We're pleased to announce the winners of the Spring 2020 Digital Matters Faculty Grants, Prof. Aislinn McDougall, and Prof. Carlos Santana!

DM will continue to award several faculty grants each semester for the next several years.

Aislinn McDougall

Visiting Assistant Professor

Department of English

Working title - Ghosts of Banks Island: Negotiating Sovereignty and Community in Cst. McDougall’s Sachs Harbour R.C.M.P. Detachment, 1953

Bio: Aislinn McDougall is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Utah. Her research addresses the content-based, formal, and material infiltrations of digital technologies on North American fiction and narrative as an access point for theorizing the twenty-first-century shift from postmodernism to post-postmodernism. As a means of opening up her literary studies beyond the established circle of postmodern and post-postmodern American authors, she has more recently begun to shift her focus toward digitality in works that offer more diverse perspectives, voices, and modes, looking specifically at methods for digital decolonization.

Project Description:Her proposed project for the DM Faculty Grant Program, “Ghosts of Banks Island: Negotiating Sovereignty and Community in Cst. McDougall’s Sachs Harbour R.C.M.P. Detachment, 1953,” is a digital exhibit that exposes, through photographic archive and interactive mapping, the narratives of colonial contact that haunt the Canadian Arctic.

Carlos Santana

Assistant Professor

Department of Philosophy

Working title - Whose Anthropocene?

Bio: Carlos Santana is a philosopher of science whose work is as a consulting conceptual engineer to the environmental sciences. He’s written and presented about a range of key scientific concepts, from “biodiversity” to “Anthropocene” to “novel ecosystem.” As a deeply interdisciplinary researcher, Carlos supplements traditional philosophical methods with experimental data, computer simulations, and data science. In addition to the University of Utah’s Department of Philosophy, Carlos is affiliated with Utah’s Global Change and Sustainability Center and the Center for Ecological Planning + Design.

Project Description: Surprisingly, the stratigraphic term “Anthropocene” has caught on at least as much in the humanities and social sciences as it has in the geosciences. This has led for numerous calls for researchers in the humanities and social sciences to collaborate with geologists in formally defining and ratifying the Anthropocene epoch. But, as the concept enters its third decade of life, to what extent do we all mean the same thing by “Anthropocene?” I’ll address this using digital methods from corpus linguistics to compare how the term used in geology and the environmental humanities, to see what prospects for a transdisciplinary understanding of the Anthropocene remain.

Call for Applications: Digital Matters Faculty Grant Program, Fall 2020

Carlos Santana, Spring 2020 DM Faculty Grant