This Faculty is practically on fire when it comes to federal and provincial research grants. Warm congratulations go to Ian Milligan (History), Evan Risko (Psychology), and David-Antoine Williams (St. Jerome’s/English), who have each won a 2015 Early Researcher Award (ERA).
Recently announced by the Government of Ontario, these ERAs put Waterloo Arts at 10 for 4 – that is, ten ERAs have been awarded to our researchers over the past four competitions.
“This run on success in our Faculty is a remarkable achievement,” says Doug Peers, Dean of Arts. “I’m particularly proud that Waterloo Arts has become a notable leader in ERA-funded humanities and social science projects across the province.”
Ian Milligan, Assistant Professor, is among the few historians working within the field of web archives. His ERA-supported project builds on previous award-winning research focused on access and use of Canadian primary digital data that have exponentially accumulated over the past 20 years. “Big data is reshaping the historical profession in ways we are only beginning to grasp,” says Prof. Milligan. “Web archives offer us the ability to reconstruct the past in unprecedented detail, yet the sheer size of these primary sources present significant challenges.” Working with his Web Archives for Historical Research Group, including student research assistants, Prof. Milligan will both write about recent history as reflected in web archives and develop new methods for searching and understanding content in digital repositories. This work will give more historians and students access to search, interpret and curate original data that have been buried in digital format. Read more about Prof. Milligan’s project in the UWaterloo media release.
Evan F. Risko is an Assistant Professor and head of the Cognitive area in the department of Psychology, and is also an NSERC Canada Research Chair (Tier 2). His ERA-supported project will provide a deeper understanding of how we use our bodies and objects in our environments to help us think. Prof. Risko explains: “Thinking is embodied and embedded. For example, we tilt our heads while trying to perceive an ambiguous image, gesture while imagining spatial transformations, and rely on technology to store and search for information (e.g., smartphones). This interaction between internal/mental processes and external processes (i.e., use of our body and objects) represents a fundamental characteristic of real-world cognition, yet we have little understanding of the principles that govern this interaction. Understanding these principles is becoming increasingly important, as technology becomes ever more intertwined with our cognitive lives.” Working with his students, Prof. Risko will test a novel theory of how “cognitive offloading” - the integration of external processes to avoid internal/mental processing - decisions are made and relate to the availability of attentional resources. In addition, a software tool to help students offload attentional demands while viewing digital lectures will be developed and evaluated. Project updates can be found on Prof. Risko’s Cognitive and Natural Behaviour Laboratory website.
David-Antoine Williams is an Assistant Professor of English based at St Jerome’s University, whose areas of expertise include modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry, literary criticism, and dictionaries. His project, which is one of the very few in literary studies to be funded by the ERA program, examines the interchanges between the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and poetry. "We tend to think of dictionaries and poetry as dealing with very different dimensions of language" says Prof. Williams, "one denotative or definitional, the other connotative or metaphorical. But that distinction misses the rich complexity of the life of words." He will enhance the background data of the OED--originally marked up at the University of Waterloo in the 1980s--with metadata about genre, in order to make possible systematic analyses of the make-up of evidence quotations in the dictionary, as well as algorithmic comparisons with other large text repositories. This work, which will involve undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral researchers, will help to re-establish Waterloo as a leading centre of study of the OED outside Oxford. Updates on findings can be found on Prof. Williams’ The Life of Words project website.
Early Researcher Award recipients are given $100k from the Ministry of Research and Innovation and an additional $50k from UWaterloo (and St. Jerome’s, in the case of Prof. Williams). Dispersed over five years, the funds are to be used for building their research teams of undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral fellows.