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Networking Letters of Revolution (2025)
Seed Grant Summer 2025 Report Gillian MacDonald and Morgan Fox Background The launch of the beta version of Networking the Letters of Revolution project on Github pages has so far been a success. The project itself, still nascent, is building upon the idea that communication and relationships during conflict are incredibly important in terms of political capital during chaos. The project’s success is reflected in the fact that the authors were invited to unveil at the Omohundro Institute’s Digital Project Coffee Hour in April 2025. Using one main corpus of letters, Leven and Melville Papers, the project visualized this world’s…
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Neshnabé Nengosêk Kenomagewen (Potawatomi Star Knowledge)
Seed Grant Summer 2025 Report Blaire Morseau Background Neshnabé Nengosêk Kenomagewen (Potawatomi Star Knowledge) is an Indigenous-centered digital humanities effort to sustain and share Potawatomi constellations, celestial stories, and teachings about the movements of the skies. The project’s core purpose is intergenerational: to return star knowledge to everyday use among Potawatomi families, especially youth, while offering non-Native learners a respectful window into a living intellectual tradition. Rooted in Pokagon Band–led star knowledge gatherings (2019) and formalized through the Digital Scholarship Lab incubator (2023–2024), the project pairs careful cultural protocol with practical technology. Using Stellarium, a free, open-source planetarium used worldwide in…
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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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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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Unlocking Squareland Mysteries: The Development of Squareland Digital Field Trips
Seed Grant Summer 2023 Report Kara Haas Project Description At the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS), MSU’s largest off-campus research and education complex, in-person field trips have been a mainstay of outreach efforts since the 1920s. Field trips are memorable learning experiences that connect students physically and emotionally with the local environment. Unfortunately, these in-person events are becoming less common in K-12 American schools, due to budget constraints, focus on standardized test performance and the COVID-19 pandemic (Behrendt & Franklin, 2014; Greene et al., 2014). In light of these constraints, teachers have been using schoolyards and near-school natural areas as field…
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Marsh Time: Humanistic Ways of Measuring and Experiencing Corey Marsh
Seed Grant Summer 2023 Report Garth Sabo and Matt Rossi Background and Context Corey Marsh Ecological Research Center (CMERC) is a 400-acre parcel of land in Bath, Michigan, that is as noteworthy for its past as its future. The plot is the only remaining portion of the original MSU land grant that is non-contiguous with the East Lansing campus. For decades, the marsh served as the university’s Muck Soils Research Farm, but since 2018 it has been repurposed as an ecological research station thanks to the efforts of Dr. Jen Owen (MSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife), who has reimagined…
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Mapping Michigan Menus
Seed Grant Summer 2023 Report Dani Willcutt I requested the seed grant to support preliminary research for finding a methodology for using bar and restaurant menus as data. I knew that I needed to find menus that were specific to Michigan and to Lansing and that the seed grant would provide the resources to digitize some of those menus and turn them into a reusable dataset. What I did not know when I proposed the initial ideas for Mapping Michigan Menus was that I would soon come into possession of a large collection of menus with a Michigan focus. The…
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AREPR and Omeka S: Developing Tools for the DH Community
Seed Grant Summer 2022 Report Christina Boyles The Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico (AREPR), or the Emergency Response Archive of Puerto Rico, is a digital open access repository of Puerto Rican artifacts of disaster pertaining to Hurricanes Irma and María (2017), the Puerto Rican earthquake swarm (2019-2022), and COVID-19 (2020-present). These artifacts include oral histories from grassroots community organizations and individuals across Puerto Rico who implemented innovative disaster response strategies in the wake of these crises. They also include documents, images, and videos of these events. To ensure that AREPR presents these materials with the utmost care, we…