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 and theories and practices of mathematics in the early 20th century. Indeed, as I learned as a graduate student, mathematics had originally been housed in the “philosophical faculty” in German universities, along with philosophy and literary studies. Their separation into STEM and the humanities as we know them today started to appear more as an ideology we imposed on these areas of study—one that covered up their deep and shared interest in language, the nature of reason, and the logical underpinnings of the world. I see DH as a way of bringing them back into productive conversation.
What DH means to me is in a sense interdisciplinary study that better reflects the mix of language, culture, technology, and algorithms that makes up our current reality. This doesn’t mean that we should give up on any of these individual subjects, but rather that a more complete image of knowledge includes both what we may learn in a German and mathematics courses as well as what is revealed by their often surprising and sometimes odd combinations. For instance, the German-Jewish mathematician Felix Hausdorff, considered one of the founders of the modern study of topology, wrote aphorisms and experimental literature inspired by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche under the name Paul Mongré. If, for Hausdorff, the combination of philosophy and literature helped question the legacy of metaphysics around 1900, how might knowledge of Germany in the 20th century (and the role of technology in propaganda) inform how we deal with the problems of algorithmic bias and hate speech on the internet today?
I attempt to model these interdisciplinary ways of thinking in my DH work and teaching. Network analysis, for instance, has provided me with new insights into how German-Jewish intellectuals organized themselves socially between the World Wars and how ideas spread throughout the social networks they created through their exchanges of letters. In my DH courses, I have students explore the origins of “the digital” in the 1940s and 1950s as well as collaborate on semester-long projects that work to analyze and make accessible materials in MSU Library’s Special Collections. In all of these endeavors, I see DH as helping makes visible otherwise hidden connections in the same ways I experienced as an undergraduate major in German and math.
–Dr. Matthew Handelman (Associate Professor)
Interim Director, Digital Humanities Faculty: Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, Digital Humanities, Jewish Studies, German
The piece above was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the October 14, 2024 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
“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.
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 the ways in which people imbue and read meaning in and through the spaces they occupy. I have three long-term goals for this project: finish 3D model of the Walsh store so that each floor has a reasonable representation of the interior and exterior; print the 3D model so that it is materialized; and expand the project to include the Leonhard Tietz Hohe Strasse store that is also part of my study.
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 DH project leaders from outside MSU.
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.
This past summer, I had the privilege of supporting Morgan Hill on her project during the Graduate Arts Fellowship. This fellowship fosters creative engagement through the resources available at the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL). Morgan’s project, “Rituals in Communities: The Art of Breaking,” utilized the DSL’s 360 Visualization Room, along with digitization, audio/visual recordings, and animation software. The entire experience—from concept to execution—was incredibly fulfilling, highlighting collaboration within both the project and the digital humanities community. I am excited to continue supporting innovative projects for next year’s Graduate Arts Fellowship and during the annual Project Incubator.
–Yuri Cantrell
Digital Scholarship Librarian
The piece above was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the October 29, 2024 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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) Fellow, I recognized that DH was something I might want to continue doing in the future. I saw it as a way of creating projects that reach wider audiences and require creative problem solving than just writing about research does not.
I appreciate the emphasis on collaboration. Academics can so often become isolated within their own research projects, which, for me at least, can create an echo chamber in which I am unable to gain feedback and new insight that outsider perspectives can provide. A second but related aspect I appreciate about DH is the interdisciplinary nature which allows for more opportunities to learn from each other gaining insights you can only get from interdisciplinary discussion. My own research tends to be interdisciplinary and so I especially benefited from collaborating with DH community members coming from backgrounds in fields like Anthropology, Archaeology, English, Urban Planning, and Linguistics. This spirit of collaboration goes beyond MSU. One example would be the #DHMakes community that I learned at the 2024 Association for Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Conference. It was an entire group of like-minded scholars who wanted to bring their creative art and crafting ideas into conversation with DH tools and methods.
DH also means being able to do meaningful work. For example, I work as the Digital Humanities Lead Developer for the Roberson Project on Slavery Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. My first project on the team was building Honoris Causa: Sewanee, The Lost Cause, and Honorary Degrees, a website displaying the research of our Public Historian, Maia Council, on the honorary degrees awarded to former and unapologetic Confederates. They were celebrated in 1957 at the height of the Civil Rights Era. I have also developed a site to tell the live and up-to-date story of Sewanee Praises. This project is a community-focused initiative between the University of the South, Virginia Tech, and Virginia Commonwealth University to develop a monument in the area that was once the heart of Sewanee’s Black Community. Finally, I am developing a 3D map to display land leases of black and white Sewanee residents in the early twentieth century. Working with the Roberson Project has meant building public-facing digital products that are accessible to current, former, and future Sewanee residents and their families. What is more, these projects make interventions in recognizing and chipping away at the legacy of white supremacy in the South.
Even when working with serious material and content, DH, to me, means being able to have fun with my work. This is because of the tinkering and experimentation that is required of DH practitioners as we constantly have to problem solve something. Part of what I enjoy the most about working with digital tools, methods, and platforms is that they are always evolving and that there is always something new to consider and experiment with. For example, I am working on a project called Menu Made America for Matrix Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science here at MSU. The project is a culmination of a DH Summer Seed Grant and a chance encounter with a collection of menus from the late CEO of Crown Publishing/Crown Menus. The collection roughly covers the years 1959 to 2008 and focuses mostly on Michigan, but goes beyond and throughout the United States. We have been vetting, cataloging, and digitizing the menus and I am going to build an Omeka-S database in the Spring. Our goal is to have the collection connect to other menu collections and to set a standard for vocabularies related to restaurants and menus as source material.
Being a part of the DH community has opened up doors for me I never even knew existed. DH has made me realize how much I enjoy teaching, but that I enjoy teaching skills and working with others on their projects more than teaching in a traditional classroom setting. Thanks to my experience as a Graduate Assistant in the Lab for Education in and Advancement of Digital Research (LEADR), I am the new Training Specialist for Omeka, replacing fellow LEADR, CHI, and MSU DH alum, Zach Francis. I will be teaching intensive and one-off workshops to scholars and researchers from all over the world. DH means being able to continue thinking creatively about how to present my own research and how to collaborate with other scholars on scholarly and public-facing projects.
–Dr. Dani M. Willcutt (Department of History)
Graduate Research Assistant, Matrix Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences Digital Humanities Lead Developer, Roberson Project for Slavery, Race & Reconciliation Editor, H-Food-Studies
The following piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the November 11, 2024 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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.
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 and pseudocode to represent steps of a process. Mimicking the actions of sorting algorithms to arrange actual physical items by size.
The goal isn’t for XA students (who have wildly different levels of experience and expertise with computing) to become expert coders, but to learn how their work might benefit from the tireless speed and accuracy of computers. Instead, the goal is to learn ways on how to effectively collaborate with future colleagues who deal in systems and data, and – most importantly – how to keep their work grounded in their humanistic ideals.
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 in order to simply survive. But, this problem is not new. These attempts rely on an idealized past, which prompts issues in creating an imagined sort of Main Street in a historical way.
The problem with developing content to share with tourists is access, specifically accessing a more diverse history. Technology can be used as a bridge between what is already in downtown archives and what tourists are looking to learn about that destination. A digital platform would allow for immersion into Main Street history and would provide an opportunity for the community to share other narratives or heritage artifacts, broadening the historical narrative to include more diverse voices.
Project Description
My dissertation project, titled Memory Lane,is a digital humanities project that employs public humanities, specifically public history and anthropology. The goal of this project is two-fold: (1) provide an example of an approach to immersive educational digital heritage experiences and (2) provide access to heritage through the use of digital methodologies for tourists to engage with that heritage. The question guiding my research is how can we critically integrate what communities already have preserved into a more inclusive and accessible digital public history project?
For this case study, I am using semiotics as a theoretical framework to talk about the different layers there are to a physical cultural space. I will also be using historical photographs to allow for more narratives, potentially competing ones, to come to light and those cultural layers bring about different historical and personal meanings to a space. I chose Romeo, Michigan as a location to investigate the semiotic landscape and these competing histories because of its preserved history, established archives, and development of tourism efforts. These multiple audiences bring about an opportunity to share and understand diverse narratives. My project is still developing, but I will create a public website with the use of different digital tools, including digitized archival documents and historical photographs, augmented reality software, geographical mapping, and a portal for the public to add to the town’s history by sharing their own narratives.
I applied for the DH Seed Grant to help fund my summer fieldwork. I first started by creating a general website that participants could reference if they wanted to know more about my project. I also used it as another way for people to access my survey (which was also distributed via flyers).
I then reached out to every business on Main Street via email–this included finding locations on Google maps, searching their website for their contact information, sending the email, and then keeping extensive records of who I contacted, the dates of any email communications back and forth, and any meetings I scheduled. In total, that started at about 60 emails. However, that number continued to grow from there. I then reached out to the village’s chamber of commerce and DDA board to which I received much interest for me to come and talk at meetings and to host interviews. I have since conducted interviews with the village President, DDA members, Lions Club, business owners, and residents. I also began to digitize historical photographs from some of the interviewees and explored the Library’s online archival database. I had plans to visit the Historical Society’s archives (as their collection is not digitized at this time), but their location flooded over the summer and they are still working on repairs, so that task is still pending.
The interviews have been very enlightening for me, not only as a history buff, but also as a researcher. They provide a space for people to share their personal histories and memories of Romeo. One central question I ask in every interview is “When you hear the name Romeo, what is the first memory that comes to mind?” One participant said “Sundays dinners at my grandmother’s,” another said “the smell of the bakery through their grandparents’ apartment window,” and another said that they remembered being in the local diner feeling the crisp denim of their new blue jeans on the first day they allowed boys to wear them to school. All of these memories and stories matter, and my hope is that this project offers an opportunity to weave these narratives into the larger central narrative of Romeo, offering a more diverse and accessible history.
Outcomes
The intended outcome of this project is to provide a model on how to critically integrate what communities have already done for heritage preservation into a more inclusive digital public history project. With the use of semiotics as a theoretical framework, I am investigating how different narratives and memories help define different social spaces on main street. Through an ethnographic methodological approach, I will continue to research Romeo’s history and tourism efforts to better understand (1) what approaches they have done so far and (2) what information community members and tourists are currently seeking. This will allow for a deeper understanding of how to connect narratives of the past to those in the present. The final product will be a website that spotlights the diverse history and narratives of Romeo, Michigan. The use of digital technologies will help multiple audiences discuss a main street history that is more reflective and inclusive of multiple narratives.
Future Directions
I plan to finish conducting interviews and scanning archival documents and historical photographs by the end of this semester. I am also currently drafting three publications about this project—one examining semiotic landscapes through an anthropological lens, one on the digital humanities approaches used, and one about Romeo, Michigan as a case study—which will add to pertinent literature in these fields, demonstrate an interdisciplinary approach to creating digital public history projects, and inspire others to become more involved in heritage preservation efforts. Over the holiday break and into the beginning of the spring semester, I will be creating the website. The goal is to have it available to the public by May or June 2025, as that will be after defending the entire dissertation project.
Memory Lane will be a digital heritage and public history project that promotes access to multiple narratives about different social spaces on Main Street. Because of the integration of ethnography, public history, digital heritage, and tourism, this project will critically analyze how to better integrate erased or contradictory narratives and mitigate homogenized approaches to tourism in post-industrial small towns.
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.
