2018 Summer Research Grants
In summer 2018 five Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
“Digital Narratives at a Community Garden”
Faculty Member: Philip Asare (Electrical & Computer Engineering)
Student: Arsh Noor Armin (Computer Engineering '21)
Project Overview: Community gardens often share information about the amount of food they produce or the number and variety of people involved in its work. However, there are far richer stories to tell about the daily activities at these locations and broader narratives about the impact of these enterprises on the people who interact with them and the plants that grow there. The main goal of this project is to explore how digital technologies can enable these richer stories to be told and the broader narratives can be communicated, using the Lewisburg Community Garden (LCG) as the pilot site.
“Banking on Precalculus”
Faculty Member: Emily Dryden (Mathematics)
Student: Nate Mattis (Mathematics '19)
Project Overview: Students in calculus courses need to have a host of precalculus concepts and skills at their fingertips. To achieve this goal, the Mathematics Department has been relying on an online precalculus course that students take before they begin Calculus I. The course serves two main purposes: it serves as a refresher of mathematical concepts that will be necessary for calculus, and it communicates to students that they will have substantial responsibility for their own learning in calculus. In this project faculty and students in the Math department will collaborate on a Bucknell-based video repository of precalculus resources that will be an excellent supplement to this course in the short term. Based on an assessment of the use and effectiveness of an initial version of the repository developed over the summer, the department will assess whether it should be expanded and replace the current course with one based on the resources in the repository. This change has the potential to help substantially more students be successful in their calculus courses.
“Refining the Film Search Engine”
Faculty Member: John Hunter (Comparative & Digital Humanities)
Student: Sarah Eckerman (Computer Science '21)
Project Overview: This summer work on Hunter's ongoing research project the Film Search Engine will focus r on four distinct elements: (1) a newly-improved front end (in JavaScript) with significantly improved functionality and usability compared to its predecessor; (2), a text search module, which performs searches based on a user-entered text string that searches the closed caption files associated with the films; (3) a color search module that takes a still image (chosen from the Film/Search Engine’s database or uploaded by the user) and searches to find other images in the database that closely match the target image’s color palette; and (4) an object search feature using a “neural network” search method to perform real-time object detection on the still images in the database.
“Documenting Offshore Oil Development: Investigating “Social License” through Inuit, Corporate, and Governmental Perspectives on the North American Arctic’s First Oil Well (1973-1977)”
Faculty Member: Andrew Stuhl (Environmental Studies)
Student: Parker Hula (Environmental Studies '20)
Project Overview: This summer work on Stuhl's ongoing text analysis-based research on Arctic offshore oil industry will focus on: 1) create a set of .txt files based on archival materials relating to Inuit perspectives on offshore oil development in the 1970s (Beaufort Sea, Canada); 2) compare these .txt files with previously digitized materials to analyze Inuit, corporate, and governmental perspectives on offshore oil development at the same time.
“Between Science and the Home: Girl’s Education in the Third Republic – An Annotated Digital Edition of Suzette (1899).”
Faculty Member: John Westbrook (French & Francophone Studies)
Student: Annie Girton (French/Education '19)
Project Overview: This summer marks the proof-of-concept phase of Westbrook's ongoing textual project: to create digital, annotated, bilingual edition of the teacher’s edition of Marie Robert Halt’s best-selling textbook, Suzette: Livre de Lecture Courante à l’Usage des Jeunes Filles. Morale—Leçon de choses, Economie Domestique – Ménage – Cuisine – Couture (Paris: Libraire Classique Paul Delaplane, 1889). The final result will be a web-accessible digital version allowing students and researchers to access a facsimile of the book, its transcription and/or translation, as well as extensive secondary materials. “Front matter” will introduce the author and the primary education system during the French Third Republic and both the transcription and translation will link to annotations that embed the text in its rich historical, ideological, and pedagogical context. The encoded digital artefact will provide multiple points of entry into the text and allow researchers to follow thematic lines of inquiry.
2017 Summer Grants Awarded
In summer 2017 six Bucknell faculty members and seven students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
“Building a Digital Materials Repository for History 201, ‘Introduction to Historical GIS’"
Faculty Member: David Del Testa (History)
Student: Ethan Pepin (Political Science ‘18)
Project Overview: Del Testa is developing a series of GIS data layers and learning modules for an online textbook to use in HIST 201 Historical GIS. Pepin worked with Professor Del Testa, along with three other students, to gather and produce thematic data layers in ArcGIS desktop. Pepin then developed the layers into a module to be used in the textbook.
“Economic Mobility in the United States: an Examination of Upward Mobility, through the lens of geography, race, gender, class, and access to higher education.”
Faculty Member: Jan Knoedler (Economics)
Students: Autumn Patterson (Interdisciplinary Studies: Economics & Math ‘19) and Emily Tevebaugh (Interdisciplinary Studies: Economics & Math ‘19)
Project Overview: Knoedler’s GIS-based project builds upon Raj Chetty’s (Harvard) project that considers income inequality among college students. Over the summer Patterson and Tevebaugh worked with Professor Knoedler to combine Chetty’s data with ArcGIS data to undertake more detailed geographic study of income inequality.
“Sustaining Marginal Communities in the Face of Gentrification and Mass Incarceration”
Faculty Member: Vanessa Massaro (Geography)
Student: Sarah Sulkowski (Economics ‘19)
Project Overview: Massaro’s project explores connections between household costs of incarceration and gentrification by completing a city-wide household survey in minority neighborhoods in Philadelphia. In spring and summer Sulkowski worked with Professor Massaro to develop the survey and gather data in the Philadelphia neighborhoods. Back on campus Sulkowski began to enter the data and undertake analysis in ArcGIS.
“Digital or Analog? Tools for Visualization of Surfaces in Multivariable Calculus”
Faculty Member: Nathan Ryan (Math)
Student: Angel Bautista (Math ‘18)
Project Overview: Ryan is undertaking a comparison between digital visualization tools and 3D printed models to determine which is more effective in learning environments. During the summer Bautista worked as part of a team of students; his focus was on the digital side, writing new applets in Python and embedding them in an openly available website.
“Documenting Offshore Oil Development: Digitizing, Organizing, and Analyzing Archival Materials Relating to the First Offshore Oil Well in the North American Arctic, 1972-1976.”
Faculty Member: Andrew Stuhl (Environmental Studies)
Student: Ashley Vecchio (Undeclared ‘20)
Project Overview: Stuhl has gathered a large corpus of government documents from the National Archives in Canada that present different perspectives in negotiation of drilling rights in the Arctic during the 1970s. Over the summer Vecchio worked with Professor Stuhl to prepare the corpus and then undertake text analysis (topic modelling and sentiment analysis) on a significant portion of the corpus.
“The Power of Mapping: Applications of GIS in disaster resilience and planning”
Faculty Member: Corrie Walton-McCauley (Civil Engineering)
Student: Patrick Yang (Electrical Engineering ‘19)
Project Overview: Walton-McCauley pursues the research question – how can GIS be used in new ways to analyze disaster preparedness, leading to application use in disaster resilience for a selected community? Over the summer Yang performed a literary review and began to undertake GIS analysis of resource data in Pennsylvania municipalities. This fall Yang and another student are continuing to develop the work with the support of a Library and IT microgrant.
2016 Summer Grants Awarded
Mellon and Technology Implementation Grants Awarded
Bucknell faculty members and students have been awarded summer grants through Bucknell’s Andrew W. Mellon and L&IT Technology Integration grants.
Course Design Recipients
Six faculty members have received course design stipends that support their efforts to create new courses or modify existing courses to include significant digital scholarship assignments, modules, or projects.
Kat Lecky (English)
ENG 250: Gaming Renaissance London: Exploring the Common Spaces of the Literary City. This course will explore the humble origins of Renaissance England’s “Great Books” by surveying digitized primary archival materials and georeferencing them with Norden’s 1593 pocket map of London. These approaches will help students uncover a canon of works crafted by and for the city’s ordinary people.
Song Chen (East Asian Studies)
FOUN 098: Humanities Visualization. This foundations seminar will introduce students to data visualization methods for the humanities. Studies will explore web-based visualization projects, discuss current debates on digital scholarship, and create their own data visualization projects.
EAST 200: Digital Methods in Chinese Studies. This course will introduce students to digital tools and resources for Chinese Studies, guiding students through the processes of marking up a text, building a database, designing queries, and developing visually informed arguments.
Le Paliulis (Biology)
BIOL 331: Genomics. In this computer research-based course, students will study the structure, content, expression, and evolution of genomes. Students will apply digital tools to the examination of the previously unstudied segment of a fruit fly genome.
Darakhshan Mir (Computer Science)
CSCI 187: Computing, Creativity, and the Social Good. This introductory course will be designed primarily for students majoring in non-STEM fields. Students will learn the programming language Processing to create visual artifacts to that investigate and draw novel insights from data sets that are social, historical, or textual in nature.
Vanessa Massaro (Geography)
GEOG 222: Thinking Space: Critical Reflections on Research. In this course students will learn the relationship between theory and research in the study of space. By uncovering the ways digital tools are utilized from a specific epistemological standpoint, students will gain an understanding of the ways power informs our understanding of place.
Renée Gosson (French)
FREN 103 and FREN 236. This course design will revise the integration of new digital technologies into two existing French courses. In FREN 103, a third-semester French language course, students will select a French film and create a video in which they review and critique the film in French. In FREN 236, Introduction to the French Caribbean Literature and Culture, students will create a podcast of a research topic related to the course content.
Summer Research Project Recipients
Five faculty-student teams have been awarded Summer Research project stipends to initiate or extend ongoing humanities and social sciences faculty-driven research.
Project: The Packwood House Digital Archive of the Personal Papers, Ephemera and Photographs of Edith and John Fetherson
Faculty Member: Janice Mann (Art History)
Student Researcher: Rebecca Reeve (Art History ’17)
Mann and Reeve will digitize letters, diaries, photographs, postcards, and other ephemera in the archives of the Packwood House Museum to create a searchable digital archive on the web.
Project: Sustaining Marginal Communities in the Face of Gentrification and Mass Incarceration
Vanessa Massaro (Geography) will work with a student to map and document neighborhood change and costs of incarceration in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia, considering how mass incarceration may be used as a tool of neighborhood relocation during periods of gentrification.
Project: Visualizing Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean
Faculty Member: Tom Beasley (Classics)
Student Researcher: Suné Swart (Computer Science ’17)
Beasley and Swart will continue to develop a web-based application that visualizes dynamically political, economic, and religious networks in the ancient world.
Project: Refining the Film Search Engine
Faculty Member: John Hunter (Comparative Humanities)
Student Researcher: Dale Hartman (Computer Science ’18)
Hunter and Hartman advance Hunter’s ongoing film search engine project by linking it to existing moving image media collections at archive.org and investigate how this search engine can be refined to allow for visual searches.
Project: Churches of Coal Country
Faculty Member: Alf Siewers (English)
Student Researcher: Sasha Weilbaker (Photojournalism ’19)
Siewers and Weilbaker will develop a half-hour digital storytelling documentary focused on faith communities of the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania.
2015 Summer Grants Awarded
Mellon and Technology Implementation Grants Awarded
Bucknell faculty members and students have been awarded 2015 summer grants through Bucknell’s Andrew W. Mellon and L&IT Technology Integration grants.
Course Design Recipients:
Five faculty members have received course design stipends that support their efforts to create new courses or modify existing courses to include significant digital scholarship assignments, modules, or projects.
Elizabeth Armstrong (East Asian Studies)
JAPN 101: Beginning Japanese. Armstrong will focus on how to emphasize grammar in cultural context through the incorporation of enhanced digital and multimedia assignment components.
Rich Crago (Civil & Environmental Engineering)
CENG 421: (Hydrology): Targeting Key Water Quality Treatment Sites in a Watershed
This senior level course redesign combines class projects and service-learning components to analyze the Susquehanna watershed through Precision Conservation methods.
Martin Isleem (Arabic Studies, Languages, Cultures & Linguistics)
ARBC 103, 104
Isleem will develop a series of app-based modules to enhance spoken Arabic proficiency at intermediate-level Arabic courses.
Jan Knoedler (Economics)
ECON 418: American Economic History
This senior-level course will incorporate advanced GIS data into redesigned, scaffolded modules.
Janice Mann (Art & Art History)
ARTH373: Art Encounters: Real and Imaginary up to the Modern Era.
New course employing a range of digital methods to analyze art and artifacts shared along the historic Silk Road.
Summer Research Project Recipients:
Five faculty-student teams have been awarded Summer Research project stipends to initiate or extend ongoing humanities and social sciences faculty-driven research.
Project: “Visualizing Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean”
Faculty Member: Tom Beasley (Classics)
Student: Suné Swart (Computer Science ‘17)
Beasley and Swart will develop a web-based application that visualizes dynamically political, economic, and religious networks in the ancient world.
Project: “Leveraging Precision Conservation for the Cultural Heritage of the Susquehanna’s West Branch”
Faculty Member: Katherine Faull (Comparative Humanities)
Student: Nick Miller (School of Management ‘18)
Faull and Miller will continue the they began in Spring 2015 to extend research on the West Branch, gathering data and piloting project development from Precision Conservation GIS methods.
Project: “Developing New Spatial Approaches to Economic History”
Faculty: Jan Knoedler (Economics)
Student: Amber McDonnell (Theatre ‘17)
Knoedler and McDonnell will collaborate on collection and preparation of GIS data to be employed in Knoedler’s ECON 418 course.
Project: “Friendship and Diversity: Philosophical and Geographical Considerations”
Faculty: Sheila Lintott (Philosophy)
Student: Melissa Eng (Philosophy, Geography ‘17)
Lintott and Eng will investigate the status of diversity in friendships in general and the role that such diversity plays in undermining the influence of ingrained and culturally shared stereotypes and biases.
Project: “Historic Tavern Guide and Early Modern German Jewry Digitization”
Faculty: Ann Tlusty (History)
Student: Dylan Davies (Geography ‘17)
Tlusty and Davies will develop map layers and associated data of the historic Killian map of Augsburg, Germany.
These grants fulfill an important expectation of Bucknell’s digital scholarship initiative: for faculty to work with students to develop a productive cycle of teaching and research collaborating on the creation of new knowledge that can subsequently lead to new research questions.
2014 Summer Grants Awarded
As part of the $700,000 four-year digital scholarship grant Bucknell has received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, four course design and six summer research project grants have been awarded for Summer 2014. Mellon Course Design stipends fulfill a primary objective of the grant, whereby Bucknell will provide course development support to faculty members who are creating new courses that teach students how to use digital technologies, and modifying existing courses to include significant digital scholarship lessons, modules, or projects. Mellon Summer Research Project stipends fulfill an important expectation of the grant, in which faculty work with students to develop a productive cycle of teaching and research in digital scholarship, collaborating on the creation of new knowledge that can subsequently lead to new research questions.
Course Design recipients:
“Digitizing the River” (Katie Faull & Alf Siewers, Comparative Humanities & English)
New digital humanities-centric design of Susquehanna Country course, incorporating extensive digital humanities engagement and analysis of cultural, historical, and environmental aspects of the Susquehanna region and Bucknell’s place within it.
“Devising Performance” (Anjalee Hutchison, Theatre and Dance)
This course explores the methods and means of creating theatre. The course redesign involves innovative approaches to performance process and collaboration through immersive digital forms of communication and documentation.
“Too Much Information, The Effects of Digital Technologies on our Lives” (Janet Knoedler & Kathleen McQuiston, Economics)
This integrated perspectives course examines benefits and costs of the ubiquitous access to information via digital technologies. The redesigned course features a scaffolded set of assignments in which students participate in real time in the collaborative community of Wikipedia.
“Pilgrimage in South Asia” (Karline McLain, Religion)
This redesigned religion course uses emerging work in the field of digital spatial humanities to enrich student learning about and engagement with the sacred geography of South Asia. Course modification will include a semester-long research project culminating in the production of a multimedia digital atlas.
Summer Research Project recipients:
“A Proper Motion Search for the Smallest Stars” (Katelynn Allers, Physics and Astronomy)
Student Researcher: Damon Frezza.
Frezza will work with Professor Allers to analyze small star foundations (as discovered using the Spitzer telescope); student will work with Allers and DSC to create website that will document research output and lead to conference paper and journal article.
“Community Level Effects of Foreign Aid in Africa” (John Doces, Political Science)
Student Researcher: Erik Heinemann
Heinemann will work with Doces on a GIS study of the effect of aid at the disaggregated community-level seeking to understand its effects, positive or negative, on development at the community-level.
“The Masquerade Project” (Ghislaine McDayter, English)
Student Researchers: Brittany Allen, Kyle Raudinsky
Student will work with McDayter on the initial development of an immersive experience that takes a user through the literary and social engagements involved in an eighteenth-century masquerade ball.
“Empowering conservation through integration of GIS data and community surveys” (DeeAnn Reeder, Biology)
Student Researcher: Laura Kurpier
This project identifies who conservation in South Sudan can be empowered through integration of aerial GIS data and fieldwork/data collection.
“Health Atlas of Pennsylvania” (Amy Wolaver, Economics)
Student Researcher: Jonathan Walls
The project involves development of a GIS atlas that creates analysis of Pennsylvania’s hospitalization rates due to health care supply and environmental factors.
“Refracting Environmentalism through a Tire: A view of ‘Fractivism’ through an Anti-Incinerator Campaign in Central Pennsylvania” (Amanda Wooden, Environmental Studies)
Student Researchers: Morgan Greenly, Ann Scott, Nicole Bakeman
Students will work with Wooden on an article and publicly-shared online digital map about the connection between anti-natural gas drilling activism (“fractivism”) and community opposition to the White Deer Township Energy Project (“the tire burner”) in Central Pennsylvania.