Anne Hunnell Chen Receives 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant
Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen.
Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grant for the project “Archaeological Archives as Inclusive Learning Laboratories,” one of seven established projects to be awarded the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant of up to $100,000. The project focuses on American excavations at iconic sites, like Dura-Europos in Syria, which have shaped Western scholarship, which hardly includes mention of local communities whose labor made these excavations possible. Through oral histories, an enriched dataset, improved browsing interface, and digital training, their work “aims to insert and amplify local Syrian voices, giving communities a platform to share their stories alongside traditional archaeological narratives” and “to rebalance a one-sided history and make digital archives more accessible to a wider range of users.”
The Archaeological Archives project is an expansion of Chen’s International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), the first project to use a multilingual Linked Open Data dataset to reassemble and recontextualize institutionally- and disciplinarily-fragmented information descendent of colonially-entangled excavation histories. IDEA, which was funded over three years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to address the dispersal of archival materials across the world by improving access to information for those in different disciplinary and linguistic areas. Its iteration at the Bard Center for Experimental Humanities, called IDEA_Lab@EH, has provided public-facing research opportunities for nearly 50 Bard undergraduates over the past three years. Chen hopes to further extend the impact of IDEA_Lab@EH through virtual learning opportunities throughout the Bard network.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently announced recipients of the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grants, which fund digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Post Date: 07-02-2025
The Archaeological Archives project is an expansion of Chen’s International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), the first project to use a multilingual Linked Open Data dataset to reassemble and recontextualize institutionally- and disciplinarily-fragmented information descendent of colonially-entangled excavation histories. IDEA, which was funded over three years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to address the dispersal of archival materials across the world by improving access to information for those in different disciplinary and linguistic areas. Its iteration at the Bard Center for Experimental Humanities, called IDEA_Lab@EH, has provided public-facing research opportunities for nearly 50 Bard undergraduates over the past three years. Chen hopes to further extend the impact of IDEA_Lab@EH through virtual learning opportunities throughout the Bard network.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently announced recipients of the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grants, which fund digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Post Date: 07-02-2025