sanctuary project
Lloyd Barba: The Sanctuary Movement Website

Professor Barba, in collaboration with students in this course, has developed a website of resources that reflect upon the U.S. Sanctuary Movement from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, the New Sanctuary Movement of today, and adjacent forms of immigrant rights activism. The website is built in Wordpress and features an interactive timeline, syllabus resources, and student work such as podcasts and articles. 

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graffiti art
Sara Brenneis: Art as Protest Class Blog and Digital Exhibits

Professor Brenneis used a Wordpress site in her course Art as Protest, first in Fall 2018 and again in Fall 2020. It allowed students to curate, share, connect, and explore multimedia artifacts and resources from a wide variety of resources. Students then synthesized individual artifacts into a thematic digital exhibit on the topic of their choice.

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trade routes map
Lisa Brooks: Our Beloved Kin Website

Professor Brooks developed a website using Scalar as a digital companion to her book Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War.. It allows viewers to take alternate paths through the text and provides high-res versions of images and maps used in the book.

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digital africas blog
Rhonda Cobham-Sander: Digital Africas Class Blog

Since 2015, Professor Cobham Sander has used a course blog in each offering of her course Digital Africas. The goal of the blog is to strengthen their critical skills as users of social media. reflect on how African writers are utilizing digital forms of communication, and consider how shifts in writing technologies lead to shifts in genre. Students post each week to the private blog to reflect on a particular reading, share an image or article, or post about ideas they generate on their own.

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LGBT timeline logo
Javier Corrales: LGBT Timeline

The LGBT Timeline project is an effort to archive and organize the most important political events in the history of LGBT rights in the Latin America and the Caribbean. It is designed to be a digital resource for scholarship in the area of comparative politics and LGBT rights issues. The timeline captures and makes openly available standardized event data about LGBT activism. Events date back to the 19th century.

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data art
Kat Correia: Data Art Website

In the summer of 2021, Professor Katharine Correia and her students in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program embarked on a unique research project to analyze data on racial disparities in obstetrics & gynecology health care. This resulted in the creation of data art and highlighted the interdisciplinary approach critical to the research project. The objective in creating data art was to make the research accessible to the larger community beyond formal academic journals, and to make the human stories behind the data more visible.

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drum
Jeffers Engelhardt: Soundscapes of the Connecticut River Valley

Professor Engelhardt has taught this course since 2009 on a recurring basis. During each iteration, students produce and post documentary video and audio essays about a wide variety of Valley musicians and communities. The website currently hosts material for over 30 projects. The benefit of a cumulative archive is that new students have a wealth of examples, and lessons learned, to draw on when planning their projects.

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microphone
Pooja Rangan: Audio Description Projects for Disability Media

In the Fall 2019 course Disability Media, students gained hands-on experience in making visual media accessible to people with visual disabilities. Using audio description as an accessibility technique, students used YouDescribe to add a narrative audio track to a film and video, to describe the visuals. This additional information made the video more accessible to people with visual disabilities.

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timeline
Kerry Ratigan: Visual Timeline using Google Slides

In January 2021, Prof. Ratigan taught Health Policy in China, a remote course offered on a compressed timeframe. A collaborative timeline built in Google Slides allowed students to quickly explore the history of Chinese health policy and politics, so that they could then place contemporary events in their proper context. 

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indian art
Yael Rice: Digital Art History Course and Other Projects

Projects and papers include Distant Looking: Mughal Manuscripts through a Digital Humanities Lens" Faculty Colloquium Series (fall 2016); Teaching with Manuscripts: Material, Digital, and Collaborative Pedagogies (online panel, spring 2021); Workshop as Network: A Case Study from Mughal South Asia (2017); “Digital Art History” (course taught in fall 2020); “Art History Beyond Objects” (article on the Digital Art History course taught in fall 2020).

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latin american cinema
Paul Schroeder Rodriguez: Mapping Community-based Filmmaking in Abya Yala

A collaboration with dozens of community-based organizations in Abya Yala that produce, exhibit, and distribute their own films. The project will feature a digital map of the organizations, with links to films chosen by the organizations themselves. The map project may grow into a more comprehensive website with additional components, or become part of an existing website on Indigenous media in Latin America.

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ai liberal arts
Lee Spector: AI in the Liberal Arts

The AI in the Liberal Arts program aims to engage a broad, interdisciplinary community of participants in discussions and activities related to artificial intelligence, exploring and facilitating multi-way interactions between work in artificial intelligence and work across the liberal arts. Professor Spector and his students maintain Wordpress and Discourse sites to enable discussion and information sharing on this topic.

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iapi oaye newspaper
Kiara Vigil: Dakota Language Project

Iapi Oaye is a Dakota-language newspaper, which was published monthly by missionaries, first in Greenwood, Dakota Territory, and later in Santee, Nebraska, between May 1871 and March 1939. Professor Vigil has had support from the College to produce high-quality digital scans of this paper, and is in the process of having these issues translated into English. By digitizing the original nineteenth century documents this website preserves an important historical moment when Dakota was recorded using an orthography that differs from the Standard Dakota Orthography that most teachers and language learners use today. Because this paper was published in Dakota but was printed and circulated by a Missionary press during the height of assimilation and allotment of Dakota people’s culture and land being able to access its contents will produce new windows into this moment in colonial history while also providing current Dakota language teachers and learners new materials to preserve and revitalize this endangered language.

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microphone
Vanessa Walker: Podcasting for Human Rights and National Security Course

In the Spring 2019 course Human Rights and National Security: Seeking Balance in the United States, students created short documentary podcasts exploring class topics for their final project. Professor Walker’s goal was to get students to go beyond listening to podcasts and become creators of podcasts. The assignment guidelines described the steps in the process to create a podcast, and included strategies for students to develop reflective and metacognitive thinking, in collaborative settings.

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nelson family
The Worlds and Works of the Nelson Brothers

A digital exhibit using Omeka, based on a unique collection of books housed in Archives & Special Collections. Created bt Professor Karen Sanchez-Eppler's Mellon Research Seminar “The Archives of Childhood” with assistance from library and IT staff.

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porter phelps
Global Valley & Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers

A digital exhibit using Omeka of primary documents and annotated transcriptions from the papers of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family of Hadley Massachusetts. Begun in 2012, this project is an ongoing collaboration between the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, and the Amherst College American Studies Course "Global Valley."

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loewenstein
Karl Loewenstein and the American Occupation of Germany

In 2013, Professor Catherine Epstein's "American Occupation of Germany" course worked with library staff to mount a physical exhibit and companion website based on the Karl Loewenstein Papers collection housed in Archives & Special Collectons.

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mapped network
Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions

The Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions (DANAIT) is a project to create a space for conversation and collaboration, with the goal of developing a framework for sharing, exploring, and visualizing Native-authored library and archival collections. 

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wampum trade routes
A Racial History of Amherst College 

This website is the work of the Steering Committee on a Racial History of Amherst College (formed in 2020), and is coordinated by Archives & Special Collections and student research assistants. In the Amherst Anti-Racism Plan, released on 3 August 2020, President Martin noted the need for a historical study of the College’s ties to slaveholding and to capital accumulation based on slavery. In addition, she called for a racial history of the college extending into present times.

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disasters at amherst
Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship Program

Frost’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program ran from 2014 to 2020. It gave undergraduate students an immersive introduction to digital-humanities approaches, methodologies, and tools. Each cohort worked with a small group of peers, librarians, and archivists to develop a digital project that explored our Archives & Special Collections. View the projects here!

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Mead Seeds

Mead Art Museum

Projects & Collaborations

The museum’s audience and users include people both on and off campus. Our Digital Humanities projects vary, but draw from some, if not all of these assets/tools: museum collections and/or their metadata, the concept and various components of an exhibition, formal educational programs (ie, we are a place where K-12 and college instructors come for curricular support) and the existence of general public audiences for our work. Key projects since 2019 include:  

  • Mead Seeds - Education Blog featuring born digital student projects: a repository of 3D models of artworks in Sketchfab, artist interviews, and summer intern research. 
  • Virtual tours (using Matterport), illustrated checklists, and artist interviews related to past exhibitions in Embodied Taste, Starting Something New, Founding Narratives, 
  • Curating at a Distance: a  work group that convened during 2020-2021 to research, brainstorm, and develop guidelines for virtual exhibitions at the Mead, and in partnership with Tufts and Colby, with funding from the New England Humanities Consortium. 
  • Curating Between the Virtual and the Physical - virtual component to in person exhibition, with projects by students in Niko Vicario’s spring 2022 course by the same name. 
  • Various improvements made at the level of metadata for accessibility including audio description, alt text, and additional tagging. 
  • Curricular support to faculty, including Yael Rice, “Digital Art History;” and Sara Brenneis, “Art as Protest.” 
  • Hidden Drives: The Scene and Unseen of Home, a partnership with the Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellows in 2020-2021 to interpret Mead artworks in a collaborative, thematic virtual format. 

Academic Resource Team (ART) Centers: Project Support & Collaboration

 

Academic Technology Services

ATS works with faculty, instructional staff, and students to enhance teaching and learning through the meaningful integration of digital technology. ATS provided the platforms and tools used for most of the projects listed above, as well as tech support and strategic consultations. 

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Center for Community Engagement

The CCE offers opportunities for faculty members and students to link learning inside and outside of the classroom, tackle problems that matter, or develop skills that they can apply in other settings. They provided support for the community engagement aspect of many of these projects. 

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Center for Humanistic Inquiry

The Center for Humanistic Inquiry (CHI) provides resources for Amherst faculty, staff, and students to engage a broad vision of the role humanistic thinking can play in scholarly and public life, The CHI's Public Humanities focus in particular connects it to many of the projects above. In 2021, the CHI and the Mead collaborated to build an online exhibit Hidden Drives: The Scene and Unseen of Home, which showcases the work of CHI fellows. 

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Center for Teaching & Learning

The Center for Teaching and Learning facilitates Amherst College’s ambition to provide a rigorous liberal arts education in a vibrant, inclusive learning community. They have advised many of the faculty above on course design and pedagogical strategy. 

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Writing Center

The Writing Center empowers students to develop their own processes and voices as writers, speakers, readers, and learners. They have worked with many of the courses above, and from 2018-2021 ran Confluences: Lost & Found in Translation, a multilingual blog with articles written, edited, and translated by Amherst College students, staff, and faculty.

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