The Digital Dissertation Fellowships will support graduate students wishing to include significant digital components in their dissertation research projects in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences. Fellowships provide funding of $5,000. The funding will be received as a one-time award.
Recipients will integrate digital approaches into a significant portion of their dissertation research. Recipients will develop a significant aspect of a digital component of their dissertation research during the summer of 2018. Recipients will also meet as a cohort three times during the fall of 2018, culminating with a public presentation of their research. Recipients will also submit a brief reflection on their experience.
Katherine Hysmith
Katherine Hysmith is a PhD Student in American Studies with research interests in Food Studies, Women & Gender Studies, Material Culture, and Digital Humanities. Hysmith’s dissertation “investigates how women in the United States have used and continue to use food as a means of resistance, focusing on the evolving technologies they use to express that resistance.” Hysmith will use the Digital Dissertation fellowship to develop digital methodologies in two ways; “first, is a process of digital data collection and organization; and second, a digital and public-facing multimodal presentation of [her] final dissertation narrative.”
Tyler Easterbrook
Tyler Easterbrook is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow in English and Comparative Literature with research interests in Digital Rhetoric, Rhetorical theory, Science and Technology studies. Specifically, Easterbrook is interested in the Terms of Service agreements on the internet and the dilemma that, other than corporate lawyers, no one understands them. Easterbrook will use the Digital Dissertation Fellowship “for support in developing an interactive web-based interface that challenges users to reimagine their engagement with terms of service agreements.”
Joseph Crane
Joseph Crane is a PhD Candidate in Sociology who completed his MA in Sociology at Carolina in 2017. Crane’s research project “is to examine variations in political speech across time, more specifically how the narrative stories told by members of an online politically conservative community change over time and especially how they change in reaction to major political events, such as presidential elections.” Crane will use a Python script to scrape comments from a chosen online community, and will then perform a content analysis on this scraped data.
Angus Lyall
Angus Lyall is a fifth year PhD Student in Geography that has been working on his dissertation project since 2014 “conduct[ing] interviews and participant observation with over 150 indigenous informants in five communities to explore accelerated cultural change and territorial transformations in the contemporary era of oil extraction.” Lyall will use the Digital Dissertation to “deploy participatory filmmaking, as a medium for sparking ethnographic reflections from indigenous individuals and groups on the issue of urbanization” and “to develop a web-based platform that fully integrates my video, audio, and archival research products in a series of historical maps.”
Gabriel Moss
Gabriel Moss is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the History 
department writing a dissertation entitled Hostile Terrain: Empire, Resistance, and Military Geography on the Roman Frontier which uses tools like GIS. Moss will use the Digital Dissertation to “provide [him] with invaluable time and resources to perfect mapping techniques for evaluating historical environments and to develop methods of digital publication to present my data in an interactive format…including a series of interactive maps using ArcGIS Online, and perhaps to use that platform’s new “story mapping” features to create a public-facing portal”
Melissa Dollman
Melissa Dollman is a PhD Student in American Studies with research interests in Film/Media and Digital Humanities. Dollman’s dissertation Changing Lanes: A Reanimation of Shell Oil’s Carol Lane, is interested in “Carol Lane” a public relations program targeting women drivers sponsored by Shell Oil Company from 1947-1974. Dollman uses several digital components in the dissertation but will specifically use the Digital Dissertation Fellowship to develop a digital platform for the Carol Lane archive that she has been working on since 2013, amassing over 3,000 items.
