Grants will digitize Obama memorabilia, early maps

Grants will digitize Obama memorabilia, early maps. Cornell University Library and the College of Arts and Sciences have awarded 11 new grants to create new digital content in support of visual and interactive learning, teaching and research. Valuable resources ranging from African-American photographs to maps of Southeast Asia will soon be available to researchers, thanks to the Grants Program for Digital Collections. The 2012 projects and faculty leads include: Peter Enns, assistant professor of government - to digitize and convert images into machine-readable text of a sample of newspapers to allow the textual analysis of how changes in campaign sources influence candidates' political speech. Cheryl Finley, associate professor of art history - to digitize the Lowentheil Collection of African-American Photographs and make these uncommonly rare photographs accessible to scholars. Fred Gleach, senior lecturer and curator of the anthropology collections - to digitize some of the objects in the anthropology collections, which are used for teaching and research purposes but are not regularly accessible due to facility and staffing limitations. Travis Gosa, assistant professor of Africana studies - to provide online access to Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections' compilation of political campaign publicity and memorabilia documenting the 2008 campaign and election of President Barack Obama.