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Announcing the Spring 2023 Digital Seeds Lecture: Baldwin’s Paris 2.0


Villanova faculty, staff, students and friends are invited to join us on Thursday, March 16, at 4 p.m. for a virtual talk by Tyechia Thompson, PhD, and Carli Smith on “Baldwin’s Paris 2.0” as part of Falvey Library’s Digital Seeds Speaker Series.

Baldwin’s Paris 2.0 (hereafter referred to as BP2) is the culmination of a Virginia Tech graduate seminar on Black American literature, where Thompson and Smith traced and interrogated the African-American expatriate experience in the city of Paris. BP2 is a multimodal prototype that was collaboratively pitched, designed, implemented, and evaluated by their team that maps quotations from James Baldwin’s fiction and essays directly onto the city of Paris, including contemporary images and street views, links to archival/historical material, and paths that follow characters’ movements. They extended the scope of Baldwin’s Paris 1.0, originally executed by Dr. Tyechia Thompson, to include more detailed location-specific information so that Baldwin scholars and enthusiasts can use the tool in order to form analyses of character and place.

REGISTER HERE 

This ACS- approved event, sponsored by Falvey Library, is free and open to the public.

Speakers’ Bios:

Dr. Tyechia Thompson is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her areas of research include African American literature, Digital Humanities, Afrofuturism, and manuscript and archival studies. She is the recipient of an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the project “Building an Institute for Empathic Immersive Narrative” and an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication supporting the project “Place, Memory, Poetry, and the James A. Emanuel Papers at the Library of Congress.” She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Afro-Publishing Without Walls/University of Illinois Open Publishing Network, Fire!!!: Afro-Publishing Without Walls/University of Illinois Open Publishing Network, and the College Language Association Journal.

Carli Smith is a seventh-grade English and Language Arts teacher at Bunkie Magnet High School in Bunkie, Louisiana. Her areas of research include African American literature, Digital Humanities, Southern literature, and Transmedia Studies. She was awarded the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences assistantship in Digital Humanities for 2020-21. Her co-authored ArcGIS Story Maps project, “Decolonial Theory in James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street,” is published through Virginia Tech’s VTechWorks archive. She represents a small team of graduate students who helped develop Baldwin’s Paris 2.0, an expanded multimodal prototype of Dr. Tyechia Thompson’s original geospatial project. A review of the current prototype is published in Reviews in Digital Humanities.


About the Digital Seeds Speakers Series:

The Digital Seeds Speaker Series is a Library funded program that supports the invitation of guest speakers in the digital scholarship community to speak at Falvey Library about their research and/or give a workshop on a topic of their choice. The goal of the speaker series is to provide an opportunity for Villanova faculty, staff, and students to learn more about digital scholarship and research at the intersection of social science, humanities computing, and data science. The lectures are often held in the spring and are open to the public and all Villanova faculty, staff, and students to attend. The series is a great way to make connections, build community, and facilitate conversation.

Learn about past speakers here.

Digital Scholarship at Falvey Library:

Falvey Library’s Digital Scholarship Program supports faculty, students, and staff interested in applying digital methods and tools to their research and teaching. Digital scholarship encompasses a broad range of technologies and research areas, including but not limited to digital mapping (GIS), text and data mining, data visualization, virtual reality, 3D modeling, and digital publishing. We host lectures on digital scholarship topics, partner on digital research projects, and provide a collaborative space for consultations and training.

Learn more about Digital Scholarship here.


 


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Foto Friday: Georeferencing Historic Maps

Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian; Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Librarian Archivist; and Jennifer Santoro, Department of Geography and the Environment, examine maps from the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection with Villanova students.

Jennifer Santoro, Department of Geography and the Environment, talks with a student about historic maps.

Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, shows students Falvey’s online exhibit, “Projecting the World: An Audio Tour of the John F. Smith, III & Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection,” and georeferencing tools.

Students focus on maps from the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection.


Learning about georeferencing historic maps, students in Jennifer Santoro’s Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) course had the opportunity to examine maps from the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection on Thursday, Feb. 23, in Falvey Library. Collaborating with Santoro, Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, showed students georeferencing tools and Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Librarian Archivist, shared more information about historic maps in the collection.

View the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection here. Contact Rebecca Oviedo for more information.

Interested in integrating digital tools and methods into your research? Contact Erica Hayes.


Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Photos courtesy of Shawn Proctor, Communication and Marketing Program Manager.

 

 


 

 

 


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Cat in the Stax: Spotify Wrapped and the Digital Humanities

By Ethan Shea

"Spotify"

Last Wednesday was a big day for people who love to overshare.

That’s right, it’s Spotify Wrapped season! For the uninitiated (and Apple Music listeners), Spotify Wrapped is an annual recap of listening habits that Spotify sends to every user at the end of the year. This time around, there was greater focus on what your music reveals about your personality. Spotify wants the raw numbers we receive to teach us something about ourselves.

As much as I enjoy analyzing my annually released statistics, there’s something deeply personal about these numbers. How is this possible? What does my 58,293 minutes of music streaming say about me? Presumably a lot according to this article.

Everyone is much more than a collection of numbers, but focusing on data is helpful even in the humanities. For me, the overwhelming interest in Spotify Wrapped feels similar to the growing interest in the digital humanities.

"Digital Scholarship Lab Hours"

Digital Scholarship Lab Hours

The digital humanities, according to Falvey’s Digital Scholarship/Digital Humanities Subject Guide, “is an area of research, collaboration, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing, digital technologies, and humanities scholarship.”

Just as Spotify attempts to reveal information about our complex personalities through listening data, the digital humanities provides a new perspective of subjective literary texts. For example, what does it mean that James Joyce uses the capitalized word “National” in Ulysses eleven times but the same word in lowercase twenty times? With statistics provided by the digital humanities,  readers have even more questions to ponder!

If you would like to learn more about the digital humanities, in addition to our subject guide, you can find the Digital Scholarship Lab in Room 218A at Falvey. The Lab is open by reservation-only, so make sure to book a visiting time in advance!


Headshot of Ethan SheaEthan Shea is a graduate student in the English Department at Villanova University and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.


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Interactive Memorial Map Celebrates Veterans’ Service, Sacrifice

By Shawn Proctor

 

 

This Memorial Day, Falvey and the Office of Veterans and Military Service Members at Villanova University wanted to share with our Villanova community a part of our project “The Voices of Villanova’s Veterans.” “Honoring the Fallen: An Interactive Memorial Map” displays the names of Villanova veterans killed in service, along with their branch of service, location, and year of death. For those veterans reported missing in action, we have mapped the nearest location of where they were last seen.

This project will honor the life and sacrifice of Villanova veterans who died while serving their country. Reflecting extensive research and collaboration, this interactive map will remember their service. This map allows users anywhere on the globe to access this map, and creates an access point for family members, the community, historians, and anyone else interested in learning about their legacy.

This Memorial Day—and every day—Villanova honors its veterans and pay tribute to their service and sacrifice by ensuring that they are never forgotten.

 

Note: This blog originally appeared May 31, 2021.


Shawn Proctor

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

 

 

 


 

 


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Join Falvey Memorial Library for the 2022 Digital Seeds Speaker Series

Join Falvey Memorial Library for the 2022 Digital Seeds Speaker Series. The speaker series provides opportunities for Villanova faculty, staff, and students to learn more about digital scholarship and research at the intersection of social science, humanities computing, and data science. For more on digital scholarship at Falvey Memorial Library click here.

These ACS-approved events, co-sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library and the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, are free and open to the public.

Promotional poster featuring Matthew Bui, PhD, for the Digital Seeds speaker series.

Matthew Bui, PhD, on “Toward Urban Data Justice: Auditing the Racial Politics of Data”

Thursday, March 24 at 4:00 p.m. via Zoom 

What is the role of (open and big) data in enacting, facilitating, and/or limiting racial justice within an increasingly datafied society? This talk explores the relationship between marginalized communities of color and data, foregrounding questions about power, inequality, and justice.

First, Bui will briefly touch on a study that proposes a typology of community-based engagements with, and disengagements from, data for racial justice: namely, data use, re-use, and refusal. Building on this work and considering the politics of data re-use and refusal to keep powerful actors accountable, Bui will discuss in detail a second longer-term project exploring questions of algorithmic accountability and the predatory nature of data-driven systems: specifically, a study that aims to audit and examine online targeted ads as racially discriminatory by nature.

In all, this work theorizes and conceptualizes “urban data justice” as a community-engaged vision and reparative praxis in response to what Bui and his team are conceptualizing as “algorithmic discrimination”. In all, he asks: how do we tell stories with—and about—data? Who benefits from dominant narratives? How can we subvert unequal power relations within—and of—data? What new methods, frameworks, and language do we need for these endeavors?

REGISTER HERE

Speaker Biography:

Matthew Bui (he/him), PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher and incoming assistant professor (starting Fall 2022) at the University of Michigan School of Information. He also holds faculty affiliations with the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. Bui’s research examines the potential for, and barriers to, urban data justice, foregrounding the racial politics of data-driven technologies, policy, and platforms. He is currently leading a study about racial discrimination and targeted ads and launching a new project that explores how entrepreneurs of color navigate algorithmic bias. His research has received recognition and support from the Annenberg Foundation, Benton Foundation, Democracy F¬¬und, and Kauffman Foundation; and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC).

Previously, Bui was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Tech and received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He also holds graduate certification in geographic information science, an MSc in Media and Communication Research from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in Communication from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

 

Promotional poster featuring David Ambaras, PhD, and Kate McDonald, PhD, for the Digital Seeds speaker series.David R. Ambaras, PhD, and Kate McDonald, PhD on “Bodies and Structures 2.0: Scalar and the Practice of Digital Spatial History” 

Thursday, March 31 at 4:00 p.m. via Zoom 

The fundamental intervention of spatial humanistic scholarship is the notion that space is multi-vocal — that places are made up of layers of meaning and history; that layers of place produce distinct geographic footprints and sets of spatial relationships; and that one’s social-historical positionality or “body” shapes how one encounters particular spatial “structures.” Launched in 2021, Bodies and Structures 2.0 examines the dynamics of place- and space-making in modern East Asia. In this presentation, we will discuss how we developed Bodies and Structures 2.0’s unique combination of individually-authored modules and collectively-curated conceptual maps and visualizations and how we used the open-source Scalar platform to build our multivocal project.

REGISTER HERE

Speakers’ Biographies: 

Kate McDonald, PhD, is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History project. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (California, 2017) and currently serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the Journal of Asian Studies.

David Ambaras, PhD, is a Professor of History at North Carolina State University. His research explores the social history of modern Japan and its empire, particularly through a focus on transgression and marginality. He is the author of Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2006); and articles and book chapters on class formation, urban space, wartime mobilization, and ethnic intermarriage. He is the co-director of the digital project Bodies and Structures: Deep-mapping Modern East Asian History. Ambaras holds a PhD from Princeton University, and degrees from the University of Tokyo, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Paris), and Columbia University. He is recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Feel free to reach out to Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, with any questions you might have!


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Announcing the 2021 Virtual Falvey Forum & GIS Mapping Workshop Series!

Falvey Forum

 

Mark your calendars! Falvey Memorial Library will be holding the 2021 Falvey Forum Virtual Workshop Series this fall. Workshops will be held most Wednesdays at 12:30 p.m. and will run approximately an hour in length.

The 2021 Falvey Forum is a series of virtual workshops dedicated to advancing research tips, techniques, and technologies. Drawn from Falvey Memorial Library’s successful Brown Bag seminar series, the conference’s 11 sessions will cover a wide variety of research and library-oriented information aimed at invigorating and improving research, informing new pedagogy, and encouraging the integration of advanced academic research into personal and professional lives.

In conjunction with the 2021 Falvey Forum series, Falvey’s Digital Scholarship Program is pleased to partner with Villanova University’s GIS Laboratory in the Geography and the Environment Department to co-sponsor a selection of introductory virtual digital research workshops that focus on GIS mapping and spatial analysis tools.

Workshops will be led by some of Falvey Memorial Library’s expert librarians as well as members of the Department of Geography and the Environment.

Those interested in attending any of the workshop sessions may scan the QR codes on the right of each workshop description with their phones or simply click on the invite image above to register.

If you have any questions about the workshops, you can reach out to Library Events staff at libraryevents@villanova.edu.

 

 

 


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Interactive Memorial Map Celebrates Veterans’ Service, Sacrifice

By Shawn Proctor

 

 

This Memorial Day, Falvey and the Office of Veterans and Military Service Members at Villanova University wanted to share with our Villanova community a part of our project “The Voices of Villanova’s Veterans.” “Honoring the Fallen: An Interactive Memorial Map” displays the names of Villanova veterans killed in service, along with their branch of service, location, and year of death. For those veterans reported missing in action, we have mapped the nearest location of where they were last seen.

This project will honor the life and sacrifice of Villanova veterans who died while serving their country. Reflecting extensive research and collaboration, this interactive map will remember their service. This map allows users anywhere on the globe to access this map, and creates an access point for family members, the community, historians, and anyone else interested in learning about their legacy.

This Memorial Day—and every day—Villanova honors its veterans and pay tribute to their service and sacrifice by ensuring that they are never forgotten.

 


Shawn Proctor

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

 

 

 


 

 


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Falvey Fridays: Virtual Workshop Series

Falvey Memorial Library is pleased to announce “Falvey Fridays,” a workshop series drawn from our popular brown bag lunch sessions. Each workshop will provide new and exciting information on research methods, tools, and pedagogies for researchers of all levels. Registration is free and open to the Villanova community.

Please register for workshop sessions below. Once registered, you will be sent a Zoom link to the event.

Tabula: Extracting Tables from PDFs (Friday, March 26; 11 a.m.–12 p.m.)

Workshop led by Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian.

If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know there’s no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data from tables out of PDF files. Come learn more about Tabula, an open source tool for extracting data tables locked inside PDFs and how to import that data easily into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Please REGISTER at the following link:

https://villanova.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEld-6qqT0jGtf_gLlSDe1fstCDdj2cNA-

Citation Management using Zotero (Friday, April 9; 11 a.m.–12 p.m.)

Workshop led by Sarah Hughes, Nursing & Life Sciences Librarian.

Serious research projects call for no-nonsense tools for taming citations. Learn how to use Zotero to save, organize, and share references.

Please REGISTER at the following link:

https://villanova.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ud-qurTgqE9eNmezaCgojaU2-bjBTCpD-

Policy Map/Social Explorer (Friday, April 23; 11 a.m.–12 p.m.)

Workshop led by Deborah Bishov, Social Sciences & Instructional Design Librarian and Merrill Stein, Social Sciences Librarian.

Explore features of two easy-to-use, online demographic data mapping tools which draw on a combination of governmental, proprietary and open resources.  Map data of interest and export and save visualizations for research or teaching. Knowledge of GIS (geographical information systems) is not required.

Please REGISTER at the following link:

https://villanova.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEscOGtqTwuGN1SqGzFYONpmNA65dIQ5H_h


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Join us for the Spring 2021 Digital Seeds Lectures

This spring Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Program will be offering two lectures in its Digital Seeds Speaker Series. Check out the details below and be sure to REGISTER in advance! Once registered, you will be sent a link to the event.

Julia Lewandoski headshot

“Mapping Indigenous Landowners in 19th-Century Los Angeles: Historicizing GIS and the Public Land Survey System“

Julia Lewandoski, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of History, California State University San Marcos

Thursday, February 18, 4:00-5:00 pm

REGISTER HERE

After the 1848 U.S. conquest of Mexican California, the federal government negotiated, but declined to ratify treaties with Indigenous peoples in California. Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash peoples around Los Angeles turned to property ownership to keep communities intact and in important places for decades, generating local property maps of their lands.

This project uses ArcGIS to locate, layer, and analyze property maps of Indigenous land in southern California. These local property maps show theJulia Lewandoski Digital map persistent existence of important Indigenous places. They also challenge understandings of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) as a visual project that replaced Indigenous geographies with rationalized settler space. Indigenous properties and landscapes are clearly visible on historic maps, and in the patterns of the present-day PLSS. Their presence raises questions for GIS practitioners about the tensions between social and mathematical frameworks for locating peoples and places.

Julia Lewandoski is a historian of early North America and is an Assistant Professor at California State University, San Marcos. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in History and the Digital Humanities at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in History with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in August 2019. Her dissertation was awarded the 2019 prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). Her current book project explores how small Indigenous nations across North America exploited imperial transitions to defend land as property in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also at work on a digital companion to the book project, using GIS to examine how Indigenous property has been mapped and measured. Website: https://www.julialewandoski.com/

This event is ACS- approved and is co-sponsored by Villanova’s Department of History, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, and Falvey Memorial Library.

 

Ted Underwood headshot

“Libraries of Babel: An Expansive Future for the Humanities”

Ted Underwood, Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Thursday, March 11, 4:00-5:00pm

REGISTER HERE

The last twelve months have not been kind to optimists. It may sound especially implausible to predict a bright future for the humanities right now, since enrollment and hiring are down in many disciplines. But, as paradoxical as it sounds, we are living in an age of unprecedented opportunity for the study of culture and history. Some of the opportunities are well publicized: for instance, digital libraries have opened up fundamental new research questions for literary scholars. I’ll give examples of that work, but the broader point of this talk is to propose that we’re living through a digital transformation that will matter for everyone, not just for academic researchers. In making it possible to explore culture as a latent space—a space of possibility—machine learning facilitates a kind of creative play that is akin to rigorous self-understanding. This is good news for the humanities, although our disciplinary institutions are admittedly struggling to seize the opportunity.

Ted Underwood is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College ofTed Underwood's book, Horizons Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new research opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once. He recently used machine learning, for instance, to trace the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction as distinct genres, and to describe the shifting assumptions about gender revealed in literary characterization from 1780 to the present. He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies(Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Website: https://tedunderwood.com/

This event is ACS- approved and is sponsored by Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library.

 

If you are interested in learning more about Falvey Memorial  Library’s spring events line-up, please see our events page for an up-to-date listing: https://library.villanova.edu/events

 


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Communication Professor Partners with Falvey to Launch “Kensington Remembers” Digital Project

By Shawn Proctor

Philadelphia is a haunted city. Not by ghosts, necessarily, but by unresolved tragedies echoing through the culture, haunting the people who must live on.

In the Kensington neighborhood of the city, Gordon Coonfield, PhD, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, happened upon vernacular memorials, created by ordinary Philadelphians to remember people who died, often violently. Flowers. Candles. Graffiti. A cardboard sign scrawled in marker. Each element is an important (if temporary) gesture to make a tribute that says to anyone who sees it: this person lived and died here.

Vernacular memorials have appeared in many places around the world. But they have a special meaning in Philadelphia, the city that originated graffiti art.

“This is home for people in a city with a very, very long history. And these memorials are a part of that history,” he says. “There is a desire to express loss that is not being met in current society.”

Dr. Coonfield, who lives in the area, began photographing and making notes about each memorial, including its location. As his entries grew, his digital scholarship project “Kensington Remembers” took shape. With the expertise of Erica Hayes, Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Professor James Parente, MFA, Communication and Media, these ever-changing, temporary memorials will be preserved, placed on an interactive digital map, and studied.

In fall 2019, Dr. Coonfield discussed with Hayes his vision for the website and, together, they reviewed and selected the website platform and Geographic Information System (GIS) best suited to his project. They continued to meet and refine the project over the next several months–memorial by memorial–with Parente contributing to the project’s web design and the custom logo.

“This digital scholarship project examines these public memorials created throughout a historic neighborhood in northern Philadelphia. Mapping technology connects these disparate locations, making them easy to navigate and understand, thanks to Dr. Coonfield’s photographs and textual explanations,” Hayes says.

“The Library staff has been enormously helpful, and are a great resource for faculty with projects like this. The Digital Scholarship Program at Falvey and the Library Technology Development department, including David Uspal, are experts in the ethics and methods of digital preservation. And Erica provided insight about the technology as well as an understanding of how best to develop this project. Without her, ‘Kensington Remembers’ would not exist,” Dr. Coonfield says.

In the future, Dr. Coonfield plans to continue expanding the project, publish articles in communication studies journals, and present on his findings at academic conferences.

If you have an idea for a digital scholarship project and would like to collaborate with Falvey Memorial Library, contact Erica Hayes or visit the new Digital Scholarship Lab online, which is scheduled to  open in Fall 2021.


Shawn ProctorShawn Proctor, MFA, is a Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

 


 


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Last Modified: October 19, 2020

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