The University of Iowa Libraries is pleased to announce the two winners of Creative Scholarship Innovation Awards, aimed at supporting significant digital humanities projects with the potential for national recognition. The award will fund hardware, software, and personnel; additionally, awardees will be paired with a team of librarians and technologists who will work as collaborators to develop the projects. Winners are:
- Julie Hochstrasser, School of Art & Art History—$8,585 toward hiring a graduate assistant with subject matter expertise to work on a collection of documentary text, bibliography, photographs, and video accumulated during research, including travel to key sites of 17th century global Dutch trade and colonization.
- William Davies, Linguistics –$2,080 to supplement other award monies toward hiring a graduate assistant with subject matter expertise to caption videos of Madurese storytellers and create a digital collection that includes Davies’ transcription of Madurese with interlinear English and Indonesian translations.
“University of Iowa librarians have a long history of close collaboration to support faculty who incorporate technology into their teaching and research, reaching as far back as the 1992 launch of the Information Arcade®,” said Library Director Nancy Baker. “This award is a continuation of our commitment to supporting digital scholarship.”
In late 2008, the Council on Library and Information Resources released “No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century.” In this report, Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University, notes that the e-research developments initially seen in the science, engineering, technology, and medicine disciplines are now penetrating the social sciences and the humanities. Luce describes how e-research will profoundly shape the research libraries of tomorrow: “Instead of simply storing objects of assorted types, researchers need libraries that reflect a Web 2.0 service environment in which communication is continuous and synchronous. This reality introduces significantly greater complexity to digital capture, curation, and preservation.”
To align with emerging e-research trends and the Libraries’ current strategic goals, the Libraries is transforming the Information Arcade space to reflect a renewed focus on faculty support for e-research, including but not limited to support for new forms of scholarly publishing, digital humanities, data curation, and open/linked data. Toward that end, Digital Library Services (DLS), in collaboration with ITS and the VPR’s office, hosted a series of AHI grant preparation workshops in January. DLS has also begun new collaborations with humanists and social scientists on projects ranging from capturing Twitter feeds in support of political science research to hosting peer-reviewed online journals such as the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.
For more information, please contact Digital Library Services at thestudio@uiowa.edu or call (319) 335-9275.