Award Recipients
The Digital Humanities Lab is delighted to announce the recipients of our 2016 Project Grants. These awards support the initial phases of faculty projects that pursue innovation and excellence in the humanities by way of digital methods. Selected from a highly competitive and varied field, the projects range from research on Renaissance Florence and present-day New Haven to twentieth-century Russian and East European émigrés.
2016 Recipients
Marijeta Bozovic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Fabian Drixler, Associate Professor of History, and Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History
Karin Roffman, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, English, and American Studies
Elihu Rubin, Associate Professor, Yale School of Architecture and American Studies
Francesca Trivellato, Frederick W. Hilles Professor, Department of History
We are currently accepting applications for the 2017 award cycle. For more information and to apply, please visit DHLab Grants.
Project Descriptions
Avant-Gardes and Émigrés: Digital Humanities and Slavic Studies
Principal Investigator: Marijeta Bozovic
Graduate Team: Carlotta Chenoweth, Jacob Lassin, Ingrid Nordgaard, Masha Shpolberg
Support Team: Anna Arays (Sterling), Trip Kirkpatrick (CTL), Kevin Repp (Beinecke), DHLab team
This project will develop a teaching, learning, and research initiative dedicated to the study of Russian and East European avant-gardes and émigrés in the twentieth century. The initiative will foreground the continuity of Russian Formalism, structuralism, semiotics, and discourse analysis with emerging work in Digital Humanities today. By studying social and institutional networks, the team will explore the dissemination and evolution of interpretive practices. The intersection of two fields uniquely situates us to interrogate the foundations of Digital Humanities practices, even as we explore new research methods, pedagogical tools, and archival and resource-sharing possibilities for cultural studies of Russia and East Europe.
Telling History through Images: New Tools for Visually Driven Narratives
Principal Investigators: Fabian Drixler and Peter Perdue
The Visualizing Cultures website, dedicated to the examination of interactions between modern Asia and the West, contains over 50 units that exemplify a new form of historical analysis that integrates images and text in the form of visually drive narrative. This project will extend and redesign the existing website so as to expand the opportunities for other scholars to contribute to this emerging genre by developing software tools for the existing corpus or by creating templates that will allow scholars to work with their own images.
John Ashbery's 'Nest': A Virtual Tour and Digital Study Center of a Poet and Collector in his Hudson House
Principal Investigator: Karin Roffman
Project Team: Ninoslav Adzibaba (VHR Solutions), Milan Branezac (VHR Solutions), Monica Ong Reed (DHLab)
This project will provide crucial documentation of the American poet John Ashbery's Victorian house and collections. Using new virtual reality technologies to explore inside the house, we will create a prototype of the center hall that includes photographs, archival records, and audio clips of Ashbery and others discussing his collections. The website we design will enable users to experience the intimacy of being in "the middle of things," a reality that echoes in Ashbery’s poems.
A Digital, Mobile, and Interactive Field Guide to New Haven's Built Heritage
Principal Investigator: Elihu Rubin
The New Haven Building Archive (NHBA) brings together ten years of student research on buildings and streetscapes in New Haven, Connecticut. As an interactive digital guide to local buildings and the role they play in the life of the city, the NHBA will harness digital mapping technologies, place-based storytelling, and community-based research to prompt conversations about the historical patterns and future development of New Haven.
The Economy of Information in Renaissance Florence
Principal Investigator: Francesca Trivellato
Project Team: Pauline Bernard, Priscilla Coker, Russell Gasdia, Matteo Giuli, Stewart Palmer, Carlo Taviani, Niccolò Valmori
Was Renaissance Florence the cradle of Western capitalism and individualism? This project will create an online platform that will allow users to draw from unpublished archival material to search for new answers to this age-old question. Thanks to the Project Grant, the team will develop the analytics and visualization component of a relational database based on nearly 5,000 limited partnerships registered in Florence between 1445 and 1808 — arguably the longest and most homogeneous archival series of business contracts from pre-industrial Europe.