Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the FutureFunder campaign in honour of my grandfather, to create an undergraduate research fellowship in digital history, achieved its funding goal.

I wanted to thank everyone who contributed. Whether that contribution was through donations, through sharing on social media, or through sending me emails making ‘hey, you should really talk to [person x]…’ connections, this could not have happened without the support and buy-in of the DH community, my colleagues, and the alumni of the History department. Kylie, Pia, and Ryan in University Advancement were also tremendous supporters, helping garner national media attention, making connections, and coming up with novel ideas about how to promote it further.

Thank you, all!

Now begins the *really* fun part! Over the coming weeks, I’ll be working with University Advancement, our department’s undergraduate committee, and digitally-inclined folks hither and yon to set up the formal parameters for awarding the fellowship. 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 think I will recommend that the student use Reclaim Hosting to do this, since RH’s whole raison d’etre and my own sense of what students need to be doing online mesh very well (and see this post on the future for RH!)

We already have great, digitally-inclined undergraduate students in the history department here. Rob is a HASTAC Scholar. Hollis organized a THATCamp. Oliver is getting into data mining. These are just the three easiest for me to link to. Others like Devin and Joe have done fantastic thinks using Voyant Tools. Matthew, Julia, and Zack have gone into networks in a big way. Allison has been developing expertise with Omeka.

I’m excited to see what’ll happen next. Thank you, everyone, for supporting this Fellowship!