[Betsy Sneller]

Hello all!

tl;dr: We\’re inviting applications to join an \”advisory committee\” from scholars across the humanities – whose work may benefit from long-form remote self-recording from participants. We want to make the end app as widely useful as possible, so hope to recruit advisory members from a range of humanities disciplines and institutions! Application is due in one week (March 15).  Long version below:

I was recently awarded an NEH-funded Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, aimed at developing an open-source app for collecting long-form ethnographic recording data remotely (mostly via smart phones).

In the wake of COVID-19, many research programs that relied on face-to-face interactions with participants were upended, and researchers across disciplinary boundaries had to pivot to digital methods. For humanities researchers working with long duration recordings or ethnographic work, this has been a particular challenge: most web app solutions limit audio recording times to around 5 minutes, but many ethnographic projects require recordings of up to an hour or more long. Thanks to a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (#HAA-284835), the Ethnographic Remote Recording project builds on a mobile app (for iOS and Android) solution successfully developed for one project (MI Diaries) and adapted to a second project (Shtisel Diary), with the goal of publishing the app code and installation instructions open-source, so that anyone can easily build their own remote recording app for their own research. Drawing together an advisory committee of humanities researchers from different fields, we aim to redevelop the existing mobile app to include features useful to a wide variety of fields.

Accepted applicants will become members of the overall Advisory Team, which will guide the app design. Members will also receive a ½ day remote training session, support for setting their project up in the system, and instruction on how to use the system for conducting their own remote ethnographic research. Advisory committee members additionally receive an honorarium for their time ($2000 total). The goal of this project is to create an open-source app that can be used for ethnographic research across a variety of fields. To that end, our aim is for the Advisory Team to comprise a diverse set of researchers housed at a variety of institutions. The program is open to a variety of prospective applicants, including individual scholars, research teams and administrative units at a variety of academic institutions. To be considered for this program, please complete the application by March 15, 2022. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at sneller7@msu.edu.

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