Category: Projects

Alabama Architecture is a descriptive digital database about historical buildings and structures in Alabama, from both the Tuscaloosa area and further afield. It was created by Art History students taking course ARH 376 led by Professor Rachel Stephens, who worked in partnership with the ADHC to enable her class to create an online resource which could be added to each year by future iterations of the course. Gradually the aim is to harness the power of service learning so that students can make lasting intellectual contributions visible not only to their peers and local academic community, but also the international audience of the World Wide Web.

Project Owner(s): Rachel Stephens

Tools: WordPress

Methods:

Topics: Alabama; Architecture

It is easier than ever to disseminate words and ideas expressed through the human voice. And of course, it is common practice in the literature classroom for teachers to read texts aloud and to ask students to do the same. However, there is little conversation in English departments about the skill it takes to read such literature aloud or about how the voice can influence our perspectives on literature. The UA Voxology seeks to address this gap, to begin to teach the voice in the literature classroom by compiling an audio anthology of local voices reading from classic American and British literature and by encouraging students and community members to contribute to that anthology. We envision an interactive hub for such content, similar to Pandora or Spotify, that situates new recordings within a larger whole and encourages listeners to browse and immerse themselves in the collection, creating their own recordings and adding their own voices. The UA Voxology will act both as a resource for the classroom and as another way the University can reach out to engage the larger community. The long-term goal of the project is to create a high quality audio database of English and American literature that students and teachers can use to experience and study how the human voice affects our experience of literaturedent.

Project Owner(s): Alexandra Ferretti, Nicholas Helms

Topic: American Literature, British Literature, Live Reading

Tool: WordPress

Methodology: Audio Recording

Project Status: Live

The Regional Composers Forum of the Southeastern Composers’ League was held annually at the University of Alabama from 1950 to 1970. The Forum was the brain child of two UA faculty members, Gurney Kennedy and Paul Newell, and its goal was to provide a venue for rehearsals, readings, and concerts of works by composers in the Southeast. The Forum also regularly featured well-known composers, including Lukas Foss, Vincent Persichetti, Ross Lee Finney, Norman Dello Joio, and many others. In the spring of 2016, Dr. Linda Cummins and the students in her graduate music history seminar, MUS 626, undertook an online project to document the history of the Forum.  They brought together materials held by the Hoole Special Collections Library and conducted research on the composers who attended the Forum over the years. The project, when complete, will illuminate a fascinating aspect of music history in the southeastern United States in the mid-twentieth century.

Project Owner(s): Linda Cummings and Cynthia Miller

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Primary Source, Digital Archives

Topics: Composers at The University of Alabama

Project Status: Live

This site is devoted to the Department of Religious Studies‘ “REL Goes to Greece 2011” annual study abroad program–begun in 2008–which brings a small group of University of Alabama undergraduate students to Thessaloniki, Greece, for three weeks. This site’s content (i.e., the posts created by all those participating in the May 2011 trip) focuses on the ways in which different versions of an idealized past are created and communicated by different contemporary social actors–in their narratives, behaviors, and institutions.

Project Owner(s): Religious Studies Department

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Travel Reflection, Digital Scholarship

Topics: Greece, Religion

Project Status: Live

Culture on the Edge is comprised of a core collaborative research group and its invited guests. Together they interrogate the contradiction between the historicity of identity, which is always fluid over place and time, and common scholarly assertions of a static and ahistorical origin for an identity community (whether religious, national, ethnic, etc.) against which cultural change can be measured. The collaborative has a book series with Equinox Publishers.

Project Owner(s): Religious Studies Department

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Religious Studies, Blogging, Digital Scholarship

Topics: Religion, Critical Theory

Crimson Fried is a student-authored forum for delicious recipes and contemporary food-related discourse. Contributors are currently participating in an Advanced Studies in Writing seminar at the University of Alabama, entitled “Discourses of Food: Growing, Cooking, Consuming,” taught by Prof. Lauren S. Cardon. The Crimson Fried website houses student-tested recipes, local restaurant reviews, and charming food-related anecdotes.

Project Owner(s): Dr. Lauren Cardon

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Advanced Writing, Digital Writing

Topics: Recipes, Restaurant Reviews, Food Storytelling

Digital Archive Black Belt 100 Lenses creates opportunities for high school students from Alabama’s Black Belt to comment on the region’s unique histories and cultures through photography. The project, started in 2007, has collected more than 7,000 images to date. Working with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, the Center for Community-Based Partnerships is building a digital archive of its images. This archive will lay the groundwork for the images’ incorporation into the University of Alabama’s library collections and will also form the content for a redesign of the project’s website in Omeka.

Project Owner(s): Heather Pleasants

Tools: Omeka Classic

Methods: Documentary, Photography

Topics: Black Belt, Alabama History, Alabama Culture