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 life itself. In our episode of the speculative cinema project, Forest Tales, Jatayu is resurrected with a prosthetic wing, only to face the extinction of his kind in the present. Audience members are presented with a speculative cinema episode, which is followed by a role-playing game, where we wonder together about the queer utopias that are latent in our impaired landscapes and disabled ecologies.

I am Jessica Stokes, a disabled poet/performer/educator/scholar pursuing my PhD at Michigan State University. I analyze contemporary ecopoetics’ crip methods for climate survival and read into the experimental poetics of those who have historically been experimented upon. I am currently working on the Wingin’ It project with Anuj Vaidya. Anuj is a teacher/student of performance/media and multispecies thinking, currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis. Deeply invested in process and collaboration, his practice is committed to challenging normativity, cultivating joy, and building community, with both human and more-than-human worlds. Together, we have been working on a transnational conversation that addresses the entanglements of vultures and plastics.

As Anuj says, the most environmentally-friendly film is one that never gets made. Our film now, then, is a project and a game. These “scenes” have taken place as moments of collaborative storytelling online at the Society for Disability Studies Annual Conference, at MSU as part of the HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker Series, and through an event put on by the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco this summer. We have a few future scenes in the works. Participants across these locales took part in a role-playing game that asks players to grapple with the environmental impacts of each of their choices as they select elements of Jatayu’s prosthetic wing, from its material components to its design to its shape. As a result of the process, participants each had wildly different wing designs, rendered by audience members or paid student-artists at each event.

In the game, each category players could choose from came with a list of potential known outcomes of each choice. Unbeknownst to the players, there was also a table of latent consequences that would become active at the end of each session. For example, under the category of “Labor,” if players chose to use domestic labor to make their wing, the known implications were “Increase employment by 10%” and “Insistence on local production increases stigma against outsiders–advance nationalism slider by one category.” And one of the unknown consequences was “The Jatayu’s Wing project becomes a union project, increase interdependence by 10% and reduce Wealth Gap by 5%.” We used these layers of outcomes and consequences to generate in depth discussions with players at the end of the game about what it means to try to imagine just and accessible futures within material constraints. People often lingered after we ended a session or shared contact information to keep the conversation going.

            Each image we have created represents hours of conversation between students, professors, disabled artists, and museum patrons. These conversations were on climate change, economics, nationalism, and other difficult to approach topics. Through a digital humanities framework of storytelling and gaming, people contemplated multiple futures.

Working with the DH Seed Grant, we set out to further complicate conversations around the shaping of Jatayu’s wing while also increasing the accessibility of the project. We wanted tangible wings to make game play more accessible for blind and low vision players while grappling ourselves with the environmental implications of our choices. In the gameplay, people always had the option of choosing to 3D print Jatayu’s wing, but through the grant we were able to more deeply consider the implications of that choice within and outside of the game.

Using DH Seed Grant funding in preparation for making material models of the work, I took several courses over the summer on designing for 3D printing in Udemy. However, as our lengthy collaboration on this project makes space for ourselves as growing, changing humans, I was slowed in my learning about 3D printing as I 3D printed my dear daughter Cordelia this summer.

I quickly crashed into issues with design without a deeper background in the subject and while crashing in between sleepless nights with this one. Using my shaky disabled hands to drag polygons led to vastly uneven wings, and my new carpal tunnel from holding a newborn compounded the strain. But this project has always been undergirded by a commitment to accessibility and interdependence not just for players but for us as makers so as these problems arose we pivoted our plans.

Speaking with Dr. Amanda Tickner who is deeply involved with 3D printing here at MSU, I had a conversation about the many material choices available in 3D printing and those specifically used here at MSU. The conversation sounded a lot like our RPG’s gameplay as players analyze costs and benefits of their choices for Jatayu’s wing. In this conversation, I learned about the possibility of seaweed 3D printing. Yay environment! Good luck dealing with that smell. I learned about offgassing in 3-D printing with the materials more commonly used here as well as other environmental considerations. While resin based printing renders details vividly its off-gassing is particularly toxic and while PLA another material used here is cornstarch based it has its own shortcomings (don’t trust it to print a little diver for your fishbowl as it will deteriorate within).

This additional information has made its way into the production game tables as well, in such latent consequences as “Despite assumptions of recyclability, practical recycling of 3D printing waste such as supports and misprints isn’t common: Increase pollution in oceans and soil by .25%”

As this project continues to stretch and grow in ways anticipated and not, I am currently working interdependently with multiple organizations at Michigan State University on materializing our versions of Jatayu’s wings. I am bringing on student artists through the Tower Guard in order to create reasonable facsimiles of Jatayu’s many wings. This is also working to support the Creativity in the Time of Covid 19 Grant by offering them a reasonable timeline for making their own future exhibits accessible.

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 often pays undergraduate interns to work on limited-run projects, such as The REO Town Reading Series Anthology and the website redesign for The Red Cedar Review, with grant funding. As has been the case with projects past, Superheroes Die in the Summer’s final iteration will be made possible with the generous support of DH@MSU.

The Project

Dr. Tamar Boyadjian, Associate Professor of English and one of three translators from Western Armenian to English in the world, approached The Cube about supporting a translation of Christian Batikian’s Superheroes Die in the Summer, an experimental text that narrates the daily lives of children from different cultural backgrounds who live in Istanbul and share an interest in American comic books and their heroes—stories that become reflections of future fantasy, sexual adventures, and their current reality. At the same time, the book individualizes the lives of superheroes within the complicated relationships of Armenians, Kurds, and Turks living in Istanbul in the twenty-first century. The bildungsroman further complicates the intersections of childhood, memory, and identity through the lens and language of Western Armenian— currently on the UNESCO list of endangered languages.

We initially edited, designed, and wrote notes for the translation in my SS21 Community Publishing class, but substantial work remained to bring to life the vision that Dr. Boyadjian and I envisioned, namely:

• meeting with copyright experts to determine whether Superheroes is a fair-use case (it is);
• finalizing all editorial decisions to be consistent with the intention of the original text while being accessible to an English-speaking audience;
• proofreading the final edits;
• developing graphics for the website and printed edition, including back cover art; 
• wireframing, building, and testing usability for the website; and
• typesetting the original Western Armenian and the English translation side-by-side in InDesign.

The grant that we received enabled all of the above to happen.

The Future

As of the time of this writing, we are working on finishing touches before purchasing a domain and taking the website public. Still left to complete are

• the final proofread of the book layout;
• final margins on the book layout;
• adding our masthead and branding to the book layout;
• refining the website for use with different browsers and on mobile; and 
• a final accessibility audit of the website.

The in-progress site can be viewed here.

The Staff

I would like to thank the following people for their dedication and hard work on this project:

• Mitch Carr, DRPW (MA 2022), Project Assistant
• Sydney Wilson, Professional and Public Writing (BA 2021), Editing and Proofreading
• Grace Houdek, Graphic Design (BA 2022), Graphic Designer
• Ethan Kolderman, Experience Architecture (BA 2022), Web Developer
• The students in my SS21 Community Publishing class: Charlotte Bachelor, Iliana Cosme-Brooks, Peyton Frederickson, Kira Ginter, Jarett Greenstein, Naomi Johnson, Noelle Oman, and Mai Vang.

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 Archive of Puerto Rico, or AREPR)–is a digital open access repository of Puerto Rican artifacts of disaster and recovery pertaining to Hurricane María (2017), the Guayanilla earthquakes (2020), and COVID-19 (2020). We see these artifacts as necessary to preserve the stories of survivors within our cultural memory; they also highlight effective disaster response strategies, counter inaccurate media narratives about Puerto Rico, serve as an educational resource about climate change and colonialism, and provide a meaningful resource for the public. 

In early summer 2021, we hosted two workshops geared specifically at our community partners. These workshops, “What is Omeka S?” and “How will my Omeka site look?” were designed to help community groups gain familiarity with the project’s tools and to begin a dialogue with our partner organizations to determine their wants and needs when it comes to building their Omeka S site. AREPR’s fall 2020 and spring 2021 workshops are available on our Vimeo page. The goal of sharing these resources is to both make the workshops accessible to team members who are unable to attend the workshops and/or would like a refresher on the content and to provide resources to other teams working on community archiving projects.

Throughout summer 2021, Aleyshka Estevez–a student employee from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez–partnered with the technical team to organize and process the metadata for the 78 oral histories collected by her team. During this time, the technical team was able to work with Aleyshka to test out the item collection spreadsheet, built using Google Sheets, to ensure that it was accessible in both English and Spanish.

Additionally, AREPR hired developer Ivy Rose to work with the team starting in June 2021. Ivy will continue working with AREPR to develop custom Omeka S themes and modules for our project and community partners. The themes, modules, and code Ivy develops for this work will be posted to GitHub and will be available for others to use. One of the most intriguing elements of Ivy’s first Omeka theme, “Multilingual”, is its built-in feature designed for supporting multiple languages. Organizations using Omeka S will be able to use this theme to display collections with multilingual metadata, presenting users with a toggleable interface in multiple languages. Ivy also hopes to include code that will make design choices–such as font, color, menu structure, and layout–more accessible on the front end of the theme(s), which means that users will be able to adjust these features without having to write their own CSS or PHP. As such, these themes will increase the ease-of-use for organizations using Omeka S and lacking resources or know-how to customize their sites.  Ivy’s work on this project will not only benefit AREPR, a digital humanities project housed at Michigan State University, but also their work will benefit other digital humanities practitioners, particularly those working in multilingual contexts.

UPR Digital Humanities Center

Among the outcomes achieved by AREPR and the collaboration it has fostered between MSU and UPR-Río Piedras, we want to highlight the now fully operational UPR Digital Humanities Center (DHC). Thanks to AREPR support, the DHC officially opened last January 2021. Five workstations with laptops and scanners were installed in an independent space inside the Angel Quintero Library in the College of General Studies. AREPR staff uses the space as a working center where equipment and documents from community groups and organizations are stored securely. The UPR-Río Piedras Division of Technology installed one internet port per workstation to ensure high speed internet access.

AREPR undergraduate assistants have been using this space to digitize and catalogue materials from community groups. The DHC has also served as a training facility for both undergraduate assistants and members from partner community groups. These experiences have proven that the area is versatile and dynamic. The fact that the DHC is inside a library gives AREPR team members access to restrooms, a kitchen, and a nearby parking area. This is very important because due to the pandemic most of the on-campus food vendors are closed and campus security is scarce.