Empowering research into culture, colonialism, race, and peer review

The NYU Digital Humanities 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 Libraries and NYU Research and Instructional Technology  

On this page: Kalinago Living Language Project | Colonial Networks | Hidden Legacies | Bridging Degrees and Critical Perspectives | Digitizing Cultural Heritage | About Digital Humanities Seed Grants

Kalinago Living Language Project: Digitizing Lexical Resources for Indigenous Survivance

NYU faculty member Isabel Bradley (French Literature, Thought and Culture, GSAS) is the principal investigator for the Kalinago Living Language Project, a digitization and translation project that aims to create a dataset and user-friendly dictionary interface for Kalinago-to-English vocabulary. The Indigenous Kalinago language thus far has mainly resources for translation to French, including French missionary evangelization materials and French-Kalinago dictionaries. The Kalinago Living Language project hopes to utilize these to create an English translation resource that will be useful for linguists, anthropologists, historians, and English-speaking communities in the Caribbean that are descended from the Kalinago. 

Colonial Networks: Remapping the “Paris” Art World in a 1786 Map of Haiti

The Colonial Networks project, led by NYU faculty member Meredith Martin (Art History, Institute of Fine Arts) and Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London), focuses on expanding a property map of the land around Cap-Francais in Haiti in the eighteenth century, when it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue, to be more interactive and informative. Deeper investigation into the owners and inhabitants, including enslaved laborers, of the large sugar plantations around this area reveals strong and complex links to the art world in Paris at the time. This revamped map will connect users with text, images, and outside resources that allow further exploration and investigation of this topic. 

Hidden Legacies: Slavery, Race and the Making of 21st-Century America

NYU faculty member Rachel Swarns (Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, GSAS) aims to create a database of digital resources and records that illustrate the connection between slavery and modern institutions in the US, including universities, religious institutions, and financial institutions through the Hidden Legacies project. This repository will facilitate easy, one-stop access to primary source records for students, historians, and researchers, allowing the knowledge and understanding surrounding these important topics to become deeper and more widespread. 

Bridging Degrees and Critical Perspectives: Creating an Open Source Peer-Reviewed Journal for Interdisciplinary Library Science Graduate Students

From the NYU Division of Libraries, contributors Roxane Pickens, Alexandra Provo, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, and Laurie Murphy are working to publish the works of MLIS-MA dual degree program graduate students to improve upon the peer-review and publishing process. Bridging Degrees and Critical Perspectives aims to use NYU Manifold to create a journal structure for publications in information science and the humanities, which will open up discourse and engagement in these fields and allow for similar projects to be created and shared across the NYU community. 

Digitizing Cultural Heritage: The Walter Feldman Collection of Turkish Classical Music

Digitzing Cultural Heritage, led by NYU faculty members Panayotis Mavromatis and Adem Merter Birson (Music and Performing Arts Practices, Steinhardt), undertakes the task of digitizing the audio cassette records from NYUAD professor Walter Feldman. Feldman is known to be the leading authority on Turkish classical music and has a collection that includes material that has never been heard, from private lessons to prominent Turkish musicians. This initiative will create a website with easy navigation and searching to allow exploration of the recordings by scholars and others interested, and digitally preserve these important audial pieces of music history.