Professor of History and DH Incentive Grant Awardee 2015-2016

The Idea:

My course on the Age of the Witch-hunts is designed to introduce students to one of the most fascinating and disturbing events in the history of the Western world. Between 1450 and 1750, at least 100,000 individuals, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft in Europe and North America. Of these, roughly half met their demise at the stake or in the noose. A variety of social, religious, judicial, and political causes, none of which is singularly responsible, lurk behind this tragedy. Over the course of the semester, this class examines the litany of complex reasons for the witch-hunts, asking why they occurred when and where they did, why certain people were accused, why the trials finally ended, and how scholars from a multiple disciplines continue to grapple with this topic.

In designing a final project for teaching this course in Winter 2016, I kept thinking of the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook series that I loved as a child. In these short, interactive works, the reader plays the protagonist of the story, making choices that lead down surprising paths, ultimately shaping the plot and the ending. I knew I wanted to create a similarly interactive assignment for my Age of the Witch-hunts class. With the help of the Mackenzie Brooks and Brandon Bucy at the W&L Library and Academic Technologies, I designed the “Choose Your Own Witch-trial” project to allow my Age of the Witch-hunts students to explore regional differences in the European witch-trials in a fun, collaborative, and informative way.

The reasons for using the Inklewriter interactive format rather than assigning a traditional research paper, were threefold. First, this method encouraged students to pay close attention to historical detail and contextual specificity, and to recognize the difficulty in forming broad causal explanations for such phenomena. Second, I suspected this project would be interesting and collectively engaging in ways that an individual, traditional research paper would not be. Last, the textual gaming method allowed students, as both creators and players of the games, to place themselves in the shoes of those who observed, orchestrated, and, most important, fell victim to the witch-hunts. This, I hope, helped to build empathy and understanding of world-views profoundly different than theirs while also providing an opportunity for reflection about our own belief systems and choices. Throughout, I reminded my students that while these games were supposed to be fun to create, any entertainment factor ought not obscure the fact that the witch-hunts were a genuine human tragedy that claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives.

The Project:

For this project, students worked in pairs to create text-based games using Inklewriter, a free tool that allows users to write interactive stories with twists, turns, and a variety of possible endings. Each pair was assigned a region in early modern Europe that experienced significant levels of witch-hunting. Despite important shared themes, there existed remarkable variety in the nature of witch belief and witch-hunting in different areas. For example, while 85% of those tried for witchcraft in Western Europe were women, the majority of the accused in Russia were male. While the use of torture during trials frequent in the very decentralized Holy Roman Empire, it was illegal in England, where the courts were tightly controlled. In Calvinist Scotland, possession cases rarely attended outbreaks of witchcraft, while the two were often linked in France. Students were accordingly asked to conduct significant historical research into the witch-trials in their specific region. They turned in annotated bibliographies of their sources early in the semester, as well as papers explaining the historical background of their games at the end of the term.

When creating their “Choose Your Own Witch-trial” game, each pair of students made their game model the nature of the witch-hunts in their specific region, paying close attention to the types of people accused, the chronology of the trials, the standards of evidence, the religious climate of the area, the types of punishment doled out, etc. Their games began with the initial accusation and continued through to the ultimate verdict. Groups had the option to write from the perspective of a third party observer, a jury member (if applicable), the orchestrators of the trial (often a clergyman or a local magistrate), or the accused witch. All but one group chose the perspective of the accused witch. At the end of the semester, the class collectively played all of the games over the space of two class periods (each pair taking 20-25 minutes for their game and following Q&A), after which each student wrote a final essay noting the regional variations they observed and examining what factors seem to have most shaped the course, chronology, and severity of the trials across Europe.

Assessment and Evaluation:

The project was assessed in three ways: the quality, accuracy, and creativity of the final games; the annotated bibliographies and historical background essays turned in by each student; and the response essays to the class gameplay. While I set minimum parameters for sources, the length of the games, and the attendant papers, the students were otherwise left to determine the content and course of their games. I did not want to give so much direction that it would stifle creativity; really, I just wanted to see what the students would come up with. I required each pair to meet with me no later than the week before the games were due in order to assess their progress and catch any potential technological or content issues in their games. Much to my surprise, not one group had any trouble using the software after it had been explained by Brandon Bucy at the start of the project. The lesson here, of course, is that my students are much savvier with technology than I am!

The overall quality of the games was generally quite high, and students reported that this was one of the most engaging and informative assignments they had encountered in their college career thus far. Next time I assign this project, I plan to increase the minimum length of the games by requiring students to include more background and more choices for the player, as some games were noticeably longer and more detailed than others. Other than this, however, I was thrilled by the results and would highly recommend the use of Inklewriter for the creation of text-based games in the college classroom.

The Games:

France

Scotland

Poland

Denmark

England

Russia

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DH Incentive Grants

Announcing Incentive Grant Recipients 2015-2016

We’re excited to announce the DH Mellon Incentive Grant recipients for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Claudette Artwick, Associate Professor of Journalism & Mass Communications
Student teams in JOUR 232: Communication Research Methods will design and conduct content analysis projects to explore the portrayal of social groups and issues in media content. Students will use digital tools, such as quickQuote and Twxplorer, to research and analyze larger-scale data sets as well as present them in an interactive, multimedia format.

Michelle Brock, Assistant Professor of History
HIST 229: The Age of the Witch-hunts will culminate in a Digital Humanities project that asks the students to imagine, write, present, and play a “Choose Your Own Witch-trial” game, modeled after the “choose your own adventure” books.

Laura Brodie, Visiting Associate Professor of English
ENGL 203: Fiction Writing will feature experimentation with new narrative techniques will encourage students to integrate digital media into the process of creative writing.

Owen Collins, Associate Professor of Theater
THTR 238: 3d Printing and Desktop Manufacturing for the Theater will feature a large scale group project in which the students will work collaboratively on creating a large scale puppet for a given play.

Holly Pickett, Associate Professor of English
ENGL 380: The (Digital) Crux in King Lear will explore Shakespeare’s King Lear from a variety of angles: its textual history and variants, sources, performance history, and legacy in film and literature. The goal for this course will be for students to explore new digital methodologies for literary analysis using tools such as Juxta Commons and Voyant.

Summer Renault-Steele, Visiting Instructor of Writing
The overall learning objective of WRIT 100: The Philosophy of New Media is to illuminate and connect up philosophical inquiry rooted in the Frankfurt School to present-day student experiences of digital culture. This course will feature “philosophy labs” in which students will apply the philosophy they read to their own reception—and production—of short digital media experiences.

This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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Incentive Grants Pedagogy

Genelle Gertz on “Gaming Paradise Lost

Please enjoy this post by Genelle Gertz, Associate Professor of English and Writing Program Director, on her experience using Ivanhoe in a course on Milton. Gertz received a DH Incentive Grant in 2014.

If you haven’t noticed lately, kids from five to twenty-five eat, breathe and sleep video games. Hoping to tap this audience, I took my first stab at merging the epic world of Paradise Lost with gaming culture. Ultimately, I plan to create a video game version of Milton’s cosmic epic, replete with angels, Paradise, the creation of Earth and the perilous seas of Chaos slamming the shores of Hell. But envisioning the world of Paradise Lost is only one part of game design: there’s also . . . the game. This I knew less about, not being a gamer. But there’s a large field of game studies with fascinating research, not only on the psychological benefits of games (Jane McGonigal’s just-published SuperBetter), but narrative theory about how games differ (or not) from fiction (Henry Jenkins; Marie-Laure Ryan). So I cleared portions of my upper-level English syllabus on Milton to make room for game studies, and my trusty DH colleague, Jeff Barry, suggested I use the newly-improved Scholar’s Lab program, Ivanhoe, to start the first version of “Gaming Paradise Lost.”

Ivanhoe, so named because the first version explored Walter Scott’s novel, analyzes plot, characterization and structure within a literary text by rendering it as a game. The program emerged in the very early stages of DH development in the 1980s, and facilitated role-playing through email exchanges about the text. The most recent version of the program works on a WordPress platform and requires students to create a role, including developing a bio and picture, and then responding within this role to a series of “moves.” Videos and sound can be uploaded to accompany any move.

I required students to post once a week to our WordPress site in their chosen roles. Jeff Barry came to the class and explained how to use the game, leaving us with helpful framing questions to influence the first set of “moves,” or “responses.” No student identities were revealed until the end of the course, so we had fun guessing who was masterminding posts by Beelzebub, Azazel-Fallen Cherub #112, William Shakespeare, Marilynne Robinson, or the seventeenth-century “contemporary” to Milton, Whom-He-Predestinate-Thrunce. Role-playing afforded the students creative license as well as the opportunity to think collaboratively, both features touted in game science as psychologically beneficial parts of gaming. In their roles, students approached the great critical questions of the text, such as whether or not Satan is heroic, God is just, and Eve is anything other than screwed.

We played Ivanhoe for the six weeks in which we read Paradise Lost, and what became apparent is that Ivanhoe encourages creativity and collaboration, but needs more structure. Other than responding from a particular role to aspects of Paradise Lost, students needed clear objectives and rules. Veteran class bloggers and textual interpreters, these students reproduced what they already do well: critique the text. Ivanhoe was to them a blog wrapped in game’s clothing. Now that I’ve been through it once, I know that I will have to set up clearer objectives and list some preliminary roles, keeping students within the world of Paradise Lost. I will give them a way of tracking progress in the game too.

Assessing gameplay, not just in terms of grading, but also in terms of promoting student reflection, poses challenges. I required final presentations on Ivanhoe that analyzed the posts/moves of assigned characters. In this way, each “role” came under scrutiny in terms of its overall meaning and contribution. Some students were more diplomatic than others when it came to leveling criticism, and some analyses were more fanciful than probing. I’d like to switch the final presentation to one in which students work collaboratively to create new games in board form. They would develop their game version for Paradise Lost, demonstrate it for the class, and explain its relevance to game studies and/or the epic. After we read several articles on game studies, it became clear that board games are a physical way of working out design of game concepts, and that we could put more planning into how to build a game as a precursor for developing a video game.

Playing Ivanhoe also raises questions about how games aid our knowledge of primary texts. One preliminary idea is that Milton’s epic denounces the classical literary values of the epic hero, elevating personal sacrifice over battle bravery. We know that video games, just like the ancient epics, frequently require violence. So how can we build a game in keeping with Milton’s text, one that fosters a different kind of heroic ethos? I’ll be working on that for “Gaming Paradise Lost 2.0,” and I hope, by then, to have more students helping me with the technical side of building a virtual, visual world of Paradise Lost.

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Announcement Incentive Grants Summer Research

CFP: Winter/Spring Incentive Grants and Summer Research Grants

Attention W&L faculty:

We are currently seeking proposals for two Mellon funding opportunities.

Incentive Grants for Winter/Spring 2016
Have an idea for a DH course project or assignment for next year? We have two levels of incentive grant funding for faculty who want to incorporate DH methodology into their teaching.

Summer Research Grants for Summer 2016
Looking to engage students in your summer research next year? Apply through the standard Lenfest Grant system.

As usual, contact DHAT@wlu.edu if you have any questions.

Categories
Incentive Grants

Two DH Incentive Grants Awarded

Congratulations to Christa Bowden and Genelle Gertz!  They are the latest recipients of W&L Digital Humanities Incentive Grants.  Professor Bowden’s students in her Spring Term Abroad class, ARTS 223 Photography and the City of Paris, will create their final project portfolios as e-books, which will be the first time in W&L’s photography program that a major course project has involved digital photographs rather than physical prints.  Each e-book will consist of a body of photographs based around a Paris-based concept or theme outside the realm of traditional tourist photography.  In her Winter 2015 course, ENGL 330 Gaming in Milton’s Paradise Lost,  Professor Gertz will use the Ivanhoe gaming platform, developed at UVA’s Scholars’ Lab, to afford her students a unique approach to this often analyzed work.