IATH NEWS

Alison Booth Receives ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship

March 26, 2013

IATH Fellow Alison Booth is the recipient of a 2013 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship for her work on digital prosopography. Her proposal, titled “The Practice and Theory of Digital Prosopography: Collective Biographies of Women and the Biographical Elements and Structure Schema,” is an extension of her Collective Biographies of Women project (CBW). The grant award of $76,068 will be used to add more material to the project and disseminate findings.

CBW is an open-access, interdisciplinary digital project centered on an annotated bibliography and database of 1271 collective biographies of women published in the United States and Britain, primarily between 1830 and 1940; these books compile some 13,200 short biographies associated with more than 9700 persons (including male and female biographers). The project began with the Collective Biographies of Women: An Annotated Bibliography, a web site built in collaboration with the UVA Library Scholars' Lab. Her work for the fellowship period will apply narrative theory to nonfiction and will explore large-scale, team interpretation of narrative, thinking about both big data and the intimate techniques of textual editing.

The ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships are given to digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. The program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports digital humanistic scholarship in order to encourage a broader understanding of the digital humanities and a more robust infrastructure that can support this type of research.