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. Noonan was selected for a 2021-2022 NYU DH Seed Grant for her project “Covid Collections”. Below, Digital Scholarship Graduate Student Specialist Jo Suk interviews Dr. Noonan.
What are you most proud of about your project? How have people in your field engaged with your project?
E.N. We organized a Zoom event in April 2022 that featured representatives of three different Covid collecting projects to share and reflect on their experiences. The discussion among the panelists and with the audience was incredibly useful, demonstrating the genuine interest in the phenomenon of rapid response Covid collecting and the utility of our project.
What Digital Humanities skills or resources helped you most with your project?
E.N. Our project team (made up of faculty and graduate students, split between NYU and University of Delaware) made effective use of Slack to communicate and share information between our weekly Zoom meetings. As part of our process for deciding what form and scope our fully realized digital project will take, the team undertook a “user stories” exercise to brainstorm what questions and needs diverse users might bring to a site about Covid collections. And we’ve all used social media and other online professional networks to make sure we are aware of both Covid collecting efforts that should receive our survey and possible models for the website we want to build.
How, if at all, do you plan to build upon your project going forward?
E.N. The Covid Collections project has been looking at models and carefully considering what kind of digital tool it would like to build using the data collected by our initial (and ongoing) surveys. We want to be thoughtful about setting out to build a project that can encompass the tremendous diversity of Covid collections and be useful to a wide range of users (not just scholars) while also being sustainable in terms of both its technical infrastructure and the labor necessary to maintain it. We are close to making some key decisions and applying for production funding.
Read more about Covid Collections.
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.