Prof. Gregory Downs wins a prestigious 2013 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship
The PhD Program in History is delighted to congratulate Prof. Gregory Downs on winning a prestigious 2013 American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship.
The American Council of Learned Societies, a private, nonprofit federation of 71 national scholarly organizations, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Advancing scholarship by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies are central to ACLS’s work. This year, ACLS will award more than $15 million dollars to nearly 400 scholars across a variety of humanistic disciplines. The seven fellows, who were selected from a very competitive pool of applications, will spend a year dedicated to a major scholarly project intended to advance digital humanistic scholarship in powerful new directions. The projects span disciplines, methodologies, and digital formats, but all engender innovative approaches to scholarly research and communication. Applications to the program were evaluated by a committee of scholars with wide-ranging expertise in the digital humanities. 2012-2013 marked the eighth year of the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program, generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The 2013 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellows are forging exciting pathways for scholarship in the humanities, providing widespread access to previously unavailable sources and creating tools to aid scholars at all levels of study,” said ACLS Director of Fellowships Nicole Stahlmann. “From transforming traditional ideas of literary genre to modeling changes in regional speech patterns over time, the fellows are finding new ways to channel big data for greater humanistic understanding.”
Among this year’s supported projects is a new searchable, digital archive of coroner’s reports that allows scholars to view the American South of the Civil War-era through the eyes of a crime scene investigator; a tool for students and advanced scholars alike to explore Pompeii through a GIS model that maps bibliographies of existing scholarship onto relevant points throughout the famous archaeological site; and a bi-lingual, multimedia online book that probes new directions in both performance studies and scholarly publication. The 2013 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellows and project titles are:
Gregory Downs (Associate Professor of History, The City College of New York) Mapping Occupation: The Union Army and the Meaning of Reconstruction (For more information, see http://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=43d71b64-8786-e211-b90d-000c29a3451a . Our own Prof. Joshua Brown notes “His project will profoundly change our notion about the “occupation” of the Reconstruction South.”)
Stephen Berry (Professor of History, University of Georgia) CSI Dixie: Race, the Body Politic, and the View from the South’s County Coroners’ Offices, 1840-1880
Allison Booth (Professor of English, University of Virginia) The Practice and Theory of Digital Prosopography: Collective Biographies of Women and the Biographical Elements and Structure Schema
William Kretzschmar (Professor of English, University of Georgia) Computer Simulation of Speech and Culture as a Complex System
Eric Poehler (Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Resource
Diana Taylor (Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University) The Politics of Passion: A Digital, Bi-lingual Scholarly Book Focusing on the Art and Activism of Jesusa Rodríguez
Ted Underwood (Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes
Further information on this year’s fellows and their projects is available on the ACLS website <http://www.acls.org/research/digital.aspx?id=798> .