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
Accessing ChatGPT’s ability to mimic humans on social media — Kai-Cheng Yang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Network Science Institute
Algorithmic Bias in AI-Assisted Conversations — Nir Grinberg, Postdoctoral Fellow, Lazer Lab
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
Angelenos Incarcerated — Joanne Afornalli, Graduate Student, English
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
Drawing Participation: Collectively Re-Blocking a Million Neighborhoods — Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga, Faculty, CAMD, Architecture
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
“Herbal Marginalia Diaspora”: Mapping Emergent Forms of Co-existence in Community Gardens — Gokcen Erkilic, Art + Design, CAMD
Her Truth: Analyzing the editorials of Nackey Scripps Loeb — Meg Heckman, Faculty, Journalism
3D/VR Historical Reconstruction of Black Boston Heritage Sites — Jessica Linker, Faculty, History
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 Real-World Migration Flow Network Using Context-Rich Social Media Data — Yukun Yang, Graduate Student, Network Science Institute
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
Modeling the Sociolinguistic Environment and Developmental Linguistic Trajectory of Bilingual Children in a Cultural Context — Priya Mariana Shimpi Driscoll, Education, Mills College at Northeastern University
Networks of Coexistence: Explaining Variation in Cross-Ethnic Ties — Matthew Simonson, Graduate Student, Network Science
The Network of Hidden Plaintiffs in U.S. Supreme Court Litigation — Sahar Abi-Hassan, Faculty, Mills College, Lokey School of Business and Public Policy
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
Quist—A Queer History App — Lisa Arellano, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
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
Renewable Messaging of Fossil Fuel Companies: Corporate Communication Strategies in Authoritarian Regimes — Yutong Si, Graduate Student, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
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
Stylometry-based Analysis of Potential Louisa May Alcott Pseudonyms — Max Chapnick, Postdoctoral Fellow, English
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
3D/VR/360 Videography Best Practices for Oral History and Community Archiving — Jessica Linker, Faculty, History; Angel Nieves, Faculty, History
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
After the War: A Collaborative Public Digital History Project — Cassie Tanks, Graduate Student, History
Cloud Experiential Learning Lab — Alex Cline, Faculty, London, Data Engineering
Community Action Lab — Mario Hernandez and Josh Lown, Sociology, Mills College at Northeastern University; Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Community-Based AI for Human Rights Monitoring — Rahul Bhargava, Journalism; Art + Design, CAMD
Digital Ancestral Altars — Fadeke Castor, Faculty, Philosophy and Religion
Early Black Boston Digital Almanac: K-12 Professional Development Workshops — Nicole Aljoe, Faculty, English
How We Remember: Indigenous Perspectives on Archiving, Museums, and Community History — Claire Lavarreda, Graduate Student, History
Mapping Black London: Engaging Communities in Multiracial History to Build Equitable Futures — Olly Ayers, Faculty, London, History
Native Space — Sarah Kanouse, Faculty, Art & Design
Unveiling of Human-Environment Digital Narratives — Vaishali Kushwaha, Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Travel Grants
Avery Blankenship, Graduate Student, English: (“The Anatomy of a Stain”) and Rare Book School Course, DH 2024.
Burak Ozturan, Network Science Institute: Beyond the Ideological Echo Chambers: Exploring the Dynamics of Diversity, and Demography in Digital Information Ecosystem, Sunbelt 2024
Claire Lavarreda, Graduate Student, History: Rare Book School Course, DH 2024
Jessica Parr, Faculty, History: African Building Heritage, the Atlantic Conference
Zhen Guo, Network Science Institute: Concentration and localization of Google search engine results pages, 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science
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