Category: Archived

Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe is a new online resource in development at the University of Alabama in collaboration with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC). The goal of the Makers Project is to encourage sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role early modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe. The Makers Project Team is in the process of designing a web-based platform that will serve as an interactive digital lab for scholars, encouraging study, collaborative research, innovative approaches, and dissemination of information dedicated to this field. The peer-reviewed digital space will allow scholars to upload visual and textual resources – biographical, archival, and printed. It will also include a dynamic mapping tool designed to highlight the connections between objects, artists, patrons, and materials. The pilot project, initiated in Fall, 2015, involves a significant pedagogical component, representing collaboration between faculty, graduate students, and staff of the ADHC.

Project Owner(s): Dr. Tanja Jones, Dr. Doris Sung, Becky Teague

Tools: Omeka Classic

Methods: Art History

Topics: Women Artists, Early Modern Art

Project Status: Archived

Dr. Catherine Davies and her class of graduate and undergraduate students explore language in the state of Alabama. They examine the difference regionally in Alabama, as well as generationally to see how language changes in Alabama.

Project Owner(s): Catherine Davies (Retired)

Tools: WordPress

Methods:

Topics: Alabama, Lingustics

Project status: Archived

Knitting & History is the result of a collaborative effort of the students in Professor Kopelson’s history class titled Handmade Nation: Knitting and History. Students compiled a timeline of significant moments in the history of knitting, as well as moments in which knitting impacted history. Additionally, students put their own knitting skills to the test, creating an exhibit of their own projects tied to history.

Project Owner(s): Heather Kopelson

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Primary Source Research, Documentary

Topics: Knitting, History

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This project is a collaboration between the ADHC and the St. Louis Public Library which aims to digitize the extremely rare newspaper publication Hobo News from the early twentieth century, and ultimately to make this digital collection available to the public. The Hobo News was created by and for hobos, including a gregarious variety of materials from reports from workers’ societies and conventions to creative re-writings of hymns and popular tunes aiming to propagate socialist ideals, as well as adverts placed by families seeking lost or missing relatives who they hoped might be known among the travelling community. There is only one known complete run of the Hobo News extant to us today, housed in the Special Collections of the St. Louis Public Library, and they are graciously partnering with us to create a proof-of-concept site which we hope will later grow and be available publicly. Ultimately, we aim to incorporate not only scans of the publication on the site, and to make these fully searchable via OCR and detailed metadata, but also to create visualizations showing the geographic range and spread of the publication and its contributors which will highlight its very specific relationship with St. Louis and other key hubs in the early twentieth century.

Project Owner(s): Lynn Adrian (Retired)

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Primary Source Research

Topics: American Studies

UA Genealogies: Historical Archives and Storytelling is a digital archive of the extraordinary family histories discovered by students in Lauren S. Cardon’s EN103 Advanced Composition course. Using a variety of digital and archival resources including the W. S. Hoole and A. S. Williams III Special Collections, students explored their genealogies, creating written narratives documenting particularly significant people or moments in their family histories. UA Genealogies showcases students’ findings about their heritage: in the Narratives section users can browse full-length stories, whilst the Map section displays these stories geographically to give a sense of the global origins of our community at the University of Alabama. Over time, this project will be added to by students participating in future iterations of this course to build a rich narrative documenting the history of the UA student community.

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This website is the first iteration of a project exploring early modern epic writing from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this first incarnation, the project focuses on commonplaces, scrutinizing Spenser and Milton’s engagement with these as a way of understanding how they are structuring their epics, and in turn, how these are crucial components defining what it meant to write epic in English. The site will house a digital commonplace book documenting Spenser and Milton’s use of recurring literary touchstones including images, rhetorical and logical structures, and lexis, and visualizations of these commonplaces, the first of which are being forged by Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and her graduate class, EN668, at the University of Alabama in Fall 2015.

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Headed by University of Alabama graduate students in the Department of English, in partnership with Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and the ADHC, the Early Modern Network Of Networks, EMNON, uses Digital Humanities techniques to visualize the intricate network of relationships connecting key figures in early modern literary and intellectual culture. Centering on the networks belonging to and shared by poets and politicians Andrew Marvell and John Milton, EMNON offers a new understanding of how early modern writers and thinkers related and interacted. An ongoing project, the site will continue to grow in coming years as students and researchers here and further afield contribute to it, allowing us gradually to visualize the social network of key early modern writers and thinkers.

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More than eighty years ago, on March 25, 1931, nine young African Americans hopped a train in a Chattanooga freight yard and headed west to seek work. Instead, they found themselves joined together at the center of a life and death courtroom drama, falsely accused of rape. The Scottsboro Boys’ cases focused an international spotlight on Jim Crow in America in the 1930s. In 2013, Alabama legislators passed two bills, acknowledging that the men were “victims of a gross injustice.” One, a resolution, exonerated the nine defendants; and the other created a law making it possible to grant posthumous pardons to the Scottsboro defendants. Part of the Scottsboro Boys Museum University-Community partnership, this digital project aims to create a curated online repository of letters about the Scottsboro Boys Trials sent to Alabama governors during the 1930s from a wide range of correspondents to shed new light on these pivotal historical events.

Project Owner(s): Ellen Spears (Retired)

Tools: Omeka Classic

Methods: Primary Source Research, Digital Archive

Topics: Scottsboro Boys, Civil Rights, Alabama

Project Status: Live

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Taste of the Tide is a collaborative student guide to cooking and dining in college. The site includes dorm-friendly recipes, restaurant recommendations, tips for getting the most out of dining halls, and guidance on how to eat healthy as a college student.

Project Owner(s): Lauren Cardon

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Student Essays, Advanced Writing

Topics: Foodways, Cooking, Dining

Project Status: Live

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