Trash Poetica is a digital poetry project which combines creative writing with mapping technologies to chart and repurpose the items which are being discarded as “trash” in Tuscaloosa. Its aim is to explore the ways that trash or garbage can be re-envisaged and take on a new, productive life if approached through a creative lens, as well as showcasing the wide-ranging environmental impact of the discarding process on our local community.
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Dr. Amanda J. Thompson’s CTD class split into groups to undertake extensive research projects on the history of different Textile Design Techniques. Students researched the technical aspects of each textile, the functions of the textile in society, how the textile exists today, and any legal/moral issues surrounding the textile. This website documents their findings.
The ADHC partnered with Dr. Christa Vogelius, CLIR Post-Doctoral Fellow for the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection to digitize two rare photograph albums documenting daily life on campus at the Lincoln Normal School in Marion, AL. The school was established for the education of freed slaves after the Civil War, and we worked together to create a website which uses the digitized albums dating from 1909 to 1924 to document the history of Lincoln Normal School. We were proud to launch the website in April 2014, and hope to add to it using other similar photographic holdings in the Williams Collection in the future.
Studying religion in culture is relevant. At the University of Alabama, our program generates a range of significant questions about classification, interpretation, identification, and the construction of tradition, among others. These questions, though, are not simply relevant for topics identified with religion but apply broadly to many aspects of societies in which we live. To illustrate that broader relevance, we will apply various questions that have arisen in our Religious Studies program to a broad range of topics and present those questions and their relevance for a broad audience through this website. This website reflects some of the work that we have done throughout our time in the program, culminating in the Capstone REL Senior Seminar in Spring 2016.
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This project houses work done by students in Heather Miyano Kopelson’s HY300 course, examining the histories of hundreds of indigenous peoples in North America from early human habitation to the present day, with a focus on those residing in what is now the United States and Canada. Students are exploring Native American history in numerous different ways, all of which are displayed in this website, including analysis of primary source materials from archives to give a first-hand understanding of this complex and wide-ranging subject from many different angles, to the creation of an interactive map of significant historical locations in Native American history such as nearby Moundville, AL. Students are also contributing entries to a detailed timeline of important events in Native American history. This website will be added to by student in multiple future iterations of this course, to foster a learning community of participants in HY300 over time, and to create a valuable public resource about Native American history.
What is the role of music in political movements? How have political forces shaped music culture? Students in UH 155: Music and Political Movements consider how music shapes and creates human society, and how the semiotic and communicative power of music has been employed in the service of political movements around the world and through history. Class study includes, but is not limited to, hip-hop in North America and the Middle East, Chilean Nueva Canción and other revolutionary movements in Central and South America, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, wars and nationalism in the United States and Europe, Music and Politico-Religious Reform in the Middle Ages, and Civil Rights in the United States and South Africa. This website is a cumulative knowledge repository for students in successive sections of Music and Political Movements, and reflects a process of discovery. Students contribute to an ever-growing timeline that highlights particular musical pieces or events that, through initial intention or acquired meaning, have shaped or expressed political sentiment. Students also showcase their primary source projects undertaken at the Hoole Special Collections library. Finally, students create presentations of their research to be featured on this website.
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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.
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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.
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Knitting History is the result of a collabortive 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.
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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.
