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THATCamp Fall 2025
Register to Attend What is THATCamp? THATCamp (which stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp”) is a gathering where the agenda is set by attendees on the day of the event based on what people want to learn and/or share. It is an event where students, staff, and faculty from any discipline and from all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed, led, and voted upon by the community. This “un-conference” event is a fun, low stakes way to engage and learn from like-minded folks in the MSU community about new and emerging ideas in the digital humanities…
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Graduate Student Profile: Ashley Cerku
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/ashleycerku Memory Lane project website: http://walkdownmemorylane.org/ About Ashley Ashley Cerku is a Doctoral Candidate in the Anthropology Department at Michigan State University. She holds a B.A. in English and Writing/Rhetoric and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Oakland University as well as an M.A. in Anthropology from Michigan State University. Her research focuses on historical photography, cultural heritage, community memory, and digital work. More specifically, she investigates the semiotic landscape of downtown Main Street and how digital technologies can provide a more immersive and inclusive approach to heritage preservation. She completed her Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities in 2025 and is also…
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THATCamp Spring 2025 Virtual
THATCamp (which stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp”) is a gathering where the agenda is set by attendees on the day of the event based on what people want to learn and/or share. It is an event where students, staff, and faculty from any discipline and from all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed, led, and voted upon by the community.
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What DH Means to Me: Max Evjen
What DH Means to Me: Max Evjen I learned about Digital Humanities when I was working as Performance and Digital Engagement Specialist at the MSU Museum (2015-2019), and increasingly I’ve seen how Digital Humanities happens in the museum context while I’ve been involved by presenting at Museum Computer Network Conferences and volunteering for that organization. When someone is using a digital tool to analyze collections, or make them more accessible through digital means I see that as digital humanities. Projects such as the Pink Art project at Williams College Museum of Art or the Open API at the Art Institute…
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What DH Means to Me: Matt Handelman
I am associate professor of German, core faculty in the Digital Humanities, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in LiLaC, and Interim Chair of Digital Humanities. This might sound like a strange combination of interests, but it goes to the heart of what DH means to me. I started my undergraduate majors in mathematics and German literature with little sense that the two subjects had anything in common. However, as my studies in both continued (and as I encountered more mathematical theories named after Gauss, Riemann, Hausdorff, Weierstraß, etc.), I became more and more convinced of the overlaps between German culture…
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Research Highlight: Matt Handelman-Below the Line
“Below the Line” (https://www.feuilletonproject.org/) provides open-access resources for those interested in learning more about the feuilleton—an arts and culture section of European newspapers popular before the Second World War—and its importance in the formation of modern Jewish cultures. The project aims to foster conversation about and research into the feuilleton as a historical forum that attracted many different types of writing, writers, and readers.
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Research Highlight: Marissa Knaak-Rebuilding Departments Stores in SketchUP.
This project is a 3D model, built in SketchUp, of the 1899 John Walsh department store in Sheffield, UK. Drawn from the architectural plans of Flockton, Gibbs & Flockton, accessed at the Sheffield Archives, I am attempting to create a general recreation of the building which was destroyed in 1940. This project is part of my dissertation, which is a comparative study of department and fashioning stores in Sheffield, UK and Cologne, Germany, as sites of industrialized labor at the turn of the twentieth century. Currently, the model is a work in progress, but has helped my conceptualize space and…
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Teaching Highlight: DH285 Introduction to Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities
Digital studies in the arts and humanities (DSAH) is the study of culture using digital methods and also the study of digital culture. The class analyzes cultural materials and tell stories using digital technologies while maintaining a critical lens. By creating their own projects and learning about digital studies tools, students become more reflective of themselves and the technologies and society around them. Some projects include looking at maps and networks. In addition, the class visits the Digital Scholarship Lab and has guest visits from the head of the Voice Library at MSU, an AR workshop, and guest visits from…
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What DH Means to Me: Yuri Cantrell
My journey into digital humanities came from a love of technology, working with software and hardware, that eventually led me into the humanities and scholarship. I began working on immersive projects, serious games for training and VR simulations, and soon transitioned into higher education from studio work. The environment provided a wide range of uses for digital tools, and I discovered the various ways faculty were leveraging technology to enrich their research and instruction.
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What DH Means to Me: Dani Willcutt
Digital Humanities (DH) has come to mean a lot to me. In 2018 – which is when my introduction to DH occurred – it was a graduate certificate that I thought would make an interesting addition to my curriculum vitae. When I made the decision to join the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate at MSU, I had no idea that it was going to completely change my career trajectory. I had never even considered myself a technical person (heck, I still use a paper planner). By the time I was halfway through my first year as a Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI)…
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Teaching Highlight: ISS 210 Course on Social Movements
This semester, Emily Joan Elliott’s ISS 210 course on social movements is partnering with Lab for Education in and Advancement of Digital Research (LEADR), run by Gillian MacDonald. Over the course of the semester, a LEADR assistant, Jada Gannaway, will visit Emily’s 200-student lecture to teach the students how to use Voyant, Timeline JS, andCanva. Students will use these tools to create digital media kits that address a specific social movement assigned to their recitation section. In several cases, recitation sections will directly support local, community-based organizations by developing informational pamphlets and interactive timelines of the organization’s history.
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Teaching Highlight: XA 310 Computational Thinking in the Humanities
Taught by Jeff Kurre, a professor in Writing, Rhetoric and Cultures, this class also incorporates aspects of Digital Humanities. The concepts that define “computational thinking” have been around for ages but recently gained prominence in 2006 with an essay by Dr. Jeanette Wing. She argued that the skills of decomposition (breaking large problems into smaller ones), identifying patterns and anomalies, abstracting away distractions, and devising reusable systems as solutions should be fundamental skills for all students, not just aspiring computer scientists. While later assignments do include actual programming, earlier projects focus on real world analogies for computer data types, flowcharts…
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Taking A Walk Down Memory Lane: Exploring Immersive Digital Approaches in Local Communities
Seed Grant Summer 2024 Report Ashley Cerku Background Downtown Main Street. A few images may come to mind, but that image is different for everyone because we all have various experiences and perceptions. Like any historical record, many small towns have a homogenized history—one that is recorded by those in positions of power and lacking in diversity. In some places, there may be political, social, or religious interests as well that shape Main Street. With attempts to revitalize or bring tourists to their downtown areas, some post-industrial small towns are continuing to retell the history told by those in power…
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Research Highlight: Adventurers, Friends, and Witnesses by Crystal VanKooten
Inspired by the stories of her extended family in Anchorage, Alaska, Crystal VanKooten at Michigan State University, documented the lives of three Alaskan nurses; Jacqueline Greenman, Anna Belle Engbers, and Marjorie VanKooten. These were American women of Dutch descent who lived in Alaska and worked at the Alaska Native Medical Center. In this website you can read all about their life stories from the Tuberculosis outbreak to the Great Alaskan Earthquake and the trials and tribulations that they’ve overcame.
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Graduate Student Profile: Daniel Fandino
Daniel Fandino is a historian of the United States and Japan with a specialization in Digital History, and a PhD candidate at Michigan State University. He received the Graduate Certificate in Spring 2024. Daniel’s research focuses on the relationship between the United States and Japan, popular culture, and technology.
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Mapping Reproductive Justice Law
Seed Grant Summer 2024 Report Taylor Elyse Mills and Gregory Rogel Background With the overturn of Roe v. Wade and current, continued reports of forced sterilization of immigrant women in recent years, our timely project aims to track and map the history of legal precedent that has enabled the forced sterilization of women (and those who gestate) of color in the United States and U.S. territories, with particular emphasis on migrant/immigrant and Indigenous communities. The history of this grave reproductive injustice is under-researched in philosophy, bioethics, and in law. By bringing these disciplines together, we aim to provide a comprehensive…
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Networking Letters of Revolution (2024)
Seed Grant Summer 2024 Report Gillian MacDonald and Morgan Fox Background Inspired by more recent developments in the field of network science and early modern studies, Networking is a nascent open access digital repository of code and data specifically related to relationships and networks of people in Scotland during the Revolution. The recent publication of Tudor Networks and Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project are important contributions to the growing field of network analysis in the early modern world. These datasets have asked important questions about early modern communication systems and social networks. The communications revolution between 1450 and…
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A Community-Engaged Approach to Mesoamerican Plant Knowledge: The Co-Creation of a Botanical Database
Seed Grant Summer 2024 Report Aubree Marshall Project Background Food plays a complex role in our daily lives. In addition to providing us with the nutrition we need to nourish our bodies, food access and choice reflect many different cultural practices and ideologies, which in turn can affect health for better or for worse (White, 1999). Thus, many archaeological studies focus on the intersection of diet and social organization to determine how and why this relationship varies within and between populations, as well as to identify and interpret dietary shifts resulting from technological, environmental, and social changes. Archaeologists have attempted…
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Fall 2024 Research Showcase
Attendees at Fall 2023 Research Showcase
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Research Highlight: Stratford Heritage Guide
Analysis of 19th-century guidebooks reveals how public understanding of Stratford’s monuments has evolved, demonstrating the subjective nature of the town’s relationship with Shakespeare.