Tulley Receives Grant Funding, Looks to Develop New App

Shopping, banking, social media, and much more can be obtained any time within seconds through mobile applications. Among others, social media apps allow smart phone users to check in at various locations and fitness apps help users track progress. Before long, there will be an app relative to any task.

Christine Tulley, Ph.D., director of the writing program, is developing a sort of tracking application that will help faculty in the humanities complete writing projects. “Faculty can check in when they are at a writing location and note what they are working on, how the writing process is going and what they have completed,” said Tulley. “Faculty will feel part of a community of other faculty writers.”

Not only will this app help faculty to track the progress of writing projects, but also each check-in will be recorded in a database to observe productivity habits of faculty for Tulley’s book project. “The app enables faculty to track progress in a manner similar to other tracking applications on physical fitness or time management,” said Tulley. “No such application exists to date.” Tulley recently earned a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to participate in the High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC) and develop this app. Among 25 faculty in the humanities across the country, Tulley is the only participant chosen from Ohio. “HPC is a think tank sponsored by the NEH,” said Tulley. “The 25 participants earn travel grants to be trained in high-performance computing.”

Tulley teaches electronic rhetoric, writing and classical rhetoric while incorporating digital assignments such as podcasts and video. She and the other participants from institutions including Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, were picked based on his or her experience with digital work. Through this grant, Tulley traveled to the University of Illinois, where she spent a week at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to learn how to perform data visualization. She also traveled to the University of South Carolina to spend a week at IT-ology learning video game design, mobile applications and writing digital humanities grants.

After participating in both workshops, Tulley receives a year of technical support provided by NEH for any humanities project she chooses. Within this timeframe, NEH will pay for all costs associated with the development of Tulley’s mobile app and will help arrange funding to further the project in the next year. Tulley plans to have the app available to all humanities faculty at any institution in the Spring of 2013. It also will be available to anyone via Google Android App Store, Amazon Apps, etc.

For more information regarding the mobile app or Endowment for Humanities grant, contact Christine Tulley at tulley@findlay.edu or 419-434-4537.

Written by Sarah Foltz