Advancing Research with 2023 Digital Humanities Seed Grants

"Migrants and the State" and "The Global Cochlear Implant" receive NEH grants

The NYU Digital Humanities community propels humanities studies forward by endorsing cutting-edge research techniques, providing educational opportunities and financial support for projects, and emphasizing public involvement. Among the programs sponsored by the Digital Humanities group are annual Seed Grants to support promising research and help it achieve additional funding. This multi-year program identifies and funds faculty-driven projects that innovatively combine humanistic scholarship with computational methods, digital publishing, and digitization. It is a joint effort involving the NYU Center for Humanities, NYU Libraries, and NYU Research and Instructional Technology

Among the faculty awarded Seed Grants in the past two cycles, two were able to use the grant to achieve additional funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2023.

Migrants and the State

NYU Faculty members Sibylle Fischer (Spanish and Portuguese, CLACS, and History) and Ellen Noonan (Archives and Public History) have received a notable Digital Humanities Advancement Grant of $139k from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their project, "Migrants and the State: Unlocking the Potential of A-files for the Histories of U.S. Immigration," aims to develop open-source machine learning methods to make historical migrant records more accessible. This initiative stemmed from a Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab focusing on government recordkeeping and migration. An initial website, "A-Files: Record-Keeping and the Golden Gate," was backed by the NYU Graduate Fellowship program. The project is an exciting example of the interdisciplinary research happening in digital humanities, as Fischer and Noonan will collaborate closely with NYU Professor of Computer Science Juliana Freire and technical staff from NYU RIT and Libraries.

The Global Cochlear Implant

NYU Faculty Mara Mills (Media, Culture, and Communication) and Michelle Friedner from the University of Chicago secured a Dangers and Opportunities of Technology Grant of $149,815 from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their project, “The Global Cochlear Implant: Provincializing ‘Brain Implants’ Through Disability Technoculture,” will undertake a humanistic comparative analysis of cochlear implant technology.