6.21 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship

I think an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship would be a good funding source for our project. It would primarily support a year for me to put together the book, but it could also offer some support for individual chapter authors.

This link states that the competitions is closed, but the deadline for this years applications is listed as Sept. 26, 2013.  I will check into that.

This is the description of what proposals are meant to do:

ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project that takes a digital form. Projects may:

• Address a consequential scholarly question through new research methods, new ways of representing the knowledge produced by research, or both;
• Create new digital research resources;
• Increase the scholarly utility of existing digital resources by developing new means of aggregating, navigating, searching, or analyzing those resources;
• Propose to analyze and reflect upon the new forms of knowledge creation and representation made possible by the digital transformation of scholarship.

I think we are a good fit for addressing the first to points.  For the first point, we explore a scholarly question (characterizations of ideologies associated with particular online communities + exploration of factors that connect to/flow across Discourse communities) by using an emerging approach (connective ethnography).  What is more, our work will document + describe connective ethnographic methods suitable for studies conducted at teaching universities.  

For the second point, we will create an eBook to document both our ethnographic findings, and our methods.

We will have to be careful to illustrate that our project is not "purely pedagogical" = but rather that it focuses on  extending connective ethnographic methods (describing and illustrating methods for ethnographic study of online cultures), and on presenting some sample products along with an application of those methods.