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L&IT Digital Research Assistant Micro-Grants

L&IT Digital Research Assistant grants provide support for faculty-student digital scholarship projects across disciplines during the academic year.

These micro-grants can provide seed money or bridge funding to encourage ongoing work on digital scholarship projects during the academic year. Proposals should focus on a faculty member’s professional research; student participants should engage in digital forms of analysis and/or publication that contribute to this larger research project. Funds pay faculty-identified student research assistants at standard Bucknell University student employment rates. Grant funding is milestone oriented, and a time frame (e.g., work schedule), objective or deliverable must be identified in the application. A faculty member may apply for funding for one or more students to work on a research project either as a cohort or sequentially, but applications should be submitted for each student, providing discreet and specific tasks and objectives for each student. Faculty members can submit further applications to continue work with either the current student research assistant or a new student; each application will be assessed individually. Awards typically do not exceed $800.

Examples of previous grants:

  • “Refracting Environmentalism through a Tire” (Wooden): multiple students collected and analyzed anti-tire incinerator activist data from community members in White Deer Township.
  • “Precision Conservation for Sustainable Watershed Management” (Crago): student worked with staff from the Chesapeake Conservancy, using GIS to identify key sites in the Susquehanna watershed likely to introduce high sediment or nutrient loads into streams.
  • “Redesign of Economics 418: The Mapping of U.S. Economic History” (Knoedler): students helped to develop data sets of NHGIS census data from 1790-1960 in preparation for course redesign.
  • “Visualizing Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean” (Beasley): student continued to work with Beasley on development of web application analyzing primary and literary evidence. This grant served to bridge work continued between sequential L&IT Summer Research Grants.

We encourage the faculty applicant to confer with a member of DP&S in order to ensure the viability of the project parameters and the student’s experience working on the project. All applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis by the Office of the VP for Library & Information Technology, the appropriate Dean’s Office, and the Office of Undergraduate Fellowships and Research.

To submit an application, please complete this form.