Current Projects
Archiving a Pioneering Grassroots Publication: The Committee on South Asian Women Bulletin
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Jyotsna Vaid
The Committee on South Asian Women (COSAW) Bulletin was started in 1983 at Michigan State University by scholar-activists of South Asian descent to highlight research and grassroots women’s activism across South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Afghanistan). At the time there was practically no media coverage of South Asian women’s issues. The Bulletin was the first pan-South Asian independent feminist publication. It developed contacts with women’s groups in every region of the subcontinent and with several small South Asian groups that were emerging in the US. Over time, it recruited emerging and established scholars to contribute articles, book reviews, and essays on a wide range of social science and humanities topics. The original editorial collective dispersed after the first year to take up academic positions in their respective fields. I became the primary editor, taking it with me to UC San Diego and then to Texas A&M, where I continued publishing the Bulletin until 1996.
As a first step, I plan to establish a digital repository of the complete back issues of the Bulletin.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Britt Mize
The purpose of The Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database is to offer the most complete and correct documentation of Beowulf representations, versions, and adaptational engagements from their modern beginnings—in Humphrey Wanley's transcription of two segments of the poem in 1705—through the present. The range of materials is defined inclusively, extending from the most conservative reproductions, such as photographic facsimiles and manuscript transcriptions; to academic mediations, like editions of the Old English text and traditional translations; to all types of freer adaptations and remakings that refashion Beowulf or salient elements of it into new creative works, such as novels, lyric poems, plays, comic books, and films. The BABD covers works in all languages, genres, and media forms.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Ira Dworkin
Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” is one of the most widely anthologized poems in twentieth-century U.S. literature. And yet, despite its canonical status, there is no clear consensus on which version constitutes the copy text. There were two significantly different versions of the poem, both published in 1925 in major volumes. In March 1925, the poem appeared in the Alain Locke-edited issue of Survey Graphic (which was republished in expanded form as The New Negro later that year). In October 1925, Harper and Brothers included a significantly longer version of the poem in Cullen’s first collection, Color.
History for Lawyers
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Katherine Unterman
Today, many Supreme Court justices and appellate judges interpret the Constitution through the lens of originalism, looking to the nation’s history and traditions in their decision making. Yet judges rarely draw upon works by professional historians, nor do they use a wide range of primary source material. Some of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of the past decade — including cases involving abortion and the Second Amendment — have relied upon historical arguments. Therefore, it is important that the history in these rulings is grounded in the archival research and careful analysis of trained historians.
My project involves the eventual creation of a collaborative, public-facing website that will build a bridge between the historical and legal communities. This website will not take a political stand, nor will it advocate a particular outcome in judicial cases. Instead, it will focus on making well-researched history, which is relevant to contemporary legal issues, accessible to the wider public. This will include annotated bibliographies, images of primary sources, and analytical content.
Nautical Lexicon Project
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Deborah Carlson
Graduate Student Principal Investigators: Bethany Becktell | Claire Zak
In 2020 lexicographer Alan Hartley donated his collection of over 6000 handwritten 3x5” index notecards to the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) at Texas A&M (TAMU). The only stipulation of this gift was the digital curation of the cards. Hartley’s archive offers a precious opportunity to salvage years of data acquisition and textual interpretation, and package those data with the visual evidence brought to light by the excavation of shipwrecks.
Navigating the Intersection of Digital Humanities, OER, and Open Pedagogy
Faculty Principal Investigator: Sarah LeMire
This project uses Manifold as a tool to look at the intersection of open educational resources (OER), open pedagogy, and digital humanities by creating texts centered around literary recovery.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Tianna Uchacz
This project analyzes the shared visual and rhetorical features of a never-before assembled corpus of European ornament prints, ca. 1550–1620. Issued in series introduced by title pages, these prints claim that their designs are useful for particular yet divergent artists, from sculptors and painters to goldsmiths and embroiderers. O:D:T queries its corpus for visual cues indicating how designs on paper could be translated by artisans carving wood, brushing paint, casting silver, and embroidering threads.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Britt Mize
Reord is a software plugin that works with an existing open-source screen-reader called Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) to make Old English more accessible for visually impaired students. Dr. Mize worked with Graduate Student Rebecca Baumgarten to develop the tool.
Graduate Student Principal Investigator: Bruna Braga Fontes
Royalist Book Trade in the Interregnum: A Network Analysis of Eikon Basilike’s Printers Using Gephi aims to create a Gephi network visualization of early modern royalist booksellers who published the Eikon Basilike, especially during the 1650s.
A social media analysis of California rideshare driver’s narratives of collective identity during the passing of Assembly Bill 5 and Proposition 22
Graduate Student Principal Investigator: G Santee Riley
This project scrapes posts on FaceBook to investigate how rideshare drivers create meaning out of their work and develop individual and collective identities in the process.