Category / Digital Humanities

by abritt

Emory News Center Highlights Work of Graduate Fellows Lemos and Strakhova

The Emory News Center recently published a profile of two 2020-’21 graduate fellows from the History Department. Sponsored by the Emory Libraries and Laney Graduate School, graduate fellowships provide graduate students with immersive and meaningful experiences in the following areas: digital humanities, instruction and engagement, research and engagement, data services and the Rose Library. Xanda Lemos, a doctoral candidate in Latin American History, was the fellow in digital humanities at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Anastasiia Strakhova, a doctoral candidate in Modern European History, was the Anne and Bill Newton Graduate Fellow at the Rose Library. Read more about the work that they and the other three fellows contributed across campus over the last year here: “Graduate fellows provide thesis, data and publishing support for students and staff.”

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Students in Miller’s “The History of Skiing and Snowsports” Launch Website

This spring Dr. Judith A. Miller, Associate Professor of History, taught a new course, “The History of Skiing and Snowsports.” Explaining the genesis of the course, Miller said, “I wished to create a course that took the history of skiing and snowsports seriously, that is, a course that reflected the questions that historians have.” The students in this course have just published their final projects on a website, which was produced in collaboration with Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS). Browse the students’ projects on the new website, and read more about the course via the description below.

This new course explores the history of snow sports, especially skiing, from the 18th century to today. We have many topics and Zoom guests lined up. This class is not only for history majors or skiers, but also for business students, and anyone interested in environmental history, sports history, and the history of gender and race. The class will look at the military uses of skiing in World War II, the expansion of leisure sports after 1960, the development of ski schools, history of ski patrols, lift technology, emerging environmental issues, snow science, avalanche control, the history of the land and the indigenous peoples, race and inclusivity in winter sports, the transformation of ski equipment, snow fashions, and the business of ski resorts. Students who have never taken a history course and first-year students are welcome. Each student will do a short final research project. Check out the promotional video on @emoryhistory Instagram during the enrollment period. As American Historical Association Executive Director Jim Grossman says, “Everything has a history.” Skiing and snow sports have a fascinating histories.

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Slave Voyages Launches Consortium

Slave Voyages, a preeminent resource for the study of slavery and a digital memorial, recently launched a cooperative consortium with six other institutions to ensure its sustainability. The consortium includes Emory, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture at William & Mary, Rice University, and three campuses at the University of California that will assume a joint membership: UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley. Slave Voyages contains the records of tens of thousands of trans-Atlantic and inter-American slaving voyages, and users can submit new records as they are encountered.

The database grew out of the archival research of Dr. David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus in the Emory History Department. Dr. Allen E. Tullos, Professor of History and Director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, has worked on an extensive update and expansion of the project since 2018. He serves on the project’s steering committee, along with Emory History Department graduate alumni Dr. Alex Borucki (University of California, Irvine) and Dr. Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (Rice University). Read more about launch of the consortium through a quote from Eltis below along with articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and from the Emory News Center.

“‘The launch of the SlaveVoyages.org consortium is an innovation not just for scholars of slavery, but for all soft money digital humanities projects,’ says David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History and co-director of the SlaveVoyages project. ‘At long last, this consortium opens up a route to sustainability.‘

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Emory News Center Features ‘Slave Voyages’ Digital Memorial

The Emory News Center recently featured the Slave Voyages project among initiatives at Emory making an impact. The article discusses the expansion and updating of the digital memorial over the last few years, including through a $300,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2018. Initiated by Dr. David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus, Emory faculty and alumni – including Alex Borucki (PhD, 2011), Daniel Domingues da Silva (PhD, 2011), Jane Hooper (PhD, 2010), Nafees Khan (PhD, 2013), and Allen Tullos (Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship) – continue to constitute the core of the Voyages team. Read the full article here: “Documenting Slave Voyages.”

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Lesser to Speak on “Cultures in Movement” for ‘University in Transformation’ Lecture Series

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning, will present a talk entitled “Cultures in Movement: Expanding Virtual Methods of Research” (Culturas em movimento: Ampliando as pesquisas em modos virtuais) for a lecture series organized by the University in Transformation (Universidade em Transformação). Lesser will discuss virtual approaches he employs in his research as well as his current major project on health, immigration, and environment in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Read more about the event (in Portuguese) here.

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Graduate Student and Digital Dissertation Scholar Camille Goldmon Presents Work on Tuskegee Ag Men

History Graduate Student Camille Goldmon was a member of the 2019-’20 cohort of the Digital Dissertation Scholars Program (DDSP), a joint effort of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS). The yearlong program prepares doctoral students to create meaningful, sustainable, and accessible digital scholarship by equipping them with practical training and financial support. Goldmon presented the work she produced as a part of this program earlier this year. Watch her presentation, titled “Tuskegee Ag Men: A Digital Supplement to ‘On the Right Side of Radicalism: Black Farmers in Rural Alabama, 1881-1940,′” on the Emory Scholar Blogs website.

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‘Classes that Click’: Emory News Center Features Crais’s Virtual ‘The Making of Modern South Africa’

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The Emory News Center’s Leigh DeLozier recently featured Dr. Clifton Crais, graduate assistant Georgia Brunner, and several students from his “Making of Modern South Africa” class. Crais, Brunner, and the students share their perspectives on finding success in the online transition. Read an excerpt from the article below, along with the full piece: “Classes that click: The making of modern South Africa.”

What’s one lesson you’ve learned during this transition, and how will you use it later?

Crais: The importance of human contact and our common humanity, beginning with the simple act of looking into another person’s eyes. I will renew my effort to develop a unique relationship with each and every student, no matter how large the class. Paradoxically, online teaching has taught me the importance of a residential college experience. We are learning new things about the world and about each other. We are going to come out of this crisis better teachers and better students – and citizens.

by abritt

Yannakakis and Premo Discuss Law, its Spaces, and its Practitioners in Colonial Mexico and Peru

Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History, recently published a conversation about law in colonial Latin America with Dr. Bianca Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University. Their piece is published as a part of the History and the Law Project within the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas Programme. The conversation includes discussion of Yannakakis’s digital project, “Power of Attorney,” which we featured in 2018: “Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney.’”

Read the piece by Yannakakis and Premo here: “On not going to court in colonial Spanish America: A conversation between Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis.”

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Eltis Cited in ‘Nature’ Article on Tracing Origins of the Enslaved from St. Helena Island

David Eltis, Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History, was recently cited in a Nature article on research tracing the origins of the enslaved on St. Helena Island. Led by University of Copenhagen researchers Marcela Sandoval-Velasco and Hannes Schroeder, the study analyzed the DNA of 20 individuals from St. Helena and concluded that they were likely taken from West-Central Africa, or present-day Gabon and Angola. The piece quotes numerous scholars who see promise in genomic analysis for reconstructing the geographic origins of the enslaved.

Eltis co-founded Slave Voyages, the Emory-based digital memorial and database that collects nearly 36,000 transatlantic slaving voyages. This past summer Slave Voyages was re-launched in expanded and updated form. The Emory News Center featured the new edition here: “Documenting Slave Voyages: Led by Emory, a massive digital memorial shines new light on one of the most harrowing chapters of human history.”

Read the excerpt from the Nature piece that features Eltis below along with the full article: “Genomes trace origins of enslaved people who died on remote island.”

“David Eltis, a historian at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia who co-founded a database that collects information on 36,000 slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866, notes that most people captured in the transatlantic slave trade originated from south of the equator — where a paucity of genome data from modern inhabitants makes it difficult to trace the origins of enslaved individuals with any accuracy.”

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Graduate Fellow Alexander Cors in ‘HASTAC’: “Doing History from the ‘Skies'”

Graduate fellow Alexander Cors recently published a blog post on the promises and practices of digital humanities for the interdisciplinary online community HASTAC. Cors’ principal research concerns the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic World, however his work with digital humanities has ranged from 3D visualizations of 1930s Atlanta to mapping legal networks of indigenous communities in New Spain (Mexico). Cors is currently one of the HASTAC Fellows at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Read the full post here: Doing History from the “Skies.”