Hefner using NEH grant for circulation study
College of Arts and Letters
A JMU English professor has won an NEH grant for his work parsing historical magazine circulation figures.
Brooks Hefner, associate professor of English, and his co-director, Ed Timke, lecturer of Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, will use the $50,000 grant to create online tools that analyze and visualize circulation data for historically significant American magazines between 1868 and 1972.
The Circulating American Magazines project will provide complete access to circulation numbers by issue in addition to each title’s geographical circulation across the United States and abroad. The work used detailed reports from several hard-to-reach archival materials from the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the advertising agencies of George C. Rowell & Co. and N.W. Ayer & Son.
The project will also feature web-based visualization tools that allow students and scholars to investigate the history of a magazine or compare multiple magazines’ readership over time and space. This centralization of circulation data aims to enable students and scholars to see American periodical history in radically new ways, describing periodicals’ development with an accuracy that has not been possible before.
The project is the product of continuous collaboration between James Madison University and UC Berkeley, including faculty from JMU’s Libraries and Educational Technologies. An advisory board composed of leading digital humanities and periodical scholars from across the country will provide input throughout the project’s lifecycle. Hefner and Timke ultimately aim to establish a rich, open-access repository of magazine circulation information that can be used by researchers, students, and the general public for years to come.
The National Endowment for the Humanities announced its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant recipients on Aug. 2 The National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 created the National Endowment for the Humanities as an independent federal agency. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the country. Altogether, its Aug. 2 grant announcement covered 245 projects set to receive a total of $39.3 Million.
