Sponsored by the Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative and the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, this year’s DLAC Teaching With Technology Fair features a wide range of digital projects.
RSVP for the Teaching with Technology Fair on December 6 from 12-1 PM at https://grinnell.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1AYrAlqCnTizpGJ.
Archaeological Research and Public Outreach: Buried Chinatowns Blog
Laura Ng (Anthropology), Evan Albaugh ’25, & George Matthes ’25
The Buried Chinatowns blog features community-engaged archaeological research on Chinese diasporic communities. All of the research featured on this blog is a collaborative effort between Dr. Laura W. Ng, undergraduate research assistants at Grinnell College, various archaeological research collaborators, and most importantly, descendant communities.
Contested U.S. Presidential Elections: Public History Projects
Sarah Purcell (History & Digital Studies)
Students in History 295: Contested U.S. Presidential Elections, an 8-week course taught in Fall 2024, learned about using history and historical thinking to contextualize presidential elections for the public. Students wrote for a public blog and posted a variety of public-facing digital projects, and in the process used digital technology to learn about doing public-facing history with real consequences.
Digital Studies Concentration Portfolios
Sarah Purcell (History & Digital Studies), Jules Wood ’25, & Hayley Carson ’25
Students in Grinnell’s first-ever Digital Studies Concentration capstone seminar have been assembling public portfolios of their digital projects and critical digital studies scholarship. Several students will show examples of how they use individual WordPress sites to present their college work online to the public (including graduate schools and potential employers).
Maria Tapias (Anthropology), Tilly Woodward (GCMoA), & Sophia Mason ’26
This project showcases the work of students enrolled in the course Graphic Medicine: Reading Comics Anthropologically taught by Maria Tapias and Tilly Woodward. Students conducted in-depth interviews with a family member or friend about an illness experience or about their work in health care. From narratives based on these interviews, they then created these comics.
Haitian Art Digital Crossroads (HADC) – The Digital Lakou and the Making of a Kreyol Thesaurus
Petrouchka Moïse (Libraries) & Cadence Chen ’26
HADC is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant-funded project exploring the current state of Haitian art resources and their accessibility to build new resources. Our project began as a collaboration between Grinnell College Libraries and the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA). Through close collaboration, the team considered best practices with regards to photographic documentation of artworks and developed a metadata schema for Haitian art. Language plays a major role in understanding and interpreting works of Haitian art. Critical Cataloging recognizes how classification systems (and other facets of metadata creation) standardize and codify long-held prejudices through language and erasure. A key to our project is the development of our Kreyol arts thesaurus, a section of the project that will be led in dialogue with our partner institutions, Kreyol-speaking artists and museum professionals, and members of the Haitian Studies academic community. By creating a thesaurus to differentiate different art practices and materials, we hope to broaden the understanding of the art form of Haitian artists and provide standards for considering diverse art forms emerging from Haiti. We see the thesaurus as a necessary guide that draws knowledge on art from Kreyol, recognizing the native language’s adaptability and fluidity as used within art communities. The Kreyol thesaurus will align with our metadata schema and be fully and freely accessible via our webpage. Descriptors for fields will be populating our Kreyol dictionary to create a multilingual database. In many ways, our linguistic considerations are tied to our desire to make a database that is accessible to Haitian populations across the diaspora and that is open-sourced and considerate of limited internet and data bandwidths available within the context of Haiti.
Podcasts for Discussing French Literature
David Harrison (French) & Hamilton Peacock ’25
As part of my seminar on early modern French literature (French 327) students made group podcasts of approximately 15 minutes each. Each podcast was intended to feature an intellectual conversation about one of more 17th-century French texts, focusing on how the text depicts certain aspects of French society. To prepare the assignment, students were first required to listen to a French podcast, in order to get a sense of the norms and vocabulary of the genre. Then, students wrote a preliminary script for their podcast which needed to be organized as a conversation, making reference to both primary and secondary sources. Finally, students received training from Tierney Steelberg in recording and editing software. The podcasts display a level of critical analysis that is equal to if not greater than that of a traditional, analytical paper.
Practical Bibliodiversity: Finding and Using Non-English and Non-“Western” Scholarly Materials
Libby Cave (Libraries)
Extensive scholarship documents the need for researchers to look outside their own information ecosystem to learn about and incorporate diverse viewpoints. However, there are significantly fewer resources dedicated to teaching researchers how to do this. Despite the digital age’s promise of easy access to information, research shows that bibliographies remain largely reflective of ethnocentric systems. The process of finding diverse sources is not intuitive for students and researchers, and databases often fall short of assisting in their discovery. In this guide, we offer a sampling of techniques to help students discover scholarship and popular sources written and published outside North America and Western Europe. Our aim is to show that researchers at all levels can incorporate bibliodiverse materials in their research, curriculum and knowledge bases.
Religion, Healing, and Health: Video Essays
Dixuan Chen (Religious Studies), Eliza Cline ’27, Sophia Spindler-Krage ’27, Madel Sibal ’26, Reeyan Esmail ’26, Ela Chintagunta ’25, & Samikshya Pokharel ’25
Two video essays bring the intricate world of religious healing to life: (1) Exorcism in Religious Healing, and (2) Religious Sound Healing. Each video is a research-driven, thought-provoking exploration that demonstrates students’ knowledge, collaboration, and communication skills. From developing a research question and thesis statement to crafting an engaging narrative, these projects reveal the creativity and critical thinking behind academic research.
Structured Light Scanning of Museum Objects
Jocelyn Krueger (GCMoA), David Neville (DLAC/GCIEL), & Amy Kan ’27
The Grinnell College Immersive Experiences Lab (GCIEL) and the Grinnell College Museum of Art have 3D scanned over 50 museum objects. The scans have been useful as digital surrogates for students in classes and reveal hidden structures of the art objects that are not easily visible when looking at the physical object. The Museum hopes to continuing scanning our collection of 3D objects and to use the scans with more classes and in our other museum work like outreach or exhibitions, where 3D scans allow for printing of objects and interacting in virtual environments.
Virtual Reality for Understanding Calculus
Christopher French (Mathematics), Shibam Mukhopadhyay ’26, & Boston Gunderson ’26
Multivariable calculus presents students with three-dimensional geometric concepts that can be challenging to convey by traditional means. We have been working on ways to present such concepts to students in virtual reality, to better convey these ideas and also make the learning process more interactive and enjoyable.
Adam Kelley-Chown (DAR) & Mahiro Noda ’26
The student-production-filled film festival, TitHead, is a very popular event on campus each year. In May of 2024, the Office of Development and Alumni Relations held its first Virtual Celebration of TitHead, and the response was terrific. To continue the momentum of the Virtual TitHead Project, our goal is to have an online database of TitHead films available for this year’s event in May. This database of TitHead films will help drive the live discussion during the virtual event, which will be open to alumni and current students.
Vivero Digital Fellows Program
Karolina Calleros ’26, Libby Eggert ’25, Regann Fishell ’27, Emma Kumano-Maloney ’25, Valery Mayorga ’26, Bruno Sica ’27, Morgan Smith ’26, Tierney Steelberg (DLAC), & Libby Cave (Libraries)
The Vivero Digital Fellows Program is a training and mentorship program that seeks to grow the diversity of the digital liberal arts community at Grinnell and beyond. Vivero Fellows support faculty and staff-led digital projects and provide drop-in peer support for digital liberal arts assignments. Current Vivero Fellows will share their experiences this semester, discuss their work in progress, and showcase how Vivero can support digital projects on campus – all the way from helping new projects get off the ground to supporting new digital directions for existing research or courses.