The same professor who wrote a textbook online, led his first-year students in a scavenger hunt in the quad, ran a digital archaeology dig, and played Mumford & Sons in his lecture will have his idea for a digital history research scholarship fully funded by Futurefunder.
Assistant history professor Shawn Graham said his grandfather provided the inspiration for the digital fellowship, named the George Garth Graham Undergraduate Digital History Research Fellowship.
He said it is a chance for students to participate in “hands-on collaborative work on a faculty member’s digital history project.”
The fellowship is worth $5,000, half of which is funded by the university’s crowdfunding website Futurefunder, with the other half being matched by the Faculty of Arts and Social Science (FASS), according to the Futurefunder web page.
Graham said the department hopes to see its first fellows by the winter term of 2014.
A requirement is that students must have taken HIST 2809: The Historian’s Craft course, he said.
FASS dean John Osborne said he has been impressed by Graham’s “remarkably entrepreneurial” spirit.
He said he met Graham as a graduate student in Rome and was “thrilled” at the project’s success.
He added that matching the Futurefunder amount “is good for the faculty” and that he hopes this will encourage other people to look seriously at Futurefunder as a way of realizing projects.
Futurefunder is a micro-funding site that allows communities and projects to find each other, according to Ryan Davies, director of communications for university advancement.
He said it’s a website that allows projects that wouldn’t find support through traditional fundraising methods to find a network of people who want to support these endeavours.
“[Graham] made a really good case for what he wanted to do . . . and was clear about the potential impact,” Davies said.
Graham attributed the success to over 100 individual tweets and Facebook shares, personal appeals to history department alumni, and an article in the Globe and Mail, which helped the fellowship gain national exposure.
He said he named the fellowship after his grandfather because he was a builder.
“He built things, he built companies, he built communities. He had no formal education past Grade 8 and so he was largely self-taught. These are all qualities I think that dove-tail nicely with the digital humanities and its ethos of building as a way of knowing,” Graham said via email.
“I’d like to think Grandpa would’ve got a kick out of the hands-on nature of what the fellowship is promoting, but I know he certainly would not have appreciated any fuss being made on his behalf.”
