Kathie Gossett and Liza Potts (co-PIs) Awarded $25,000 NEH Grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $17 million in grants for 208 humanities projects, including a $25,000 grant to support a three-day workshop to explore relevant issues and identify requirements for the development of an archive for the preservation of dissertations that incorporate interactive or dynamic digital media.

Kathie Gossett (Iowa State University) and Liza Potts (Michigan State University) are co-PIs on this project. The proposed workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars (e.g., Humanities, Library and Information Sciences, and Computer Sciences) to explore digital media as a discursive strategy and to examine of the norms through which traditional modes of scholarship, like dissertations, are constructed. The proposed workshop seeks to be a launching point from which born-digital dissertations will receive the necessary technological support to encourage their development, deposit, and maintenance. The workshop’s main deliverable will be a white paper that will summarize the intellectual, pedagogic, and technological contexts for developing an open-source archive and will outline the steps necessary to produce a prototype. The white paper, which will be freely available online, will also serve as the basis for further efforts to secure funding, including future grant applications such as an NEH Digital Implementation Grant.