In summer 2024, six Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: Keegan Kang (Mathematics)
Students: Sophie Yang
This project worked with random numbers to anonymize sensitive information such as a person’s income, disability status, health, or education. With the anonymized data, a modified version of linear regression was used to predict trends and understand how features interact with each other. Sophie Yang presented her poster “Securing Privacy and Insights: Analyzing Anonymized Data using Linear Regression and Random Projections,” at the Susquehanna Valley Undergraduate Research Symposium in July, and their research will go on to further Shiya Cao‘s (Statistical and Data Sciences, Smith College) and the Disability Inclusion Analytics Lab‘s work with anonymized data.
Faculty Member: David Del Testa (History)
Students: Scott Takacs
Scott Takacs used his computer science background to learn Unity Game Engine, a video game design software, alongside Prof. David Del Testa as part of a curriculum development project running since 2021. Ultimately, users will maneuver through “digital twins” of real-world places and spaces, recreated as virtual learning environment built onto a gaming framework in Unity, supported with ArcGIS software. Scott’s continuing work with the game engine will allow students to follow a historical travel narrative and encounter content, assignments, and assessments tied to coursework.
Faculty Member: Stephanie Larson (Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies)
Students: Alexandra Fedchenko
The Digitizing the Ancient Objects of Thebes project will for the first time bring together materials collected at Bucknell’s multi-year excavation at the Ismenion Hill in Thebes, Boiotia, Greece into a searchable online content management system, providing access to and further analysis of these materials for the researchers and their colleagues at other institutions. This project realizes an ongoing need by the researchers to be able to store, sort, and share visual representations of archeological finds by situating spatial and temporal data for each object (GPS point, image, drawing) cross-referenced from other sites and publications. Alexandra continued work from last summer, using Adobe software to turn drawings of these archaeological artifacts into high-quality digital artifacts for researchers around the world to study within the spatial context of the original dig.
Faculty Member: Eric Faden (Film Studies)
Students: Jackson Rubiano
Prof. Eric Faden has been working to preserve rare Japanese films that were produced on paper instead of celluloid from 1932 – 1936, which cannot be digitized using existing tools made for celluloid. The Japanese Paper Film Project locates and scans the few surviving films in museums and collections in Japan with custom-designed hardware and software. Jackson travelled to Japan not to improve the software’s scanning capabilities, and continued refining the meticulous digital process of editing initial scans into smooth, screenable video.
Faculty Member: Cymone Fourshay (History and International Relations)
Students: Barbara Wankollie
Alongside the annual Bucknell in the Caribbean program, Prof. Cymone Fourshey and Barbara Wankollie, an intern with the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Culture, explored how surviving sugar mills and other buildings used for sugar production in Antigua might be better understood through African descended people’s narratives of their experiences in and around those buildings. Barbara used her own experiences as well as Antiguan literature and in-person interviews to create new narrative and visual elements to the long-running Griot Institute Antigua Sugar Mills project.
Faculty Member: Beth Capaldi (Biology, Animal Behavior)
Students: Sophia Martinez
Prof. Beth Capaldi and Sophie Martinez met with landowners as well as collecting GIS data in the field to coordinate digital resources for all easement properties and develop a field application tool that will link to ArcGIS maps of Merrill W. Linn Land and Waterways Conservancy properties. The MLC will use their digital dashboard to monitor easement properties, and decide which to monitoring in the future for conservation purposes. Sophia, a Community Engagement Scholar mentored by the Center for Community Engaged Leadership, Learning & Research team, will continue working on the project this academic year.
In summer 2023 four Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: Song Chen (Chinese History)
Students: Yunke Wu
I am currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled “The Embedded State: The State, the Elite, and Local Society in Sichuan, 755-1279.” The book investigates why state-makers in China succeeded in rebuilding centralized political authority from the late sixth century, while political fragmentation became the norm in Europe following the collapse of the Roman empire. It argues that by promoting political participation and cultural integration, the Chinese state in the eleventh century worked out a modus vivendi with local elites and strengthened its authority by embedding itself in local power dynamics. In developing this argument, I have assembled a large dataset on careers, migrations, marriages, and social interactions of elite families who hailed from China’s Sichuan region during the Song dynasty (960–1279). I make extensive use of GIS and network analysis tools to analyze this dataset, and the findings are reported in three ubstantial chapters of the book. In connection with this book project, I propose to work with a student and design a website that publishes my research data and allows visitors to explore the data in interactive ways. I will provide the data for the website, which includes data on careers, migrations, marriages, and social interactions of Chinese elite families between the 10th to 13th centuries.
Faculty Member: Stu Thompson (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Students: Jean Marie Ngabonziza
The Ready Set Fit project has been providing motivation for people to get outside to get some exercise and teaching them about their community for over 6 years. The primary focus has been to get people out to particular places and tell them about the place while they are standing right there. The project has had “live” apps for about 5 years and has made two major updates during that time. The latest was about a year ago. The apps and supporting backend system were built and are maintained 100% by students. The project has been supported by students from multiple majors across the university and has engaged multiple community partners in the area. In many respects, the project has seen great success both in engaging communities but also in engaging a lot of students over the years. Those involved in the project strongly believe that it supports the first Strategic Commitment of the Plan for Bucknell 2025: Cultivating academic excellence across the community. More specifically, it aligns with the first two priorities of this commitment which focus on transformative learning (undergraduate research) and cross-campus collaboration (arts and sciences, engineering, and the BCSE) as well as the third commitment by connecting to the local community. Within the last 6 months the team has had multiple conversations with community groups who have voiced interest in bringing content to those who cannot necessarily get outside. The PA DCNR is the biggest of those groups and specifically mentioned that while getting outside is known to have a positive impact on people’s health, just seeing images or being virtually immersed in images of outside has also had marginal benefits. This became more relevant during COVID especially for those in nursing homes. These conversations got the group thinking about how we might bring RSF’s content to a device besides a phone and in a way that didn’t require the user to be at the specific location.
To address the above, we have an interest in doing two things. First, we want to create a web front end to RSF that will allow someone with a laptop or iPad, through a browser, to experience existing RSF path content (images and text) along with getting some sense of the relative location of the spaces they are viewing. An example use case for this would be showing nursing home patients a path related to where they might have lived and another is to engage students in other countries who want to learn about an area but they cannot travel there. In our specific case, possibly showing someone who grew up in Shamokin one of the Shamokin-related paths, possibly about Thomas Edison and the electrification of Shamokin. Second, we want to integrate 3D, virtual walkthroughs of indoors and possibly outdoor spaces into the existing RSF experience. An example use case includes the ability to take a virtual tour of a building that you might be standing in front of that might be locked or unavailable. Or the user might have virtual access to areas of the building that have been closed off in order to avoid wear and tear. We have already started to explore this option but more work is needed to identify the best hosting and capture options. We believe these two components complement each other, as well, and offer new ways to allow users to experience spaces of significance.
Faculty Member: Stephanie Larson (Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies)
Students: Alexandra Fedchenko
The Digitizing the Ancient Objects of Thebes project will for the first time bring together materials collected at Bucknell’s multi-year excavation at the Ismenion Hill in Thebes, Boiotia, Greece into a searchable online content management system, providing access to and further analysis of these materials for the researchers and their colleagues at other institutions. This project realizes an ongoing need by the researchers to be able to store, sort, and share visual representations of archeological finds, something a wide range of scholars of ancient history and archaeology would find useful in fixing their own studies within a chronological, cultural, and artistic framework of greater breadth. Ideally this project would eventually situate spatial and temporal data for each object (GPS point, image, drawing) and cross-reference comparanda from other sites and publications.
Faculty Member: Darakhshan Mir (Computer Science)
Students: Shane Monaghan, Nasif Walid
In summer 2022 two Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: Roger Rothman (Art History)
Students: Sophie McQuaid
The Heresies Project: A Survey of Scholarship will, for the first time, bring together all publications relating to the pioneering feminism and art journal, Heresies. This will inform the mission of the Heresies Research Group (HRG) for many years to come and will stand as a platform for further scholarship. The project will fall underneath the greater Heresies Project umbrella, which is a multi-year research project into the remarkably innovative journal Heresies. Identified as a journal of “Feminism, Art, and Politics,” the first issue of Heresies appeared in 1977 and continued for the next 16 years with hundreds of women involved in the magazine’s production. Each issue focused on a different topic (for example, #3 was devoted to “Lesbian Art and Artists,” #6 “On Women and Violence,” and #16 on “Film, Video, and Media”). Between 1977 and 1993 a total of 27 issues were published.
The goal of The Heresies Project is to curate and analyze the journal and undertake research into the lives and work of the hundreds of women who participated in its publication (the vast majority of whom have yet to be studied). The summer project is to create an accessible database utilizing digital scholarship, including annotated bibliographies, of all publications that mention The Heresies Journal. Digital scholarship will be integrated into every level of the project, from the gathering of metadata to the organization and dissemination of the texts. This work is crucial to the project itself because it will create a unified base on which all student research can examine, and re-examine.
Faculty Member: Stephanie Larson (Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies)
Students: Alexandra Fedechenko , Kitzito Ononuju
The Digitizing the Ancient Objects of Thebes project will for the first time bring together materials collected at Bucknell’s multi-year excavation at the Ismenion Hill in Thebes, Boiotia, Greece into a searchable online content management system, providing access to and further analysis of these materials for the researchers and their colleagues at other institutions. This project realizes an ongoing need by the researchers to be able to store, sort, and share visual representations of archeological finds, something a wide range of scholars of ancient history and archaeology would find useful in fixing their own studies within a chronological, cultural, and artistic framework of greater breadth. Ideally this project would eventually situate spatial and temporal data for each object (GPS point, image, drawing) and cross-reference comparanda from other sites and publications.
In summer 2021 two Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: Ghislaine McDayter (English)
Students: Susie Williams
This project grew out of my “Literature of Flirtation” seminar several years ago. Throughout this class we read many novels and conduct books that depicted the masked ball and it’s cultural significance; Susie was in the audience when I presented this work at a Humanities event and she approached me about participating in the work. With the support of the Summer Research Grant, Susie and I plan to integrate the most recent Libertine narrative thread into the game — the work that has been partially done by my students in the Flirtation seminar this fall.
Faculty Member: Stephanie Larson (Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies)
Students: Sage Lamade, Kitzito Ononuju
The Digitizing the Ancient Objects of Thebes project will for the first time bring together materials collected at Bucknell’s multi-year excavation at the Ismenion Hill in Thebes, Boiotia, Greece into a searchable online content management system, providing access to and further analysis of these materials for the researchers and their colleagues at other institutions. This project realizes an ongoing need by the researchers to be able to store, sort, and share visual representations of archeological finds, something a wide range of scholars of ancient history and archaeology would find useful in fixing their own studies within a chronological, cultural, and artistic framework of greater breadth. Ideally this project would eventually situate spatial and temporal data for each object (GPS point, image, drawing) and cross-reference comparanda from other sites and publications.
No awards were made in summer 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In summer 2019 seven Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: Philip Asare (Electrical & Computer Engineering)
Student: Arsh Noor Armin (Computer Engineering ’21)
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. For this summer, we plan to focus on the people, and in future work, we plan to add the plants.
Faculty Member: Stephanie Larson and Kevin Daly (Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies)
Student: Sage Lamade
Digitizing the Ancient Objects of Thebes will, for the first time, bring together materials collected at Bucknell’s multi-year excavation at the Ismenion Hill in Thebes, Boiotia, Greece into a searchable online content management system, providing access to and further analysis of these materials for the researchers and their colleagues at other institutions. This project realizes an ongoing need by the researchers to be able to store, sort, and share visual representations of archeological finds, something a wide range of scholars of ancient history and archaeology would find useful in fixing their own studies within a chronological, cultural, and artistic framework of greater breadth. Ideally this project would eventually situate spatial and temporal data for each object (GPS point, image, drawing) and cross-reference comparanda from other sites and publications.
Faculty Member: Mehmet Dosemeci (History)
Student: Emma Downey
The History of Disruption is a kinetic investigation of social struggle in the Atlantic world since the 18th century. It begins by questioning the association academics and activists make between social struggle and the category of movement. More than a semantic issue, the term social movement carries with it particular assumptions inherited from early strains of European liberalism: a connection between freedom, progress, and mobility; of a largely static and intransigent social order that movements struggle against; and the legitimate tactics to be employed to put this order into motion. Against these assumptions, the book unearths a near 300 year history of transatlantic struggle predicated on disruption; struggles that aimed not to move society but to interrupt its incessant need to produce, circulate, and uproot; struggles that found freedom not in the ability to move but through arrest.
Faculty Member: Jan Knoedler (Economics)
Student: Griffin Perrault
The purpose of this proposal for an L&IT summer grant is to continue and expand my analysis of U.S. election data at a very detailed level, and to combine it with the relevant socioeconomic data, to analyze the impact of the growing income inequality and the economic decline in rural America on election outcomes. Working with Carrie Pirmann, Janine Glathar, and my two presidential fellows this current year, as well as with my previous presidential fellows, we have compiled detailed data from the 2016 and 2018 elections as well as selected election data for other important turning point elections in recent decades. In a recent paper, I analyzed, in preliminary fashion, the impact of growing income inequality and rural decline on the 2016 election outcomes, specifically, looking at whether the 2016 election outcome was linked to the decline of the white working and middle classes, or whether the election outcomes are linked instead to racial concerns.
Faculty Member: Vanessa Massaro (Geography)
Student: Collin Mills
As one piece of a broader research project, a student will work on compiling a suite of digital materials that will be used to facilitate a workshop for families who have loved ones employed by a correctional facility and families who have loved ones that are incarcerated. The workshop will be held during the 2019-2020 school year and the goal will be to develop a collective understanding of the way prisons impact families and social reproduction across the state. On first blush, one might see these groups as antagonistic to one another, however the workshop will use digital tools created with a student research assistant in summer 2019 that will facilitate collaborative learning and knowledge production around the commonalities these groups share as people whose lives are impacted and intertwined with the correctional system.
Faculty Member: Ghislane McDayter (English)
Student: Lauren Ziolkowski
This project grew out of a “Literature of Flirtation” seminar in 2014. Throughout this class we read many novels and conduct books that depicted the masked ball and it’s cultural significance; it became clear that a lack of cultural knowledge was hindering the undergraduates in the class from fully engaging in the literary work. I had the option of assigning a series of historical documents for them to study – or to engage my students in a more hands-on experience through which they might learn about the culture. I chose to offer the latter and this is how the masquerade Ball project was born. With the support of the Mellon Digital Summer Research Grant, one of my graduate students, Britt Allen and I planned to reconstruct a virtual eighteenth-century masquerade ball which, through virtual interaction, would allow viewers to engage with this complex and rarified world of its past pleasures and transgressions. Having undertaken this work for the last four years, and having worked with 12 students on the project, we have already composed the skeleton of the game, and have nearly completed one narrative thread of three. The game has now been populated with multiple narrative characters and their backgrounds, digital images and artefacts, links to academic scholarship and original essays, music and costumes. The work continues and I am hoping to employ a new student, Lauren, as my research assistant this summer to complete one more thread before we, ideally gather to complete the project in the following academic year of 2019-20. Lauren will need to read several of the background texts to get up to speed, meet up with me regularly to go over the cultural context, and gather the academic material to support the second narrative thread.
Faculty Member: Stu Thompson
Student: Rachel Cherrey
The RSF team is always looking for ways to provide a more immersive experience for users. The place-based learning aspects of the app mean that a user is literally learning about where she is standing. While this is interesting in its own right, the visual impact of learning in place is diminished if all tangible artifacts are no longer visible. This might be the case with locations of pre-Colonial historical significance, places of industrial development, urban areas that have suffered destruction by fire, or sites of demolition and development This has led the project team to explore augmented reality (AR) as a way to provide an additional layer of user immersion for historical sites. For example, we would like to be able to stand on the Milton State Park island, look towards Milton and be able to superimpose historic, now absent structures, scenes, and vistas, onto the environmental viewscape through the phone. As demonstrated by this example, the team is aware of some of the capabilities of AR but only at a high level. Additionally, we assume that AR, like VR, has challenges when it comes to content creation.
In summer 2018 five Bucknell faculty members and their students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: Philip Asare (Electrical & Computer Engineering)
Student: Arsh Noor Armin (Computer Engineering ’21)
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.
Faculty Member: Emily Dryden (Mathematics)
Student: Nate Mattis (Mathematics ’19)
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.
Faculty Member: John Hunter (Comparative & Digital Humanities)
Student: Sarah Eckerman (Computer Science ’21)
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.
Faculty Member: Andrew Stuhl (Environmental Studies)
Student: Parker Hula (Environmental Studies ’20)
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.
Faculty Member: John Westbrook (French & Francophone Studies)
Student: Annie Girton (French/Education ’19)
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.
In summer 2017 six Bucknell faculty members and seven students were awarded L&IT summer research project grants.
Faculty Member: David Del Testa (History)
Student: Ethan Pepin (Political Science ‘18)
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.
Faculty Member: Jan Knoedler (Economics)
Students: Autumn Patterson (Interdisciplinary Studies: Economics & Math ‘19) and Emily Tevebaugh (Interdisciplinary Studies: Economics & Math ‘19)
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.
Faculty Member: Vanessa Massaro (Geography)
Student: Sarah Sulkowski (Economics ‘19)
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.
Faculty Member: Nathan Ryan (Math)
Student: Angel Bautista (Math ‘18)
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.
Faculty Member: Andrew Stuhl (Environmental Studies)
Student: Ashley Vecchio (Undeclared ‘20)
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.
Faculty Member: Corrie Walton-McCauley (Civil Engineering)
Student: Patrick Yang (Electrical Engineering ‘19)
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.
Bucknell faculty members and students have been awarded summer grants through Bucknell’s Andrew W. Mellon and L&IT Technology Integration grants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Five faculty-student teams have been awarded Summer Research project stipends to initiate or extend ongoing humanities and social sciences faculty-driven research.
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.
Faculty Member: Vanessa Massaro (Geography)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bucknell faculty members and students have been awarded 2015 summer grants through Bucknell’s Andrew W. Mellon and L&IT Technology Integration grants.
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.
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.
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.
ARBC 103, 104
Isleem will develop a series of app-based modules to enhance spoken Arabic proficiency at intermediate-level Arabic courses.
ECON 418: American Economic History
This senior-level course will incorporate advanced GIS data into redesigned, scaffolded modules.
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.
Five faculty-student teams have been awarded Summer Research project stipends to initiate or extend ongoing humanities and social sciences faculty-driven research.
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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.
Faculty: 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.