COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A team from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism is one of four winners in the third annual Future of Information Alliance (FIA)-Deutsch Foundation Seed Grant Competition. The five member Merrill College team included journalism student Karen Mawdsley ’15. Merrill Associate Professor Nick Diakopoulos was one of two faculty mentors for the proposed project titled “Revisiting Segregation through Computational History: the case of the WWII Japanese American Tule Lake Segregation Center.”
“This FIA grant is a fantastic opportunity to explore how journalistic methods in computational and data journalism might be applied to an historical archive of national importance,” said Diakopoulos. “It will allow the College of Journalism to work with the College of Information Studies to explore an archive on the Japanese-American concentration camp at Tule Lake in a way that unlocks that archive for the broader public, and provides a model for how to handle sensitive historical data while still exposing interesting stories.”
Other team members include graduate students Drew Barker, Jamers Howland, Emily Keithley and Liz Tobey – all from the College of Information Studies (better known as the iSchool). Joining Diakopoulos as a faculty sponsor is Professor Richard Marciano from the iSchool.
The four winning teams, each of them interdisciplinary, were chosen Dec. 10 from among 12 semifinalist teams competing in a two-hour pitch event at McKeldin Library on the University of Maryland campus.
Nine colleges and schools were represented among the winning teams. “We are excited by the broad participation of the university community in this seed grant program,” said FIA Co-Director Ira Chinoy. “Each of the winning teams will also be working with one or more of six of our 10 Future of Information Alliance partners in carrying out their projects: the National Park Service; the Barrie School; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Newseum.”
ABOUT THE FIA SEED GRANT COMPETITION
Each team in the competition could have of up to five students – undergraduate, graduate or both – from at least two different colleges or schools, with one or two faculty mentors. Each winning FIA-Deutsch Student Fellow will receive a $3,000 stipend. Each winning FIA-Deutsch Faculty Fellow will receive $3,500 (since each team had a pair of faculty mentors splitting $7,000.
Each team will also receive up to $3,000 in expenses to carry out their projects during the winter and spring, and they will present the results of their work at a public forum on Wednesday, May 6, 2015, from 10 to noon in Room 6137, McKeldin Library.
Details of the competition, a list of the four winning teams, and abstracts of the winning proposals are posted on a link from the Future of Information Alliance home page at: http://www.fia.umd.edu/
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