Please share with undergraduate students! Applications are due next Friday.
NSF-REU program "Mapping Freedom"
Dates: June 5 - July 28, 2023
Applications Due: January 27, 2023
The research and education in this Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site at The University of Southern Mississippi will focus on the use of mapping technology, including geographic information systems, to understand better the transformation of society during periods of historical change.
About Mapping Freedom
Student researchers will work with faculty mentors in computer science and digital humanities to map the granular process of emancipation in Mississippi during the Civil War and through the period of Reconstruction to visualize freed-people's paths to citizenship.
This project was inspired by three factors:
- the need for more individuals from economically underprivileged backgrounds in computer science and digital humanities;
- evidence that underprivileged students are more likely to enter and stay in science and engineering fields if their first interaction is with material they recognize and find socially significant; and,
- the need for sophisticated, but user-friendly mapping technology in digital humanities and comparable fields of scholarship. The historical focus on emancipation is somewhat familiar to most students, but how that process evolved for the nearly half-million enslaved Mississippians in the 1860s and 1870s is largely unknown to them.
Read more about the opportunity at https://www.usm.edu/digital-humanities/nsf-reu-program.php and apply at https://www.usmcdh.org/mapping-freedom-application
Many thanks,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth La Beaud
Head of Library Technology, The University of Southern Mississippi
Director, Mississippi Digital Library
Elizabeth.LaBeaud@usm.edu