Digital Humanities and Scholarship Advancing at Purdue: Data Science Initiative Funds Supporting Course Redesigns, Graduate Student Learning

November 15th, 2019

Purdue University students who take social science or humanities courses will learn more from digital scholarship concepts and ideas incorporated into these courses in the coming months and years.

Thanks to Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities Matt Hannah, Professor of English and African-American Studies Venetria Patton, and the Integrative Data Science Initiative (IDSI) at Purdue, College of Liberal Arts faculty—who have had a desire to redesign an existing humanities or social science course to include digital scholarship—have been awarded small seed grants via Hannah’s and Patton’s “Engaging in the Digital Humanities” IDSI project.

In 2018, their proposal was awarded funds as part of “the first investment towards achieving the goals of the Integrative Data Science Initiative.”

According to Hannah, most of the faculty will work closely with him to strategize and implement key changes in an effort to expand digital scholarship into new arenas. In addition to the several faculty members who were awarded seed grants, Hannah was able to fund five graduate students working in some area of digital scholarship to attend conferences and present original work.

“I was delighted by the range and scope of the proposals,” Hannah said. “I am excited about the future of Digital Humanities at Purdue.”

Graduate students and faculty members awarded grant funds are listed below.

Graduate Student Grants

• Sweta Baniya (English) presented “#RageAgainstRape: Nepali Women’s Performance of Local Digital Actions Against the National Silence on Rape” at Conference on College Composition and Communication in Pittsburgh, PA.
• Jared Wright (sociology) presented “‘The Future of the Internet Hangs in the Balance,’” The Perception and Framing of Political Opportunity and Threat among Activists in Digital Space” at Moral Machines?: The Ethics and Politics of the Digital World in Helsinki, Finland.
• Reyes Espinoza (philosophy) presented “Art, Technology, and Trans-Death Options” at Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art and Science 2018 in Mexico City, Mexico.
• Sharareh Vahed (second-language studies) presented “Multilingual Learners’ Developing Identities as Writers through the Reflection, Response, and Self-Assessment” at Conference on College Composition and Communication in Pittsburgh, PA.
• Sabiha Sadeque presented “Augmented reality tools to learn a foreign language” at the “Tech + Research” workshop at University of Maryland.

Faculty Grants

• Manjana Milkoreit (political science) to redesign Political Science 32700: “Global Green Politics” to incorporate virtual reality and gaming, which suggests provocative possibilities for adding new methodologies.
• Angelica Duran (English) to develop SCLA 101: “Transformative Texts, Critical Thinking & Communication I: Antiquity to Modernity” to expand mapping projects related to archival materials.
• Kim Gallon (history) to redesign History 495: “Digital History: Exploring the Digital History of Slavery” to incorporate an articulate storyline so students can design interactive modules.
• Eric Waltenburg (political science) to redesign Political Science 300: “Introduction to Political Analysis” to incorporate textual and sentiment analysis.
• Elizabeth Mercier (classics) to redesign Latin 315: “Paleography” to incorporate the Purdue Paleography Project and conduct significant work with digitizing manuscripts.
• Megha Anwer (Honors College) to redesign Honors 19903: “Interdisciplinary Writing” to incorporate digital mapping and textual analysis.
• Dwaine Jengelly (Honors College) to redesign Honors 29900: ISIS to incorporate textual analysis.
• Dino Felluga (English) to redesign English 202: “Engaging English with digital methods derived from innovative work on COVE (Central Online Victorian Educator).
• Song No (Spanish) to redesign Spanish 24100: “Introduction to Hispanic Literature” to incorporate textual analysis.

For more information, contact Hannah at hannah8@purdue.edu.