News & Updates
Mapping Ancestral Ties
Cultural Affiliation and Repatriation: A Spatial Analysis Project Rylee LaLonde My digital project proposed for this year explores how cultural affiliation operates under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) through an interactive mapping interface. While repatriation is often understood as a straightforward process, in which cultural items are returned to a single...
Mapping Chinese Multicultural Motifs: Project Proposal
Why This Project Matters to Me: Over the past few years, my research and design work has been driven by a question: What kinds of cultural knowledge are recognized as legitimate sites of computing, and whose cultural stories are allowed to shape how we imagine computer science? This question sits at the heart of my practicum work, my broader research agenda in culturally responsive computing,...
Project Proposal: Web Mapping Postwar Legal Change in Immigration and Naturalization
My project for the next few months will be a web mapping project based on my dissertation research on intimate partner and family-based changes to U.S. immigration and naturalization law following World War II. The project will create interactive maps showing profiles of over thirty bills that were introduced in Congress between 1945 and 1951, data about connections between the bills’ sponsors...
Superhero Comics and Readerly Affect: Introducing Miraclemapped
Miraclemapped is an archive that aims to shed light on a pivotal cultural moment through the specific multiplicity of reader responses and break new ground in the study of comics and the applicability of cultural developments on real-world societal change.
Voices from the margins : Building a Digital Archive of Reproductive Care
Voices From the Margins is a digital humanities project designed to make visible what too often remains hidden: the reproductive struggles and care journeys of Muslim women in West Bengal, India. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork but built through digital methods, this archive will bring together narrative, multimedia documentation, and spatial data to show how infertility is not merely a private...
The Badman (Digital) Archive – Detroit
by Harry M. Foster | Department of English Project Overview The Badmen Archives is a revolutionary modular digital museum system that will ultimately map Black masculine heroism across every major American city. Starting with Detroit as our prototype city module, we're creating a scalable architecture that transforms how communities nationwide preserve and share their resistance narratives. The...
Cinematic Counter-Cartographies: Formal Refusal in Palestinian Cinema
An introduction to my project. My project will map how Palestinian narrative film documents Israeli military occupation with a focus on checkpoints in the West Bank from 2000 to 2025. I will be focusing on 3-5 significant checkpoints that appear across multiple films. By mapping these repeated locations and comparing how different filmmakers cinematically reimagine these spaces over time, the...
Introducing People’s Letters: Building a Digital Archive of Everyday Voices
People’s Letters is a digital archive that seeks to preserve and illuminate a remarkable yet understudied body of historical sources: the letters written by ordinary people to government agencies throughout the Mao era. These letters (including petitions, complaints, requests for assistance, personal appeals, and explanations of one’s situation) offer a rare window into the emotional worlds,...
Mappin Women’s Work: Introducing Threading Histories- Bryttany Grimes
Threading Histories: Nigerian Women's Textile Traditions is a digital humanities project that maps the spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions of Nigerian women's textile handicraft traditions from 1850 to 1960. Through interactive mapping and archival research, this project visualizes how British colonialism disrupted traditional knowledge systems and transformed women's labor across...
Version Control and Data Management
by Harry M. Foster Cultural heritage projects represent a unique nexus of cultural preservation and technological innovation. Whether digitizing historical photographs, building interactive maps, or creating multimedia timelines, these projects require meticulous and thorough attention to both content integrity and collaborative workflow. Version control, a system originally developed for...
