University of Houston Libraries Digital Research Services (DRS) and Digital Research Commons (DRC) are pleased to announce the 2021 sponsored digital research projects. DRS collaborates with UH faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows on projects involving digital techniques across the humanities, social sciences, and experimental sciences, offering grants at three levels designed to address projects in various stages of development.

2021 sponsored projects are:

A Multilingual Database of Digital News in 54 African Countries
Dani Madrid-Morales, PhD, Journalism, Jack J. Valenti School of Communication
This project seeks to develop a multilingual database of African online news content, and to create a custom-built R package to interact with the database, implement basic text analysis, and create relevant data visualizations.

Sharing Stories from 1977: The National Women’s Conference as a Window into Recent American History
Nancy Beck Young, PhD, and Leandra Zarnow, PhD, History, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS)
This DRC project development grant will support the continued conceptualization and anticipated launch of a website targeted for March 2021 that will announce a multi-year, multi-state, multi-institutional effort led by the University of Houston to document and analyze the experience and impact of thousands of delegates and observers of the 1977 National Women’s Conference.

Building the Past: Memory-Making on the University of Houston Campus
David Guzman and Caitlyn Jones, History, CLASS
This project will generate a dataset to build a digital map of the University of Houston campus that allows visitors to access biographies of the building namesakes and the history of the building’s construction, as well as historical photos or documents related to the building or person.

1771 in 3 Cities: Genre Boundaries and Dispersion
David Mazella, PhD, English, CLASS
Using results from previous iterations of this project, this stage takes the 2000+ items published in the year 1771 in three cities, along with the 10 categories and 100+ genres established earlier, and examines the spatial and boundary relations between literary and extraliterary genres. This project will conduct network analyses and visualizations of these relations, and will also tackle the significant conceptual problem of the “collection” to see whether there is a relation to be drawn between this year’s aggregate genres (e.g., “Works,” “Miscellanies,” periodicals) and its principles of genre differentiation and attraction.

SYRIOS
Kristina Neumann, PhD History, CLASS; Elizabeth Rodwell, PhD, Comparative Culture Studies, CLASS; and Peggy Lindner, PhD, Information and Logistics Technology, College of Technology
In its final form, this online exhibit will guide a wide audience through the different coins and histories of Syrian cities within the Greco-Roman period. The overarching goals are to 1) transform public awareness of the ancient world and Syria in particular; 2) revitalize the perception of Syria as a diverse and vibrant metropolitan region; 3) exemplify the power of objects as testimony to everyday lives and struggles; 4) offer historical professionals an enhanced, digital data source and model applicable to research, teaching, and community outreach; and 5) invite new perspectives into the research of this historic place.

Black Migration Houston
Rachel Afi Quinn, PhD, Comparative Culture Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, CLASS
Black. Migration. Houston. (BMH) is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and community organizers who study the international migration of black people to the Texas Gulf Coast. This project’s objective is to educate students, service providers, and the general public on the intersection of migration, sexuality, and blackness through its public facing website. As this project develops, it will expand the site in the following ways: (1) teaching resources for educators and community members (i.e., syllabi and critical thinking material); (2) resources content for black migrants and 1st generation people (centering the concerns of gender non-conforming and queer persons); (3) an interactive and virtual reality component.

Documentary and oral history of the foundation of the UH College of Medicine
Ruth Bush, MD, JD, Medical Education, UH College of Medicine; and Helen Valier, PhD, Medicine and Society Program, The Honors College
This project intends to enhance existing plans to preserve the documentary and oral history of the UH College of Medicine. Through sponsored projects funding, this project will begin focused collection work for the creation of an interactive digital timeline and visualized social network map, hyper-linked to layers of curated resources. In the longer term, this project will develop a database purposed for meta-analysis of preserved documentary, visual, audio, and other collected media.

From Digitizing to Mining, C.T. Bauer College Archives — A Practical Journey Through Our College’s Public Records from 1947 to 2009
Emese Felvegi, PhD, Decision and Information Sciences, C.T. Bauer College of Business
This project seeks to support the capture, categorization, analysis, and digital exhibition of historical College of Business administration/C.T. Bauer College records by C.T. Bauer College students. Select student groups enrolled in BCIS 1305 during the spring and fall 2021 semesters will participate in various phases of a hands-on project that aims to process the college’s historical documents that are a part of the University of Houston Archives. This cyclical semester-long project aims to process the whole of Bauer archives over the course of the next 2-4 years with work continuing with already photographed assets from 2020.