Digital Innovation Grants

Project title: Lifecycle Valuation Project

Project description: In this project, students complete a holistic company valuation in the style of the CFA Institute Research Challenge while using the logical structure of the corporate lifecycle framework. Each student team is randomly assigned a public company from one of three lifecycle categories: young growth firms, middle-aged transition firms, or mature/old firms. They then use traditional dividend discount modeling, free cash flow modeling, and comparable/EBITDA (earnings before interest expense, taxes, and depreciation and amortization)-multiple valuation techniques.

Project description: This proposal introduces a single two-part project within my Introduction to Drawing course that examines the connections between nineteenth-century stereoscope imagery and contemporary Virtual Reality as methods for creating immersive visual experiences. Students will research historical stereoscopic images and analyze how artists used perspective, depth, and binocular vision to construct the illusion of three-dimensional space. Using observational drawing techniques, students will create paired drawings designed to be viewed stereoscopically while also working digitally as contemporary VR environments and spatial image-making. The assignment encourages students to strengthen traditional drawing skills — including observation, perspective, composition, and spatial awareness — while considering how emerging technologies continue to reshape the experience of seeing and inhabiting images.

I propose a student-driven AI Governance Data Lab as part of my Fall 2026 course, “We, the Machine? Governing AI in Democratic Organizations.” In this course element, students will collaboratively operationalize democratic governance concepts and construct a comparative dataset evaluating how democracies regulate AI across institutional and legal dimensions. Students will compare AI governance approaches across countries, debate competing governance criteria, develop coding protocols, and produce public-facing governance analyses and visualizations. The project combines participatory data construction, ethical reasoning, and comparative institutional analysis while treating AI governance as a problem of democratic judgment rather than primarily technical implementation.

Project description: The Quantified Self assignment asks students to conduct a self-tracking project that explores the broader themes of datafication, quantified selfhood, and the use of numerical data to understand everyday life. Students must choose one measurable element of their daily lives, such as time spent on activities, mood, exercise readiness, calories, sleep, or other recurring behavior, and track it consistently over a one-month period during the semester. The chosen element should be easy to observe, record numerically, and comfortable to share with classmates. Students must collect at least 28 days of data, either manually or through digital tools such as a smartwatch, health app, or tracking software, and organize the records in a Google Sheet/Excel. After the tracking period, students will create one to two data visualizations in R or other data software, and then present their findings to the class using slides. The presentation should explain what was tracked, why it was chosen, what patterns appeared in the data, and what the experience reveals about self-tracking. Finally, students will write a reflective essay, including visualizations and a link to the raw data, connecting their personal experience to broader questions about opportunities and limitations of quantifying human behaviors.

Project description: This digital innovation project introduces students inWGST311/QS311 Feminist Theory to virtual reality (VR) technology in three main scaffolded ways. First, this project will introduce students to the basics of VR technology, including the hardware/software and the embodied experience of VR. Second, the project will introduce students to VR as an ‘object of analysis’ (or ‘text’) for close readings — these will encompass ways of analyzing the possibilities, promises, and limitations of VR. Finally, the project will position VR as a potential ‘tool’ for students to employ towards addressing a central concern in feminist theory, specifically that of how to translate feminist and queer theory to audiences beyond the academic. With respect to Bloom’s taxonomy, these three approaches will support students as they build from remembering and understanding, to analysis and evaluation, and finally to application and creation. 

Project description: I’d like to develop a digital mapping project for my Hip-Hop Music and Culture course (MUS 248) that would visualize the early hip-hop scene in New York City. I would divide my students into groups, each being responsible for representing one physical site/club where hip-hop was happening. The groups would pull together visual evidence from digital archives, textual evidence from scholarship and oral histories, and extant sonic evidence like bootleg recordings and early commercial records. The goal of this assignment would be to better understand how hip-hop moved through physical spaces — from the Bronx, to clubs in Manhattan, and to the commercial record labels. I see this primarily as a data visualization project that will appear as a digital map, possibly living as an Open Pedagogy project. This assignment has plenty of room for future expansion, as there were many important sites in NYC as well as many other important cities worth exploring.