At Carleton University, we have a number of essay awards for undergraduate history students. We do not have any awards geared towards writing history in new media, or doing historical research using digital tools, or any of the various permutations that would broadly fall within big-tent digital humanities.

So I decided to create an award, using the University’s micro-giving (crowdfunding) platform, Futurefunder.

I’m establishing this fellowship in tribute to my grandfather and the values he represented. George Garth Graham did not have any formal education after Grade 8. He educated himself through constant reading. One of my fondest memories is going through his stack of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, and making things with him in his basement workshop. Digital History is often about making, tinkering, and exploring, and this was something that my grandfather exemplified. He had a great love of history, showing my brothers and I around the area, telling us the stories of the land. He was generous with his time and would also quietly help those in need, never asking for nor expecting recognition for his contribution.

I’m calling this a ‘research fellowship’ rather than a scholarship because I want it to encourage future work, rather than reward past work. I intend this fellowship to be available to any History student who has taken the second year, required, HIST2809 Historian’s Craft course (a methods course). The student would have to have a certain GPA (appropriate to their year), and have a potential faculty member and project in mind (and I would help facilitate that). A committee of the department would adjudicate applications.

One of the conditions of the fellowship would be for the student to maintain an active research blog, where she or he would detail their work, their reflections, their explorations and experiments. It would become the locus for managing their digital online identity as a scholar. I imagine that holders of this fellowship would be well set-up to pursue further work in graduate programs in the digital humanities or in the digital media sector. I imagine opportunities for the students to publish with faculty (as did the students who worked on my 2011 ‘HeritageCrowd’ project, writinghistory.trincoll.edu). I know of no other undergraduate fellowship like this, in this field. Students who held such a post would not just be assistants, but potential leaders in the field.

For more details about the Fellowship, and how you can contribute to it, please see the Fellowship’s page on Futurefunder.