Funded! ACLS Digital Extension, $150,000

We are very excited to announce that the Crow team has been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension grant in the amount of $150,000. Congratulations to our Crow team, and in particular, to Shelley Staples, Ashley Velázquez, Hadi Banat, Bradley Dilger, Ali Yaylali, Aleksey Novikov, and Adriana Picoral. These Crowbirds contributed extensively to developing our application. We also wish to thank those at University of Arizona who supported our grant writing and submission: Kim Patton (Research, Discovery, & Innovation), Beth E. Stahmer (Social and Behavioral Science Research Institute), and Jane Zavisca (Associate Dean for Research, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences).

ACLS Digital Extension grants support digital research projects in humanities and the humanistic social sciences. According to John Paul Christy, director of public programs at ACLS, “This year’s awardees share a commitment to the kinds of community building – across disciplines, institutions, languages and cultures – that strengthen the enterprise of the digital humanities.” The Crow team is thrilled to be one of the first writing research projects funded by ACLS (if not the first one).

Our project, “Expanding the Corpus and Repository of Writing: An Archive of Multilingual Writing in English,” will run for three semesters, from July 2019 until December 2020. Key personnel on the grant include Staples (PI) and Dilger (Co-PI), research assistants at Arizona (Novikov; Picoral; Yalalyi) and Purdue (Lan; Gao) as well as undergraduate research assistants at Purdue. We also will continue to work with our amazing developer, Mark Fullmer.

This grant will allow our team to advance research in several areas. First, it will help us expand our data collection of multilingual writers to a new population of heritage Spanish writers at the University of Arizona (a newly designated Hispanic Serving Institution). Second, we will be able to automate some of our intertextuality research by creating a new computational tool. Our final goal for this project is to offer extensive outreach to researchers, teacher-researchers, and developers. To reach this goal, we plan to conduct multiple training workshops for teachers and researchers on how to use the Crow platform, as well as train teacher-researchers how to add their own texts to the Crow platform and train developers on how to use the API for their own projects. ACLS support will enable us to offer support and incentives to these educators.

Thanks again to everyone involved in various steps of the grant application in different capacities. We remain grateful to our current funders, the Humanities Without Walls Consortium, and our institutions, Purdue University, the University of Arizona, and Michigan State University. We are very happy to continue expanding Crow with the help of their continuing support.