NYU Digital Humanities Seed Grant
In Spring 2021, we secured seed funding from NYU to fund a summer workshop and visit with our project partner, Laura Briscoe, at the New York Botanical Gardens. The seed funding helped us write the grant that was eventually funded by the NEH.
Summer 2021
Trip to the New York Botanical Gardens
We used this funding to take a field visit to the New York Botanical Gardens to view herbarium specimens and living collections, taking photographs and other experimental images of objects with the support of NYBG staff members Barbara Thiers and Laura Briscoe. Over the course of several hours and
as the first researchers allowed entry to the herbarium since March of 2020, Briscoe and Thiers pulled more than two dozen samples from the collection for us to view, including historically and culturally relevant specimens collected from multiple continents and specimens collected by Indigenous experts,
women, and working-class amateurs. This trip also included a full tour of the herbarium, the garden’s digital imaging laboratory, and the living gardens. We also conducted and recorded interviews with both, which offered valuable insights into our botanical stakeholders’ values and desires for the project.
After the visit to the NYBG, we spent a week working together to map out the general landscape of this project, share our perspectives on common themes of interest that we would like to investigate, identify principal and secondary stakeholders, and plan for the project, determining budget, deliverables, deadlines, and key touchpoints, as well as ideas on how we could leverage different digital mediums and design interesting and user-friendly systems and interfaces to convey transdisciplinary depth and complexity.
Thematic Mapping
One of the most important developments over the course of the workshop was the identification of the three themes that would form the fulcrum of our project and that pervaded all of our discussions around the geopolitics of knowledge, the history of botanical science, and digital archives: various senses of scale, different kinds of subjects, and the sensory experiences of archives.
Stakeholder Mapping
We also mapped the relevant stakeholders for this project, and used it to identify both key questions that we would like to address to their expertise, as well as create a list of participants that we would like to invite for our workshops and ask for letters of commitment.
Planning for the NEH Grant
From our discussions, we also created a few initial exploratory sketches of what a digital platform that would illustrate the formations of modern botany across 19th century colonial regimes, the movements of botanical specimens from the colonies to empire, highlight principal actors involved in the creation of botanical knowledge (imperial taxonomists, colonial interlocutors, and subaltern\indigenous collectors), and draw attention to moss itself as a historical, cultural, and planetary agent. We made sketches trying to think through how audiences would access and move through each of our three themes: through different scales, subjects, and senses of moss.
Experimental Interfaces
Imaging technologies like macroscopic lens and high resolution 3D scanning as well as the many open source software toolkits that have been developed for artists and designers to make experimental interactive systems, enable the production of novel perspectives of other species and species relations. We are interested in the potential that these kinds of imaging or interactive technologies have, for producing new ways of seeing and relating to moss. In producing these initial experiments, we were asking whether they might produce new sensibilities for seeing moss in both different subject experts, as well as non-expert audiences.
