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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…
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Movements through Time and Space: Visualizing a Literary Journey by Ethnic Koreans in China
Seed Grant Summer 2022 Report Catherine Ryu and Olivia Hale Project Description Our project’s main goal in the summer of 2022 was to pilot a viable digital humanities approach to visualizing the movements through time and space in the writings by ethnic Koreans in China (Map 1-a). This diasporic community is situated in the area known as Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (Map 1-b), which was established in 1955. Among 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, Koreans are known as “a model ethnic minority.” Key distinguishing aspects of this community include their robust cultural activities and high-level education. Their literary…
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Materializing Multiple Futures: Printing Jatayu’s Wing
Summer 2021 Seed Grant Funding Submitted by Jessica Stokes The project Wingin’ It: A Material Re-Storying the Ramayana is an attempt to make material and tangible parts of a speculative cinema piece and role-playing game crafted around the vulture Jatayu. An exalted character in the Ramayana epic tradition, the vulture Jatayu is known for his courage and loyalty. When Ravana abducts Sita and whisks her away in his flying chariot, it is the fearless Jatayu who tries to stop him. An aerial battle ensues, but Ravana eventually prevails, chopping off Jatayu’s wing, disabling him from fight and flight, and eventually…
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Superheroes Die in the Summer
Seed Grant Summer 2021 Report Submitted by Kate Birdsall The Cube The Cube, in its role as the only publishing nexus of its kind at MSU, currently has three distinct operational wings that provide significant experiential learning, mentorship, and professional development opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. In its second operational wing, The Cube’s director, graduate assistant, and paid undergraduate interns review new proposed projects, accept or reject them based on budgetary constraints and funding (provided by clients, grants, or other internal support, e.g. special project for XA), direct them, and scaffold them. Due to limited internal funding, The Cube…
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Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico (AREPR)
Summer 2021 Seed Grant Funding Submitted by Christina Boyles Summer 2021 Highlights: Hosting 2 workshops to train students and community partners on best practices for collaboration, collection, and technology. Developing customized themes and modules for Omeka S to support multilingual and community-based project work with the support of our developer, Ivy Rose. Developing a metadata ingestion strategy using Google Forms, ensuring that logging data is easy and accessible for our students and community partners. Processing bilingual metadata for ~75 oral histories from individuals and community organizations in Puerto Rico. The Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico (The Emergency Response…
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CURBED3: Using DH Visualization to Understand Location, Cultural Identity, and the Public Imaginary
Summer 2020 Seed Grant Funding Report Submitted by Divya Victor, Julian Chambliss, and Natalie Phillips Overview & Project Goals Inspired by Professor Divya Victor’s forthcoming book Curb (2021), CURBED3 is a web-based multimedia space that seeks to visualize instances of racial othering in the United States. The DH@MSU Summer Seed Grant supported Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab’s (DHLC) first fellow in our Public Humanities Fellow program. Our goal is to aid Professor Victor in developing her digital praxis. Borrowing heavily from Professor Victor’s book, which utilized geolocation data to highlight instances of racial othering in public spaces, our central…
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Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico
Summer 2020 Seed Grant Funding Report Submitted by Christina Boyles Puerto Rico’s recent spate of natural and man-made disasters has led to greater public attention on governmental disaster-response methods–prioritization of urban centers, slow distribution of resources, and limited communication with those in need–often leaving marginalized and vulnerable communities to fend for themselves. Individuals and communities were and are highly dependent upon local traditions, oral knowledge, and community organizing. These knowledge systems are key to surviving the conditions lived and experienced in Puerto Rico, and they serve as powerful resources for future disaster response protocols. In response, I am working with…
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Transferring the website “Legacies of Enlightenment” to Humanities Commons
Summer 2020 Seed Grant Funding Report Submitted by Valentina Denzel, Tracy Rustler, and Michael Stokes The DH@MSU summer seed grant allocated during the summer of 2020, allowed Valentina, Tracy, and Michael to migrate the website “Legacies of the Enlightenment: Humanity, Nature, and Science in a Changing Climate” to Humanities Commons (an open access, open source nonprofit network), and to create an eponymous research group on HC. The website and the research group are part of a larger, multifaceted and interdisciplinary research project that unites scholars from around the globe, working in various disciplines to examine the lasting effects of the…
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“Level 101: A Video Game About Video Games”-Game Development in a Global Pandemic
Summer 2020 Seed Grant Funding Report Submitted by Justin Wigard Prior to receiving the 2020 DH Summer Seed Grant, I was the recipient of a 2018 DH Summer Seed Grant, and that report can be found here. Since 2018, this project has grown from a pedagogical DH project into my dissertation; as such, I applied for the 2020 DH Summer Seed Grant to further the development of Level 101, a serious game that is being developed with the program Unity to address gaps in game studies and higher education. This grant went towards three components of research and development in…
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Visualizing German-Jewish Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century
Summer 2019 Seed Grant Funding Report Submitted by Ryan Carty and Matthew Handelman In the summer of 2019, the DH@MSU Summer Seed Grant enabled Ryan and Matt to build the code for prototype visualizations of archival data of German-Jewish intellectual correspondences during the Weimar Republic. This work is part of a larger, ongoing project, also funded by a Digital Humanities Fellowship from the Research Association Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel, to map the social networks that constituted German-Jewish intellectual life in the early twentieth century, especially those networks surrounding liberal-democratic newspaper the Frankfurter Zeitung and the philosopher, journalist, and later film critic,…
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The Collapse of the USSR: A Living Archive on the End of the USSR and Afterward
Summer 2019 Seed Grant Funding Report Submitted by Martha Olcott The funding that I received from the Digital Humanities program helped support my attendance at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, where I completed the 2-week course on Humanities Data and Mapping Environments, and supported some of the cost of James Madison College student team members attending HILT course on Getting Started with Data, Tools and Platforms (which I attended along with Michael Downs and Bridget McBride), as well as ILiADS (which I attended along with Michael Downs, Sofia Cupal and Ryan Lumsden, and…