The Center for the Humanities, NYU Libraries, and NYU Research Technology fund the initial development of new research projects that will analyze digital sources, apply algorithmic methods to humanities data, or create digital publications, exhibits, or websites. The goal of the program is to seed projects that may go on to receive greater funding from other sources or otherwise build NYU’s institutional capacity in Digital Humanities work.
We are excited to announce this year’s cohort of funded projects. Congratulations to them all!
Inverting the Wunderkammer: Rethinking the Digital Humanities through Botanic Histories and Archives
Contributors: Ahmad Ansari (Tandon), Elaine Ayers (Museum Studies), Tega Brain (Tandon), Laura Briscoe (New York Botanical Garden)
Abstract:
Focusing on the the nineteenth-century bryological Mitten Collection at the New York Botanical Garden, this project uses moss–one of the most commonplace and adaptive plants in the world–to explore how experimental digital imaging techniques and pluralistic storytelling might be applied to colonial botanical collections to open up ways to critically interrogate violent systems of classification and order. Intersecting the history of science, critical archival studies, and recent interventions into decolonizing design, this digital humanities project uses a specific set of sources (ranging from archival and manuscript materials to herbarium specimens) to ask how women, indigenous experts, and working-class collectors’ contributions to the history of botany have been subsumed and silenced in the service of natural historical “authorship”–in this case, by the British bryologist William Mitten (1819-1906). By engaging a multitude of stakeholders across various fields and levels of expertise, this public-facing project explores how reading moss from multiple perspectives can engender new systems of knowledge production crossing colonial natural history, museum and archival studies, and decolonial design practices.
Archive of Cuban Socialism (ARCHCUS)
Contributors: Maria A. Cabrera Arus (Gallatin)
Abstract:
The proposed Archive of Cuban Socialism (ARCHCUS) will document and archive the material culture of everyday life in Cuba between 1959 and 1990. It builds on an existing blog, Cuba Material, which will be expanded into a comprehensive, interactive, systematic, and user-friendly platform. Cuba Material has been a multi-year effort at the community and academic level to preserve and make available to scholars and other interested parties information regarding the common goods, fabrics, objects and uniforms, among other material objects, that circulated in Cuba following the 1959 Revolution. Both the objects and meanings (social, political, aesthetic) will be preserved in digital form for documentation and study. The innovative web platform will catalogue objects, male them easily searchable, host digital exhibitions, and provide mechanisms for additional contributions from the community, contextualization, and discussion. This makes it a significant contribution to the study of contemporary material culture as well as to Cuban, Caribbean, Latin American, and state socialist studies.
The Zine Union Catalog
Contributors: Lauren Kehoe (NYU Libraries), Jenna Freedman (Barnard College)
Abstract
The Zine Union Catalog (aka ZineCat) is a union catalog dedicated to zines. A union catalog is a resource where libraries can share cataloging and holdings information. ZineCat lets researchers discover zine holdings by searching a single catalog, helps librarians copy catalog records to eliminate duplication of cataloging effort, and facilitates lending across libraries. ZineCat serves educators, researchers, librarians, archivists, and anyone in the general public with an interest in zines. Zines – self-published literature that often features counter cultural, political, and artistic content – are an increasingly important primary resource for humanities, social sciences, and other scholars, but due to the diverse standards and practices among the libraries, archives, and community organizations that collect and maintain them, accessing them through traditional research discovery systems is difficult. The initial prototype was developed by Lauren Kehoe (Faculty Librarian, NYU) and Jenna Freedman (Librarian, Barnard) in their MA Digital Humanities program at the City University of New York Graduate Center using 25 records from three libraries with different metadata schema: MARC, Dublin Core, and a spreadsheet-based standalone schema to a Collective Access catalog. The prototype has grown to include over 31,000 zines from six collections.
COVID Collections
Contributors: Jacob Remes (Gallatin), Ellen Noonan (Archives and Public History), Valerie Marlowe (Disaster Research Center), Scott Knowles (Drexel University)
Abstract:
As COVID-19 began to dominate the global agenda during the spring of 2020, museums, libraries, and archives around the world announced efforts to document human experiences of illness, isolation, economic downturn, fear, adaptation, and solidarity. These efforts ranged widely in scale and methods, from local historical societies seeking personal reflections to large scale federally-funded oral history projects. What will become of these various collecting efforts, and how will scholars be able to locate them effectively? The COVID Collections Project aims to catalogue the many COVID-19 oral history, documentation, and archiving projects that have begun since winter 2020. As a multi-year project, we have started to survey repositories and oral historians to discover and catalogue the collections that are being built around the global experience of COVID-19. We will then develop a website that will help researchers find these collections. We also hope to foster collaborations among archivists, documentarists, and historians as the collections are being developed. The COVID Collections Project is a collaboration among the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies (NYU Gallatin), the Archives and Public History Program (NYU GSAS), and the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.
Creating a digital Museum of the History of Dentistry at the College of Dentistry, NYU.
Contributors: Andrew Spielman (Dentistry)
Abstract
Imagine a digital museum where artifacts appear in virtual reality in three dimensions and can be manipulated for full inspection. The College of Dentistry is creating such a museum by 3D scanning and digitizing its artifacts using the services of the LaGuardia Studio for high resolution scanning and a novel 3D display software called Sketchfab, to manipulate objects in space. The current effort is one of the very few in the World to utilize such technology for museum artifacts.