An international group including researchers from Tufts' Department of Classics was one of eight teams selected from a field of over 80 to be awarded a grant from the first Digging into Data Challenge.
Professor Gregory Crane, chair of the classics department and a member of the team, said its grant-winning research project features meaningful undergraduate involvement that will further efforts both within the department and throughout the university to promote undergraduate research.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and peer agencies in the United Kingdom and Canada sponsored the Digging into Data Challenge and announced Crane's team as a grant winner at an awards ceremony in Ottawa last night.
The challenge is targeted at developing tools to process and analyze data in the humanities and social sciences. The digital revolution has made such information available on an unprecedented scale.
"The challenge asks, ‘How does this notion of scale change the way you do your research? How do you use sophisticated tools to process these huge amounts of information?'" Director of the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities Brett Bobley told the Daily.
The team's project addresses variances in ancient texts. The technology that Crane is working on alongside scholars from Imperial College London and Mount Allison University will produce editions of digital classics texts that allow scholars to link to associated translations and citations in a massive digital library.
"This would be pretty much impossible to do manually," Bobley said. "You couldn't write a book that included all this information, but on a computer you can. It's a really interesting first step towards creating new tools that other scholars will find quite useful."
Undergraduates were and continue to be involved with this project, an element Crane sees as reflecting a wider trend of technological advances that both enable and necessitate undergraduate contributions to research.
"We have an infinite amount of work that needs to be done, that exceeds what the small number of us as professional scholars are able to perform," Crane said.
Crane said that with new technological developments, the results of undergraduates' work can be published in the Tufts Digital Library, making them "far more visible than the most well-read scholarly books of a generation ago."
He said this is paralleled by an ongoing cultural change in academia to recognize the value of undergraduate research.
"We have moved from a very hierarchical discipline where the professor knows everything, and the students just learn as much as they can," Crane said. "Now you can have the expectation that you will be able to contribute in some tangible way early on in your career."
University administrators' support has led them to start initiatives that facilitate undergraduate research, including the creation of the Tufts Summer Scholars Program by University Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha.
Another recent measure taken to encourage students' studies has been the consideration of potential faculty members' ability to support undergraduate research as a hiring criterion. The classics department is at the forefront of this development. In its job description for an open tenured position, department administrators specified that they "especially welcome candidates who can support contributions to and original research by undergraduates." Crane called this move "revolutionary."
According to Crane, the administration's emphasis on making research an integral component of the undergraduate experience and encouraging faculty to actively engage the undergraduate community positions the university to play a leadership role in the academic field.
Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences Vickie Sullivan attributes this to the makeup of the university.
"Tufts is well-positioned to be a leader in undergraduate research because of its outstanding undergraduate population and because of its faculty, who are leaders themselves in research," Sullivan said in an e-mail. "This combination which Tufts offers is particularly powerful."
Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg agreed that engaging in research enhances the learning experience for undergraduates. "Universities really care about extending the frontiers of knowledge, and research is a chance to be personally involved in that," he said. "It's active learning, not just sitting and reading. It's doing."
Bobley indicated that the involvement of undergraduates in Crane's project could offer valuable insight to the NEH."At the moment, we don't have any grant programs that specifically target undergraduate participation," he said. "But I do think it's a very interesting idea, and I'm very curious to see how it goes and see other fields take better advantage of what the undergraduate community has to offer."
