Author: swood@uoregon.edu

In 2022, the Wired Humanities Projects (WHP) marks twenty-five years of service at the University of Oregon! Logically, our home is in the Center for Equity Promotion, as we aim to create and host for free digital collections that support teachers and scholars interested in sharing and advancing knowledge about Indigenous cultures of this hemisphere, content that is clearly under-represented in our classrooms today.

We are very excited to announce our most recent publication (still a project in progress), the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.  This is an online searchable database of the basic units of the Nahua writing system that originated in pre-Columbian times but lived on for about a century after contact (and a writing system that many hope to revive). We have started this project with the beautiful glyphs of the Codex Mendoza (c. 1541), but we are beginning to add glyphs from other manuscripts, as well. The goal is to have better materials to teach students to read and write in hieroglyphs and dive more deeply into the Nahua culture and Nahuatl language.

In 2021 WHP made ever more robust a number of already accessible digital collections, such as our online Honoring Tribal Legacies project that involves elevating indigenous perspectives about the Lewis and Clark Expedition in U.S. history; our online Mesoamerican Cultures and their Histories website with free curriculum for bringing a deeper appreciation for our early American heritage to U.S. classrooms; the Online Nahuatl Dictionary (with more than 100K users from 140+ countries, Mexico first and the U.S. second); the Mapas Project (about indigenous-authored pictorial manuscripts and maps of early Mexico); the Early Nahuatl Library (largely alphabetic manuscripts in the Aztec language with transcriptions, translations, and interpretations all searchable).  The latter three are now on relatively new platforms (Drupal) and are therefore more stable, but the functionality has changed from their beta versions. Huge thanks go to Ginny White and Len Hatfield for helping keep WHP on platforms with longevity. Documents from the Early Nahuatl Library have also recently also found a new home in Paris, being included by Marc Thouvenot in his TEMOA digital collection.

Several older collections, such as the Age of Exploration maps (featuring the interpretations of cartographic historian Dr. James Walker); Presente! Art and the Disappeared, wherein we analyze works of art from Latin America that strive to make the “disappeared” present in our hearts and minds; and the Text in the Textiles project, examining the embedded meaning in textile arts, are also in line for migration to the Drupal platform.  But they are not yet available.  Thank you for your patience.

In November 2021 we completed our fifth and final round of funding from the National Park Service (NPS) for the Honoring Tribal Legacies project. Here is our most recent video about HTL (from 2019), made by Justin Deegan (of the Three Affiliated Tribes: Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara).  The collaboration with NPS is one of many; such partnerships are outlined in this video.

In the summer of 2019 we had funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Institute, taking 25 schoolteachers on part of the Lewis and Clark Trail to discover Native cultures and their histories. We met with many elders and visited a number of Native communities, learning first hand from their own educators, such as Dr. Shane Doyle (Apsáalooke), Rose Williamson (Apsáalooke), Dr. Janine Pease (Apsáalooke), Dr. Timothy McCleary (adoped Apsáalooke), Conrad Fisher (Northern Cheyenne), Loren Yellow Bird (Arikara),  Calvin Grinnell (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Ruth Buffalo (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Alisha Deegan (Hidatsa/Sahnish), Dr. Carmelita Lamb (Lipan Band of Apache), and Dakota Goodhouse (Hunkpapa Lakota/Yanktonai).  Most of the participating teachers created and share the curriculum they created from this experience, free in our website, Native Histories.

We are enormously proud to say that we have had the pleasure of thirteen NEH grants over the years, mostly stemming from our own grant writing, but also a few sub-contracts on grants at other universities.  One recent NEH-funded sub-contract for WHP, with the digital scholarship center at the University of Texas libraries, involved the perfecting of Optical Character Recognition for reading unknown fonts of the first books ever printed in the Americas, in a project called Primeros Libros, mostly from the sixteenth century. WHP’s contribution has been to review and help train the OCR’ing of diplomatic and normalized transcriptions of Nahuatl.

Another recent development in funding came in the form of a subcontract from Benjamin Johnson (University of Massachusetts) for getting started on our Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs. Collaborating institutions include the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, guardians of Mexican codices that will be key to the project. Besides creating a tool for epigraphic decipherment of glyphs, we will be creating a Unicode proposal and a collection of symbols for use in didactic materials. Gordon Whittaker (Germany) and Ed Trager (U.S.) are important collaborators.

We are proud that in our scholarship and in our daily work we honor diversity and inclusion, creating materials that enhance teaching and research about American Indian and Mesoamerican cultures and their histories.  We have also had the honor of having a majority of our student employees and interns from underrepresented ethnicities.

We are thrilled to announce that the Wired Humanities Projects research group is resides in the Center for Equity Promotion in the College of Education at the University of Oregon.  This move represents our continuing strength in creating digital resources of significance to underserved student and scholarly communities, particular with regard to Latin@s and American Indians.