Stanford Humanities Center Newsletter

The Stanford Humanities Center has awarded 11 research teams seed grants to develop collaborative projects in the humanities. The research groups are managed by Stanford faculty and involve collaborations with scholars both at Stanford and at other institutions.

Humanities scholars increasingly are embarking on ambitious projects that require both the specialized knowledge of more than one researcher and the resources of more than one institution. The network project grants aim to make such collaborations easier and more meaningful by providing the financial and technological support necessary to bring people and resources together across any distance.

The seed grants are intended to support the early stages of project development. During this initial grant period, pilot projects are expected to develop a full proposal seeking external funds for a larger scale initiative.

The network projects form part of a larger online program, which provides each group with a virtual workspace tailored to their needs. These workspaces allow 24/7 access and offer advanced file sharing and web publishing tools, as well as confidential instant messaging, email archiving, and bloging. Perhaps one of the most useful tools is Version Control, which allows large projects with multiple authors to track all changes to a file over time.

According to Technology Specialist Nicole Coleman, it is the flexibility of these virtual workspaces that make them so advantageous to collaborative research. Members can work simultaneously or separately, at any distance, and they can easily share the resources available at their institutions online with the larger group.

Professors Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein, for example, are participating with a group of researchers at the University of Chicago to map the sources of the Encyclopédie. Chicago has the data-mining program and full access to the digitized text files; Stanford wants to analyze the data. With the technologies and financial support available to them through the network grant, Chicago can run the searches and the Stanford group can analyze the raw data Chicago posts to the web.

The network projects represent a vast intellectual terrain, from cross-linguistic investigations to historical studies of ancient Persian texts to digital histories of conservation in the Bay Area. The inspiration comes from the Humanities Center’s successful research workshops, which foster intellectual community and sharing among Stanford faculty, graduate students, and scholars from other institutions. 

In short, the seed grants aim to make teamwork in humanities research possible at a distance and, through collaborative efforts and the use of new technologies, facilitate not just the creation of new knowledge, but also new ways of creating new knowledge.

2008-2009 Humanities Research Network Projects

Anglo-American Antiquarians and Early Modern Science
Michael Shanks, Classics
Giovanna Ceserani, Classics
The Assemblies of Lovers: Art, Poetry, and Religion in Persianate Islam
Shahzad Bashir, Religious Studies
Intimate Encounters, Postcolonial Engagements: Archaeologies of Empire and Sexuality
Barbara Voss, Anthropology
Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment: Producing the Encyclopédie
Keith Baker, History
Dan Edelstein, French and Italian
Law and Society in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest, 332 BC – 640 AD
Joe Manning, Classics
Literary and Cultural History of Contemporary Europe
Amir Eshel, Comparative Literature and German Studies
Poetries in Contact: The Encounter of Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic metrical traditions
Paul Kiparski, Linguistics
Relative Clauses and Noun-modifying Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation
Yoshiko Matsumoto, Asian Languages
Researching the Unpublished James Joyce
Carol Shloss, English
Speed Limits
Jeffrey Schnapp, French and Italian

LINKS:
Humanities Research Network: http://www.humanitiesnetwork.org/
Humanities Research Network Projects:
http://shc.stanford.edu/digital/projects.htm