About SHANTI / Cohorts Fellows Program
Introduction: SHANTI Cohort Fellows Program
The application period for the 2009-2010 SHANTI Cohort Fellowship program has passed. If you submitted an application, the SHANTI team will be following up with you as soon as possible. If you did not submit an application for this year, SHANTI expects to call for proposals again in 2010. Thank you for your interest in this program.
The SHANTI Cohort Fellows Program creates small groups of five to ten faculty, graduate students, and staff to do a year-long exploration of innovative research, teaching, publication, and engagement strategies enabled by the creative use of new digital technologies. Each cohort has a specific thematic focus, and participants need have no prior digital expertise; this program is broad-based and aims to engage everyone at UVa. Sustainability Cohorts require each participant to describe a specific project to accomplish over the course of the year using sustainable technologies offered by SHANTI; Exploratory Cohorts focus on exploring technologies and approaches over the course of the year with the goal of understanding the technologies and the innovations they enable; a project may or may not be required for exploratory cohorts. Projects to be developed within a cohort could be a research project (intellectual or technical in character), preparation for teaching a class using these technologies, using technologies for a specific community engagement project, and so forth. Alternatively, a group of faculty in a cohort could work on a single collaborative project, including projects that are focused on a department or center.
While we welcome such pre-formed groups, we anticipate that the majority of proposals to be individual applicants who have a project that they want to advance, or an area they want to explore (or both). We will then combine these applicants together into small cohorts of individuals with common interests as SHANTI Fellows for an academic year to explore and utilize common tools, technologies, standards, methodologies, and/or research interests for their specific projects. Each cohort will be organized around one or more of these themes:
- specific technology that SHANTI is supporting for broad use at UVa
- an experimental exploration of technologies in a given area
- a common pedagogical or research methodology
- a disciplinary or geographical focus
- a specific collaborative project
Our goals are fivefold:
- Give you a way of advancing a project that is vital to you
- Connect you with colleagues who are doing similar work
- Support UVa faculty, students, and staff at UVa to use sustainable and UVa-supported technology in their specific activities and projects today
- Grow and improve UVa’s enabling digital infrastructure so that your project (and other similar projects) can be sustained
- Explore new technologies and approaches on the cutting edge
Sustainability Cohorts involve the exploration and use of technologies and standards which UVa is offering as sustainable, persistent solutions. Therefore applicants for this type of cohort must have well-defined projects which they propose to further using these solutions. These Cohorts may at the same time explore experimental supplements or complementary approaches as well, but these will be clearly identified as such and will not be the focus of work.
Exploratory Cohorts involve the exploration and use of technologies and standards about which UVa has not currently resolved on sustainable solutions that it plans to support now and in the future. Thus we cannot offer assurances of the future support of the tools we will be exploring, though we do hope to identify and endorse standards and technologies in the relevant areas as a result of these Cohorts. For this reason, applicants having projects which they propose to further using these solutions is less emphasized. In some cases, you may only have materials to use as the basis of experimentation, though here also, a well-defined project is desirable.
Any project that is part of these Cohorts will come to a logical conclusion in terms of direct SHANTI support at the end of the fellowship year; the presumption is that the technologies in any Sustainability Cohort offer a sustainable, self-supporting solution once the project’s initial goals are met. When additional grant funding is needed or you need to build on this project with additional or more expansive goals, SHANTI staff will help you search for and prepare grant applications. We also anticipate that some Cohorts may continue after the SHANTI Fellowship year, whether as a user group, a faculty community, or even something more ambitious like a thematic center.
What does a Cohort Do?
The activity of cohorts vary considerably depending on whether they are focused on supporting personal projects, or rather exploring new technologies and their use without individual projects being involved. Generally, the latter involves a reduced set of activities that is a subset of the former. A project-driven cohort, then, involves the following four core activities:
- regular individual consultations to create and revise comprehensive plans, needs assessment, and timetables
- customized training that is in small groups, hands-on, uses your own data or data of interest to you, and includes followup personalized support
- exchanges with other participants to get intellectual feedback, exposure to similar efforts, and ongoing conversation about common intellectual and technical interests
- personalized programming, technical support and other forms of strategic aid offered by SHANTI staff to ensure your project meets promised goals and does so in a sustainable fashion for the future
How does this Benefit Me?
Each cohort involves training, peer-to-peer brainstorming with other fellows in face-to-face meetings, and direct support for your own project (both for the provided software and from the skillful facilitation by SHANTI staff). We anticipate the frequency of meetings and intensity of activity will vary considerably across specific programs. Possible benefits to Cohort Fellows:
- Programming by skilled programmers to solve specific technical problems facing your
- Web development/data entry/media scanning services, or other time-consuming chores to get a project on line initially
- Purchase of key software or equipment supporting your project
- Sustainable solutions for your ongoing work that apply and persist beyond the fellowship year
- New events supported, including performances and speakers, relating to your interests
- SHANTI research to create bibliographic summaries, analysis of tools and methodologies, and other such work in support of your interests
Our primary goal is creating an enabling infrastructure that allows for sustainable initiatives for hundreds of faculty, staff, and students. Your project’s success, then, will be tied to this more sustainable infrastructure. Thus we will not be providing extensive, personalized support for any single individual, but rather strategic support and opportunities to enable your individual or collaborative projects to take advantage of UVa-supported tools and systems now and in the future. In this way, you can focus on your intellectual, pedagogical, and engagement efforts, rather than having to raise funds and allocate time to reinvent the technical wheel.
We encourage you to include in your application any needs for your project that you can anticipate, but we also expect that some needs will only become clear in the course of the Fellowship year. Our budget does not allow us to support course release and summer salary.
How Much Time will this Take Me?
All overworked faculty, graduate students, and staff naturally ask this question when considering a new opportunity. There is no simple answer, however, since each cohort will be very different. Project-driven cohorts – which involve building sustainable support for your personal project – will typically take more time than cohorts which are primarily about exploring new technologies without any specific project development. In addition, the level of commitment even within a cohort will vary considerably depending on each participant’s goals and situation. We will individually consult with each participant at the beginning of each Cohort to determine a plan that involves a sustainable level of commitment from the person in question, as well as for the cohort overall. Thus the time commitment involved will be customized to the cohort and the individual, and part of our program of sustainability will be to make sure the commitment level is sustainable. Of course there is a minimum time commitment, which basically involves (i) attending cohort meetings, (ii) attending the customized training sessions, (iii) spending some time with the technology on your own after training, and (iv) for those with projects, meeting with SHANTI staff periodically on project planning and consultation. This may result in a single meeting a month over the course of the academic year; or, meetings could be more frequent, but only if the interest, needs, and willingness of the cohort indicates more frequent encounters are both desirable and sustainable either for the cohort overall, or for individual participants.
Applications
Applications are done online, and should follow the application instructions.
Applications to Sustainability Cohorts (and many, but not all, Exploratory Cohorts) must detail a specific project that you want to explore over the course of the year in relationship to the relevant technologies and approaches, and include a reasonable goal to achieve by the end of the period. In the case of some Exploratory Cohorts, it may be that the project is chiefly the exploration of a type of technology or methodology together with other fellows in that cohort. We are especially focused on research projects, but we also encourage applications for projects that are focused on teaching, engagement, or publication goals. Projects can be only ideas with no work actually accomplished, and need not be already underway.
Your application will describe your project, its current status (including “its just an idea”), your goal to achieve by the end of the Cohort program, and the types of support you require. Acceptance into a Cohort will be communicated by a letter to each fellow that includes description of what we believe to be a reasonable goal that can be achieved and the support we can offer towards that goal during the Cohort program (agreed upon, as necessary, in consultation with the applicant).
Successful applicants will be agreeing to the following commitments as fellows:
- use of the tool(s), standard(s), and/or system(s) provided by SHANTI
- actively engage in cohort meetings to build community, share insights, and deepen mastery
- represent and advance this kind of work at UVa by giving presentations or consulting with colleagues
We encourage you to contact us with questions, or requests for meetings to discuss your interests in advance of applying (write us at shanticontact@collab.itc.virginia.edu).
Who can Apply?
Faculty, staff, and graduate students can apply. Preference is given to faculty if there is a need to choose between applicants; undergraduates may be invited to participate as part of a team led by one of the Fellows. Priority is given to the humanities, social sciences, and arts, but applicants from other disciplinary areas are encouraged. Applicants can be from any school at UVa.
We are hoping that Cohort applicants will include technically-inclined faculty, students, and staff as well, including Computing Science faculty or students, and programmer staff. Such applicants will receive priority attention. We particularly hope that Cohorts can help build new partnerships between scholars and technologists as they share intellectual inquiries across disciplinary divides. At the same time, technical expertise is not required.
Collaborative proposals are prioritized, and we also urge joint faculty-student or faculty-staff applications. We expect, however, that most proposals will be from individuals. If you are planning on applying on behalf of other applicants, please list their names and verify that you have gained their agreement to participate.