About

Provost Digital Innovation Grants

The Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants support digital projects designed, created, programmed, or administered by doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Since 2012, the grants have supported a range of inventive projects across the disciplines: an online, open-access, crowdsourced database of scholarly relationships within writing studies; an app to support street medics and promote health and safety among activist communities; and a first effort at “Diplonomics,” a computational analysis that applies Big Data techniques to the study of diplomatic history. This is just a sampling of the diverse research interests reflected among the grant recipients.

Every spring, applications are accepted from matriculated doctoral students in good academic standing at the CUNY Graduate Center. The most recent call for proposals is posted on the news section of our homepage. Grants are awarded to projects that contribute to the mission of the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as to the larger scholarly community and to the public. In addition to encouraging ambitious thinking in new areas, the program seeks to create connections between student scholars working in the digital realm. To forge these ties, grantees present publicly on their work in progress during the academic year, take part in collaborative discussions with current and past grantees, and, at the end of the grant period, report on their work through this website.

Kyle Ferguson, “eTLP: Digitizing Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” 2012-2013 grantee.
Text visualization by Micki Kaufman: “Target word: ‘Bombing,” 2013-2014 grantee

Website credits

The PDIG website is maintained by the GC Digital Initiative Fellows. Laura Wildemman Kane and Hillary Miller created the website in 2012-2013, during the first cycle of our grant. In Spring 2026, Silvia Rivera Alfaro redesigned it. Across the years, different GCDI Fellows have updated the information:

  • Hillary Miller
  • Laura Kane
  • Patrick Smyth
  • Andrew G McKinney
  • Jeffrey Binder
  • Kelsey Chatlosh
  • Javier Otero Peña
  • Tom Ribitzky
  • Param Ajmera
  • Chelsea Lane
  • Stefanos Milkidis
  • Silvia Rivera Alfaro