A humanistic comparative study of cochlear implant technology as an early form of a neural-computer interface. 

Perhaps no medical device has sparked more popular discussion of the "dangers and opportunities of technology" than the cochlear implant (CI). The first true bionic device, CIs (re)produce an absent 'normal' human function. Despite debates about the ramifications of CI technology, few book-length studies of the technology exist and these overwhelmingly emphasize U.S. and European perspectives. This collaborative and comparative project will document the impacts of the technology itself, the influence of the global corporations that market it, and the range of ways implants have been domesticated, maintained, and re-interpreted. At this pivotal moment for the development and global dissemination of neuroprosthetics, with brain implants featured ubiquitously in the headlines, this multi-disciplinary, international project will serve both a documentary and a comparative function, as well as provide a platform through our conference and published work for alternative narratives of CI use.

Research and writing a multi-author volume on the ethics of biotechnology. 

This collaborative research project aims to provide ethical guidance for conservation applications of biotechnologies such as gene editing, synthetic biology, and gene drives. The project team, which includes experts in conservation philosophy, animal ethics, environmental justice, and Indigenous philosophy, will develop conceptual and evaluative resources that are inclusive of a broad range of values and informed by high-rate anthropogenic change. Project outcomes will include academic publications with interdisciplinary reach, conference presentations at interdisciplinary venues, and public-facing scholarship.

An ethnographic study of social media content creators comparatively analyzing folk theories and current academic theories of algorithmic governance. 

This project seeks collaborative team funding to strengthen an equal partnership between academic researchers at Arizona State University and community researchers from The Online Creators’ Association (TOCA) to gather community-based knowledge that TikTok content creators circulate to understand and resist algorithmic governance. We will conduct interviews to map how creators conceptualize the forces that impact their everyday lives: algorithmic content curation and opaquely-defined moderation. Participants will be recruited from TOCA, which is predominantly composed of people from historically marginalized groups. We will publish two academic papers: 1) a content analysis identifying folk theories; 2) a comparative analysis between folk theories and current academic theories of algorithmic governance. We seek to reveal overlapping narratives and produce a shared vocabulary to enable academics and community members to more effectively intervene in the spread of mis/disinformation.

Planning and conducting interdisciplinary case studies and a public-facing speaker series examining the historical, social, economic, political, and epistemic impact of machine listening systems in preparation of a special issue in an academic journal and conference tutorial session.    

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that mobilize sound – i.e., machine listening systems – are being implemented in high-stakes contexts spanning healthcare, human resources, and security. Few scholarly works have investigated their broader impact on society, and public awareness of how these systems affect people’s everyday lives is limited. This project will bring together a multidisciplinary and international group of scholars to advance research on the dangers and opportunities of machine listening from a humanistic perspective. Through working group meetings and a speaker series, the project will explore how the epistemic question of “listening” is shifting with the rise of AI, how machines learn to listen, and how machine listening systems are impacting or could impact society in the near future. The outcomes will include a special issue on machine listening systems (the first of its kind), a conference tutorial session, a piece in The Atlantic, and a white paper for NEH.

Research and analysis of the impact of algorithmic decision-making tools on the lives of incarcerated people within and outside of Pennsylvania’s state corrections system.  

This project will contribute to a growing effort in critical data studies to focus analysis on institutions and their use of algorithmic tools that pose structural harms to prisoners, countering the institutional focus on assessing the (racialized) “risk” individuals pose to the institution and, by extension, society. By examining the limitations and consequent dangers of existing algorithmic tools, this project aims to address how alternative data-informed approaches could lead to the rehabilitation and liberation of incarcerated people.

Development of a podcast series and scholarly book chapters analyzing how persistent narratives of slavery and servitude have influenced popular understanding of artificial intelligence and humans’ ethical engagement with emerging technologies.

Our goal is to investigate how legacies of slavery, as a set of emotional frameworks for determining the parameters of the human, are shaping the perception and reception of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). Much of this framing is done, we aver, through popular culture and the discourse it provokes regarding the scope of human rights. Our key activities are the research, production, and dissemination of six digitally accessible research conversations and two book chapters. Our expected final outcome is to bring past and present conceptions of slavery and servitude, as mediated by popular cultural representations of conversational AI, into the dialogue surrounding the ethical development of AI. This work is vital as we move into a future in which concepts of human dignity and freedom will be reshaped by AI in ways fraught with both danger and opportunity. As the Director and Associate Director of UConn’s Humanities Institute, we are applying as a collaborative team.

Further development of a web publication and edited volume of scholarship and criticism on the cultural and historical impacts of technology on water stewardship.

The project is best described as a multidisciplinary digital humanities and public engagement research initiative with aspirations to produce new knowledge, convene experts, engage the public, and curate resources focused on the nexus of water, technology, and environmental justice. The project emerges from our ongoing, hitherto unfunded work that began with Water Justice and Technology: The Covid-19 Crisis, Computational Resource Control, and Water Relief Policy, a collaborative report and policy critique featuring twelve contributors from various humanistic disciplines and the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ). From this work we established an early development digital humanities platform that, with the support of NEH, we plan to grow into an internationally recognized platform and publication source on the intersections of technology and water.

Independent research into the aesthetics, application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfakes across media contexts, including digital artworks, social activism, museum exhibits, and film and television.  

The project explores the aesthetics, application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfakes across media contexts, including digital artworks, amateur videos, social justice activism, museum initiatives, and film and TV.

A series of convenings among college and university educators and the development of open educational resources concerning the pedagogical use of computational image generation technologies in art history, visual culture, and media studies. 

This proposal requests funding for a series of convenings to create a peer-supported learning community of college/university-level educators who want to integrate a deeper understanding of computational image generation technologies (such as DALL-E 2 or Midjourney) into their teaching practices. Participants will be selected through a nationwide call for participation from those currently teaching in the fields of art history, visual culture, and material culture. To produce as broad an impact as possible, participants will be sought from a highly diverse set of academic and geographic settings. Additionally, the Project Team will produce an openly-accessible website that gathers scholarly information about the dangers and opportunities present at the intersection of computational image generators and the history of human visual artistic production. This website will also describe how this series of convenings was designed and produced as a model for others to use in future.

Research and development of a scholarly monograph examining the cultural tensions surrounding LGBTQ live streaming.  

This project seeks to understand the ambivalent relationship between internet technologies and the empowerment or endangerment of LGBTQ people. It does so by examining one subset of LGBTQ people online: LGBTQ live streamers and their viewers. As many news reports have documented, the phenomenon of live streaming grew exponentially during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly on real-time on platforms like Twitch, Instagram, or Zoom. LGBTQ people have played a prominent yet precarious role in the rise of live streaming. Many LGBTQ streamers have become public role models for a new generation of young LGBTQ internet users and LGBTQ groups gather regularly for events. Concurrently, anti-LGBTQ harassment is rampant on these same platforms. This project looks specifically at LGBTQ streaming on Twitch, the largest live streaming platform, to understand how LGBTQ streamers simultaneously express identity, build community, combat harassment, and navigate regulatory platform politics.

Research and writing a co-authored book on ethical considerations for the practice of data science. 

This project investigates the technology of data science (a collection of techniques to extract value from data). The project advances the argument that data science is a moral practice. The project makes this argument by bringing normative theories and philosophy of science to bear on the practice of data science. The main goal of the project is to offer a systematic analysis of the nature of data science and its inherent ethical dilemmas. Key activities are the identification of ethical dilemmas in each step in the data science work cycle—these steps include data collection, data “cleaning”, data analysis, and communication. The main project outcome is a book manuscript; further outcomes are two peer-reviewed open access journal publications. Each of the steps in the data science work cycle will be the topic of a book chapter and/or article.

Research and development of an open access monograph analyzing internet infrastructure and digital access in Latin American Indigenous communities. 

The goal of this ethnographic and single researcher led project is to examine and address the effects of digital inequalities embedded in code and infrastructure on people's access to the internet, with a focus on Indigenous people in Abya Yala [Latin America]. I aim to identify dangers and opportunities in the design of internet code and infrastructure in light of the agency of Latinx people and their lived experiences. While internet services are taken for granted in many contexts in the global North, in Indigenous territories in the global South cellphone networks and internet networks are frequently not available, having to be built from scratch by people in the communities. Parallel to that, this project will apply participatory design research to collectively prototype new forms of internet interconnection with the goal of leveraging Indigenous control over their digital data, also known as Indigenous digital sovereignty.

Research and writing of a scholarly monograph and associated public events on the history of Google’s first data center in The Dalles, Oregon.

Project 02: Twenty Years of Google in The Dalles, Oregon develops new models for changing the Internet through an environmental history of Google’s first hyperscale data center. Project 02 contributes new perspectives to existing studies of this Internet by analyzing Google’s oldest data center longitudinally, tracing its emergence over the past twenty years. The novel mode of computation implemented in The Dalles produces new practices of occupying land, organizing time, securing data, structuring information, and engineering flows of materials. This monograph traces shifts across Google’s discourse, computing technologies, relationships with local governments, entrenchment of settler colonial processes, and consumption of water and electricity. Project 02 highlights ways that the contingencies of these practices provide opportunities to contest Google’s expansive power, leveraging the more-than-human materialities and histories of this node in this Internet to produce change.

Research and writing of a scholarly monograph on the intersections of information technology, warfare, and state sovereignty with a focus on war planning, drone warfare, and digital mapping. 

This project explores how digital technologies of warfare are reshaping the sovereign state. Historically, states emerged out of institutional changes driven in large part by military competition. Today, however, the technologies of war—more than war itself—are driving state transformation. The resulting book will apply humanistic and social-science methods to examine three intersections between information technology, warfare, and statehood today: planning wars in the virtual domain of cybersecurity, fighting wars remotely through drones, and negotiating resolutions to conflicts through digital mapping. All three cases reveal how representations— conceptual, linguistic, and visual—are an important but largely overlooked element in the political consequences of technological change. Key representations are reshaping how territorial borders function, how new forms of interstate violence are deployed, and how states seek to govern new domains such as the internet.

Research examining the complexities of digital fundraising efforts on commercial social media platforms by diasporic communities seeking to support democratic resistance in Myanmar. 

Influencing the Revolution will study the social media fundraising campaigns that are sustaining Myanmar’s “Spring Revolution,” a movement seeking to restore democracy to the nation. The project argues that, while transnational fundraising aims to support democratic activism in Myanmar, fundraisers’ digital tactics depend on the very profit-generating mechanisms that make social media susceptible to undemocratic outcomes. Through social media archiving, user interviews, and focus group discussions, the goal of this single-researcher study is to document how fundraising networks harness the functionality of social media platforms like Facebook to monetize supporters’ time and attention. Final outcomes— a public commentary, scholarly article, and book proposal—will document the political organizing of an understudied US population and provide insights into the relationship between transnational activism, digital fundraising, and social media’s conversion of users’ engagement into profit.

Research and analysis of the history and development of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the multifaceted impacts on local residents and communities.  

Large research facilities such as astronomical observatories are essential to the advancement of science, but their value to host communities is not always clear. Though social impact assessments for research facilities are often undertaken, proposed facilities can cause tremendous social friction. The proposed project therefore offers a step towards redressing this gap of knowledge, proposing a situational analysis of the history of decision-making that enables the formation of new research infrastructures and the consequences of those decisions as science-society interactions at the sites and host localities of large-scale research infrastructures throughout their lifecycle (i.e., their development, establishment, operation, and decommission) through a case study of the history of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Research and writing of a work of public scholarship, a monograph on the history of life support technology and its impact on American culture.

My project is a history of life support technology in the United States and how it changed American death in the 20th century. It will take the form of a book manuscript focused on the history of the ventilator and its use in the intensive care unit between 1950 and 2000, telling the story of how both medicine and society created, responded to, and interacted with this technology. I will also look at how two early 20th-century devices—the pulmotor resuscitation machine in the 1910s–20s and the iron lung in the 1930s–50s—played foundational roles in this history, not only in technological development but in the broader medical, cultural, and popular discourse about the use of technology at the end of life. The book will be aimed at both an academic and general audience and will use methods and approaches from the academic history of medicine, science and technology studies, and literary journalism.

Ethnographic research culminating in several scholarly articles and a monograph investigating whether precision medicine helps prevent or reproduce health disparities.

This project will ethnographically investigate whether precision medicine can contribute to reducing health disparities experienced by racialized peoples or if it will reproduce such disparities in the genetics-based language of precision medicine. Employing recent insights from the historical study of genetics and postcolonial science studies, this project will trace the processes by which medical researchers practice precision medicine, and deploy the language of this scientific field, as a form of preventative care that addresses health disparities experienced by racialized peoples in Canada. In scholarly articles and a monograph, the findings of this project will contribute to debates within the humanities about bioethics, race and social justice, and postcolonial science. It will contribute to broader audiences including racialized communities, educators, decision-makers in public health discussions through a conference/knowledge exchange, op-eds, social media and podcasts.

This project will publish the book Imagination and Science in Romanticism, written by NEH Fellow Richard C. Sha (NEH grant number FA-56408-12), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access edition.

This project will result in the publishing of the electronic open-access version of the book The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe & Its Critics in Spanish Culture, authored by NEH Fellow Luis Martin-Estudillo (NEH grant number FA-58154-15). The open-access format will be published under a Creative Commons license, rendering it free for download and distribution. With the release of the eBook, Luis Martin-Estudillo will receive at least $500 in royalty payment.

This project will publish the book "American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream," written by Julia L. Mickenberg (NEH grant number FA5576111), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book "Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America," written by Kristine C. Harper (NEH grant number FB-53252-07), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

The purpose of this project is to seek support for open-access digital publication of Whitney Trettien's book "Cut/Copy/Paste: Echoes of Little Gidding" on the Manifold Scholarship digital publishing platform.

This project will publish the book Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries, written by NEH Fellow Jewel A. Smith (NEH grant number FA-53416-07), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of $500 upon release of the open access book.

Photographic Presidents tells a history of photography through stories of how presidents shaped and participated in transformative moments in the history of the medium. Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action as well. Telling a new story about a medium and an institution that have largely grown up together, this book offers readers an accessible, visually engaging story about photography, the presidency, and public life.