The DH Seed Grant Spotlights highlight work supported by the NYU DH Seed Grants. Over the next several posts we will feature the work of the 2021-2022 cohort of faculty grant recipients.
Dr. Elaine Ayers, along with Tandon professors Dr. Ahmed Ansari and Dr. Tega Brain, and Laura Briscoe of the New York Botanical Garden were selected for a 2021-2022 NYU DH Seed Grant for their project Inverting the Wunderkammer: Rethinking Digital Humanities through Botanic Histories & Archives.
Below, Digital Scholarship Graduate Student Specialist Jo Suk interviews Dr. Ayers.
What are you most proud of about your project? How have people in your field engaged with your project?
E.A. We have been incredibly proud of how our collaboration has expanded all of our work - as a historian, I hadn’t considered many of the questions that Tega and Ahmed have raised during our many meetings and workshops, and they have also said that moss has expanded the way they think about design. While our participant list for the pilot workshop was smaller than expected because of last-minute covid-related cancellations, we have received incredibly positive feedback from those participants and from colleagues at the New York Botanical Garden and other botanical gardens around the world. Hopefully we’ll have more to report in the next few months!
What Digital Humanities skills or resources helped you most with your project?
E.A. Tega & Ahmed took the lead here, but we relied heavily on digital technologies from NYU-Tandon in taking, for instance, high resolution microscopic images of mosses / other plants during our pilot workshop at the New York Botanical Garden in May, and we’ll be expanding our use of experimental technologies in our future workshops. We also built a prototype website based on our pilot workshop to share with the NEH - we will make this public in the next week or so.
Did you apply for any other grants?
E.A. We applied to the NEH Digital Humanities grant in the spring of 2021 and were successful - we are still actively working on the project and are launching a series of workshops, a website, and potential publications over the next year using this NEH funding. We used the seed grant funding in part to help with this NEH grant - we held a pilot workshop and several work sessions to use as evidence for the NEH proposal and were able to hire grad students to help with the process.
How, if at all, do you plan to build upon your project going forward?
E.A. The project is expanding massively over the next few months - we are launching a series of new experimental workshops starting in December 2022 that will be held internationally (our pilot workshop only included NY-area-based participants for logistical reasons during the pandemic), our prototyped website will go live, and we plan on co-authoring publications building on the work that we’ve done over the last couple of years.
Read more about Inverting the Wunderkammer: Rethinking the Digital Humanities through Botanic Histories & Archives.
The DH Seed Grants are administered and funded by NYU Libraries, the Center for the Humanities, and NYU Research and Instructional Technology. The goal of the program is to sponsor the initial development of projects that may go on to receive greater funding from external sources or otherwise build NYU’s institutional capacity in Digital Humanities work. We especially welcome projects that give voice or expression to underrepresented communities and that engage with the urban fabric of the cities in which NYU has campuses.
You can also read more about the NYU DH Seed Grant program and keep an eye out for our call for proposals for the 2023-2024 cohort in December.