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Since 2014, the NULab has offered funding for seedling grants, travel, and co-sponsorship of events related to computational social science and digital humanities.

Seedling grants support pilot research to begin a longer-term research project. These grants have funded research assistantships, data sets needed for research, access to tools and software, and travel costs for meetings that initiate, or further, a research project.

Community Collaboration Grants support digital and computational projects that center community engagement, citizen science, or community co-creation.

Travel grants support the presentation of NULab-related research at conferences or substantive NULab-relevant professional development opportunities such as workshops.

Co-sponsorships support NULab-relevant speakers and events, ideally open to the public or bringing a multi-institutional or regional audience to NU.

The NULab holds two rounds of grant applications, in the fall and spring semesters; applications for travel grants for conferences that fall outside of these two rounds will be considered as funds are available. See CFP Process page for more information.

Projects Funded by NULab Seedling Grants

The Network of Hidden Plaintiffs in U.S. Supreme Court Litigation — Sahar Abi-Hassan, Faculty, Mills College, Lokey School of Business and Public Policy

Stylometry-based Analysis of Potential Louisa May Alcott Pseudonyms — Max Chapnick, Postdoctoral Fellow, English

Drawing Participation: Collectively Re-Blocking a Million Neighborhoods — Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga, Faculty, CAMD, Architecture

Renewable Messaging of Fossil Fuel Companies: Corporate Communication Strategies in Authoritarian Regimes — Yutong Si, Graduate Student, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Accessing ChatGPT’s ability to mimic humans on social media — Kai-Cheng Yang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Network Science Institute

Mapping Real-World Migration Flow Network Using Context-Rich Social Media Data — Yukun Yang, Graduate Student, Network Science Institute

3D/VR Historical Reconstruction of Black Boston Heritage Sites — Jessica Linker, Faculty, History

3D/VR/360 Videography Best Practices for Oral History and Community Archiving — Jessica Linker, Faculty, History; Angel Nieves, Faculty, History

Algorithmic Bias in AI-Assisted Conversations — Nir Grinberg, Postdoctoral Fellow, Lazer Lab

Angelenos Incarcerated — Joanne Afornalli, Graduate Student, English

Analyzing Social Media Images used in Political Communication — Seo Eun Yang, Faculty, Political Science and Communications; Yakov Bart, Faculty, Business; Costas Panagopoulos, Faculty, Political Science

A Public History of New York City Latinx Comedy — Isabel Martinez, Faculty, Sociology and Anthropology and Cultures, Societies and Global Studies

Art of the March — Team: Dietmar Offenhuber, Faculty, Art+Design and Public Policy; Nathan Felde, Faculty, Art+Design; and Alessandra Renzi, Faculty Concordia University

Atlas of Southern Memory — Caroline Klibanoff, Graduate Student, History

The Birth of Boston: Reconstructing Boston’s Social History in 1676 — Chris Parsons, Faculty, History

The Black Architects Archive — J. Cephas, Faculty, Architecture

#BlackLivesMatter: The Digital Decolonization of Online Personal Narratives & The Rise of Transmedia Activism — Taryn Gilligan, Graduate Student, English

BookNet: Building A Dataset of Narrative Features — Yakov Bart, Faculty, Business; Samsun Knight, Postdoctoral Researcher, Business

Building Up the Bay: A Digital Archive — Zobeida Chaffee-Valdes, Graduate Student, History

Characterizing the Impact of Influential Actors on the Dynamics of #MeToo Online Social Movement — Silvio Amir, Faculty, Computer Science; Yakov Bart, Faculty, Marketing; Michael Manzon, Student Researcher, Computer Science; Sean O’Hara, Student Researcher, Finance

Communication Science in the Digital Age, International Communication Association — Brooke Foucault Welles, Faculty, Communication Studies

Comprehensive Indicators of the Urban Form — Geoff Boeing, Faculty, Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Contemporary Literature’s Vexed Democratization — Juliana Spahr, Faculty, Oakland, English; Stephanie Young, Faculty, Oakland

The Critical Fan Toolkit: Fanfiction Genres, Ideologies and Pedagogies — Cara Marta Messina, Graduate Student, English

Cycles of conflict, a century of continuity: Using computational and network analysis techniques to measure why some ideas succeed, and others fail — Laura Nelson, Faculty, Sociology and Anthropology

DH Hub: Research Gathering Series, Spring 2019 — Megan Barney, Graduate Student, History; Juniper Johnson, Graduate Student, English

Early Black Boston Digital Almanac — Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English

Early Caribbean Digital Archive — Team: Elizabeth Dillon, Faculty, English; Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English; Ben Doyle, Graduate Student, English; Elizabeth Hopwood, Graduate Student, English

Encoding Early Periodical Writing by Women of Color — Team: Julia Flanders, Co-Principal Investigator; Nicole Aljoe, Co-Principal Investigator; Jacob Murel, Senior Encoder

Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) — Team: Sara Wylie, Faculty, Sociology/Anthropology and Health Sciences; Lourdes Vera, Graduate Student, Sociology; Dietmar Offenhuber, Faculty, Art+Design and Public Policy; Casey Greenleaf, Undergraduate Student, Cultural Anthropology; Cole Alder, Undergraduate Student, Sociology and Environmental Studies

Exploring GPT3 Training for ‘Black’ Neural-Network Text Generation — Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Faculty, English

Responsible Research and Innovation in the Age of Big Data — Sina Fazelpour, Faculty, Philosophy and Computer Science

A Global Ranking of Cities by Accessibility to Services — Talia Kaufmann, Graduate Student, Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Gossamer Network— Cameron Blevins, Faculty, History

#HashtagActivism: Network Counterpublics in the Digital Age — Team: Moya Bailey, Faculty, Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Brooke Foucault Welles, Faculty, Communication Studies; Sarah Jackson, Faculty, Communication Studies

Her Truth: Analyzing the editorials of Nackey Scripps Loeb — Meg Heckman, Faculty, Journalism

Ignatius Sancho’s London — Olly Ayers, Faculty, London, History; Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English and Africana Studies

Ignatius Sancho’s Subscribers — Lawrence Evalyn, Faculty, English ; Chinma Nnadozie-Okananwa, Research Assistant, English ; Alisa C. Chen, Research Assistant, English

The Impact of Race and Gender in Online Dating — Team: Apryl Williams, Faculty, Sociology, Susquehanna University; Ronald E. Robertson, Graduate Student, Network Science; and Hanyu Chwe, Graduate Student, Network Science

The Leadership Structure & Power Dynamics of Digitally-Enabled Leaderful Movements — Adina Gitomer, Graduate Student, Network Science

Letterpress Goes 3D — Ryan Cordell, Faculty, English; Kenneth Oravetz, Project Manager

THE BROWNIES’ BOOK: Mapping Black Boston Education Histories — Tieanna Graphenreed, Graduate Student, English

Mapping Black Activism, 1700-1860 — Jessica Parr, Faculty, History

Mapping power dynamics and participation of children and youth in the decision-making
processes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
— Olga Skaredina, Graduate student, Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Mapping the Early Caribbean in Boston — Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Faculty, English

Mapping the Origins of West End Theatre in London — Peter Maber, London, English

Mapping transformation: How changing neighborhood identities affect civic life — Meg Heckman, Faculty, Journalism; Elieen O’Grady, Ruth Hunger, and Jordan Erb, Graduate Students, Journalism

Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive: Mapping Topographies of Revolution — Team: Elizabeth Dillon, Faculty, English; Ryan Cordell, Faculty, English; Noelle Baker, independent scholar; Sonia Di Loreto, Faculty, Universita di Torino; Leslie Eckel, Faculty, Suffolk University

Mapping Social Infrastructure for Disaster and Pandemic Resilience — Timothy Fraser, Graduate Student, Political Science

Measuring Affective Dynamics in Polarized Publics and Counterpublics — Brooke Foucault Welles, Faculty, Communication Studies; Ryan Gallagher, Graduate Student, Network Science

Mexican Textile Factories 1843-1857 — Hunter Moskowitz, Graduate Student, History

Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance — Moya Bailey, Faculty, Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Networks of Coexistence: Explaining Variation in Cross-Ethnic Ties — Matthew Simonson, Graduate Student, Network Science

News-Based Early Warning System — Samuel Fraiberger, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Network Science

Novels in the News: The Reprinting of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers — Ryan Cordell, Faculty, English; Avery Blankenship, Graduate Student, English

Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840–1914 — Ryan Cordell, Faculty, English

The Paradox of Hate Speech — Robin Lange, Graduate Student, Network Science

Photogrammetry and Public History: The View From Lower Allston — Jim McGrath, Faculty, History

Power’s Inversions — Kasya O’Connor Grant, Graduate Student, History

The Prevalence of Backfire Effects After the Correction of Misinformation and Fake News and Backfire Effects — Briony Swire-Thompson, Postdoctoral Researcher, Network Science Institute

Relating Digital Trace Data to User-Level Perceptions: Satire, Misinformation, and Source Cues — Stefan McCabe, PhD Candidate, Network Science

(Re)Making/(Re)Marking: Rhetoric, Design, and Markup in the Writing Classroom — Kevin Smith, Graduate Student, English

Risograph on Risograph — Kenny Oravetz, Graduate Student, English

Seeing Our Neighborhoods: Providing Public Access to the Boston Globe Photograph Collection — David Smith, Faculty, Computer Science; Giulia Taurino, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Experiential Artificial Intelligence

Shakespeare and Punjab Digital Archive (SPDA) — Vijeta Saini, Graduate Student, English

Simulating Epistemic Injustice — Alexandros Koliousis, Faculty, London, Computer and Data Science; Brian Ball, Faculty, London, Philosophy; Jason Radford, Faculty, Network Science

Speculative Knowledge and The Fugitive Caribbean — Elizabeth Dillon, Faculty, English; Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English; Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English

Strategic Narratives of Russia’s War in Ukraine: A Comparative Study of the United States and the European Union — Xuechen Chen, Faculty, London, Politics and International Relations

Texts of Taste — Avery Blankenship, Graduate Student, English

Towards a networked contact theory: Adolescent friendship, intergroup contact, and attitudes towards sexual minorities — Cassie McMillan, Faculty, Sociology and Criminology

Transatlantic Newspaper Symposium — Ryan Cordell, Faculty, English

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire project — Liam MacLean, Graduate Student, History; Benjamin Grey, Graduate Student, History; Paul Martin, Graduate Student, History; Fahim Rahman, Graduate Student, History

Triggered Suspicion: How to Minimize Unintended Consequences of Fact-checking — Myojung Chung, Faculty, Journalism

Upskilling during the Great Recession: Why Did Employers Demand Greater Skill and What are the Consequences? — Alicia Sasser-Modestino, Faculty, Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics

Viral Texts — Ryan Cordell, Faculty, English

Visualizing the 1721 Epidemic — Christopher Parsons, Faculty, History

Visualizing Early Colonial Philadelphia: A Digital Narrative on the Role of Health in Philadelphia’s Early Urbanization — Molly Nebiolo, Graduate Student, History

Wapping Dispute — Sam Kemp, Faculty, Creative Writing; Amil Mohanan, Faculty, Philosophy

When I Learn the News is False: Fact-checking Information as a Tool to Combat Spread of Fake News — Myojung Chung, Faculty, Journalism

Word-Embedding Models and the Digital Dissection of Early Modern Anatomy — Jacob Murel, Graduate Student, English

Women Writers Project documentary — Julia Flanders, Faculty, English

A Women’s History of the Boston Globe — Meg Heckman, Faculty, Journalism

XM<LGBT/> — Abbie Levesque, Graduate Student, English

Community Collaboration Grants

Digital Ancestral Altars — Fadeke Castor, Faculty, Philosophy and Religion

Early Black Boston Digital Almanac: K-12 Professional Development Workshops — Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English

Mapping Black London: Engaging Communities in Multiracial History to Build Equitable Futures — Olly Ayers, Faculty, London, History

Cloud Experiential Learning Lab — Alex Cline, Faculty, London, Data Engineering

Native Space — Sarah Kanouse, Faculty, Art & Design

How We Remember: Indigenous Perspectives on Archiving, Museums, and Community History — Claire Lavarreda, Graduate Student, History

After the War: A Collaborative Public Digital History Project — Cassie Tanks, Graduate Student, History

Travel Grants

Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English and CSGS: Early Caribbean Digital Archive Project Team, “A Point of Entry: Re-presenting Enslaved Lives in the Early Caribbean Digital Archive,” at The Caribbean Digital conference

Victoria Dey, Graduate Student, World History: “Wokeism in the 1980s: An Examination of Racial Consciousness in Black French Youth Publications” at the Colonial Legacies
Revisited in the Digital Era conference

Risa Kitagawa, Faculty, Political Science / International Affairs: “The Politics of Colonial Responsibility: Evidence from Parliamentary Debates” at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

Alisa Chen, Graduate Student, English: “Multicultural & Multilingual TEI Encoding: A Comparative Study of British Romanticism and Chinese Tang Poetry through the Lens of Romantic ecology and affect narratology” submitted to the TEI 2023 annual conference

Adina Gitomer, Graduate Student, Network Science: “Stop scrolling!: Youth activism and political remix on TikTok” at the 73rd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association

Seo Eun Yang, Faculty, Political Science: “Automatically uncovering visual dimensions in political communication” at the PolMeth XL Conference

Galen Bunting, Graduate Student, English: T.S. Eliot Summer School, “Global Eliot” seminar

Adina Gitomer, Graduate Student, Network Science: “The speech we miss: (Re)examining young peoples’ participation in U.S. presidential election discourse” at International Communication Association (ICA)

Kendra Lange, Graduate Student, Network Science: “A Meta-Study of Multimodal Team Research” at International Communication Association Conference

Alexi Quintana Mathé, Graduate Student, Network Science: “Who follows Whom on Twitter: The role of geography and ideology” at the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2s2)

Emre Tapan, Graduate Student, Political Science: “A Populist Anti-Americanism? A Snapshot of Turkish Public Opinion through Social Media” and “Twitter Opinion Barometer on Turkish-American Relations” at International Conference on Computational Social Science

Giulia Taurino, Postdoc, AI:  “Anticipatory Techniques for Broken Futures. A methodathon on critical design, algorithmic dysfunctions and practices of care” at Anticipation 2022

Ana Abraham, Graduate Student, Political Science: “Quantifying the Rhetoric of Polarization: A Word Embeddings Approach to the American Ideological Divide” at TextXD (Text Analysis Across Domains)

Jacob Murel, Graduate Student, English — “Digital Approaches to Bibliography & Book History” workshop at Rare Book School 2021

Garrett Morrow, Graduate Student, Network Science — “Putting Urban Technology to Work: Technological Determinism and the Real, Breathing Smart City” at Southern Political Science Association’s (SPSA) annual conference

Abbie Levesque, Graduate Student, English — “XM<LGBT/>: Enacting the QueerOS” at ACH2019

Avery Blankenship, Graduate Student, English — “Novels in the News: The Reprinting of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” at ACH 2019

Cameron Blevins, Faculty, History — Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT)

Cara Messina, Graduate Student, English — “Reimagining Romance: ‘The Legend of Korra’ Critical Fandom Practices” at ACH2019

David Medina, Graduate Student, English — “Decolonizing the Archive: The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Digital Remix” at SEA 2019

Gregory Palermo, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Hanyu Chwe, Graduate Student, Network Science — Sunbelt 2019

Jeffrey Sternberg, Graduate Student, Sociology — “Using Computer Vision to Capture the Collective Perception of a Neighborhood” at PaCSS 2019

John Wihbey, Faculty, Journalism — “Breaking News and Younger Twitter Users: Comparing Self-report Motivations with Online Behavior” at the International Conference on Media and Society

Justin Haner, Graduate Student, Political Science — “Organizing Europe: An Analysis of Expanding Zones of Common Governance and the Long-Term Decline in European Armed Conflict” at the Southern Political Science Association’s (SPSA) annual conference

Molly Nebiolo, Graduate Student, History — “The Birth of Boston” at DH2019

Ryan Gallagher, Graduate Student, Network Science — “Core-Periphery Decomposition of Networked Publics and Counterpublics” at ICA 2019

Sarah Shugars, Graduate Student, Network Science — “The Structure of Reasoning: Inferring Conceptual Networks from Free Response Text” at Sunbelt 2019

Brooke Foucault Welles, Faculty, Communication Studies — “The Battle for #Baltimore: Networked Counterpublics and the Contested Framing of Urban Unrest” at the International Communication Association Annual Conference

Carolina Mattsson, Graduate Student, Network Science — Social Science Foo Camp

Geoff Boeing, Faculty, Public Policy and Urban Affairs — “Urban Spatial Order: Street Network Orientation, Configuration, and Entropy” at NetSci 2019

Hanyu Chwe, Graduate Student, Network Science — NetSci 2019

Jonathan Fitzgerald, Graduate Student, English — “Stranger Genres: Computationally Classifying Reprinted Nineteenth Century Newspaper Texts” at DH2018

Juniper Johnson, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Kaitlin and Megan Woods, Graduate Students, History — “‘From Grateful Friends’: American-Luxembourgish World War II Memory on Luxembourg’s Landscape” at the 2019 National Council on Public History (NCPH) annual meeting

Meg Heckman, Faculty, Journalism — “Her Truth: Analyzing the Editorials of Nackey Scripps” at the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference

Molly Nebiolo, Graduate Student, History — Digital Humanities Summer Institute; “The Birth of Boston: Digitally Representing Seventeenth Century Boston Using ArcGIS” at DH2019

Sarah Shugars, Graduate Student, Network Science — “The Structure of Reasoning: Inferring Conceptual Networks from Free Response Text” at the 2018 North American Social Networks Conference (NASN)

William Quinn, Graduate Student, English — “The Social Media of The Crisis: Letters to the Editor and Literary Production” at Mediating American Modernist Literature: the Case of/for Big Magazines, 1880–1960

Zhengyan Yu, Graduate Student, Information Design and Visualization — “Close and Distant Reading via Named Entity Network Visualization: A Case Study of Women Writers Online” at IEEE VIS 2018

Gregory Palermo, Graduate Student, English — HASTAC 2017

Jonathan Fitzgerald, Graduate Student, English — American Studies Association 2017

John Wihbey, Faculty, Journalism — “Knowing the Numbers: Assessing Attitudes among Journalists and Educators about Using and Interpreting Data, Statistics, and Research” at the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Top Rated Research Paper for the conference.

John Wihbey, Faculty, Journalism — “Exploring the Ideological Nature of Journalists’ Social Networks on Twitter and Associations with News Story Content” at the KDD Data Science + Journalism Workshop/Conference

Nicole Keller, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Sarah Payne, Graduate Student, English — American Studies Association 2017

Sarah Shugars, Graduate Student, Network Science — “The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes” at Midwest Political Science Association and “Mapping Conceptual Networks” at the 10th Annual Political Networks Conference

Thanasis Kinias, Graduate Student, History — “Transoceanic Newspaper Exchange in the Nineteenth Century” at Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP)

Bill Quinn, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Gregory Palermo, Graduate Student, English — Workshop on Quantitative Text Analysis for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Brown University

Jonathan Fitzgerald, Graduate Student, English — “What Made the Front Page in the 19th Century?: Computationally Classifying Genre in ‘Viral Texts’” at Keystone DH; “Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in the Nineteenth Century Newspaper” at American Literature Association Symposium

Nicole Keller, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Sarah Payne, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Syed Arefinul Haque, Graduate Student, Network Science — Complex System Summer School

Carolina Mattson, Graduate Student, Network Science — Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School

Dan Calacci, Lazer Lab — “Frame of Mind: Using Statistical Models for Detection of Framing and Agenda Setting Campaigns” at Association for Computational Linguistics

Jim McGrath, Graduate Student, English — Digital Humanities Summer Institute; “Crowdsourcing In Theory and Practice: Lessons from The Boston Bombing Digital Archive” at Keystone DH

Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English — “‘The Memoir of Florence Hall’ (1820ca) and the Caribbean Slave Narrative Tradition” at Society of Early Americanists-Omohundro Institute

Jim McGrath, Graduate Student, English — poster presentation on Our Marathon at Digital Humanities Conference 2014; poster presentation on DHQ at TEI Conference and Members Meeting