Martin Awarded NEH Fellowship for Book Project Supported by SAIL
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded Cathie Jo Martin, Director of the Center for the Study of Europe at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Professor of Political Science at Boston University a $30,000 fellowship for her work on the influence of literature on British and Danish educational systems between 1700-1920. The fellowship represents only 1 in 84 awarded by the NEH in this cycle.
The project entitled “Literature, Society and Education in Britain and Denmark 1700-1920” highlights the differences in viewpoint on mass public education between Denmark and Britain. Denmark saw mass education as a benefit to society, whereas Britain saw it as a benefit to the individual. Martin gleaned this from reading popular novels like Robinson Crusoe amongst many others.
SAIL Enters the Picture
The project’s challenge was that there were so many books to review, Martin needed to computerize her research and she turned to the team at the Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) at the Hariri Institute for Computing. “We have to learn something new every time,” says SAIL director Andrei Lapets (GRS’11), the institute’s director of research development, as well as a CAS computer science lecturer. “We might look at something and say, we don’t actually know the technology for this project, but we know that we can learn it because that’s the culture we cultivate at SAIL.” Utilizing various natural language processing techniques (NLP), SAIL was able to support Martin’s thesis in that British works of literature were more likely to associate schools and learning with individualism and freedom than were Danish works, which linked schooling to nation and people.