Wired Humanities Projects

WHP has entered into discussions with the designer of the Mayan Epigraphic Database, Rafael Alvarado (UVA), about collaborating to unite his database with our online Mayan Dictionary, currently under development with consultation from Matthew Restall (Penn State) and edited primarily by new Virginia Commonwealth University graduate student, Kaitlan Smith.

Alvarado’s project started life as an experiment in networked scholarship, something WHP has also been developing with our Distance Research Environment (DRE). We are additionally excited to add glyphs to our Mayan dictionary as a way of bridging classic-period writing systems with colonial and modern Yucatec Mayan. We will also be adding Ch’olan, where necessary, to provide headwords for glyphs that do not express Yucatec Mayan.

Spending three days at UVA immersing ourselves in cartography and Geographic Information Science, in particular.  This is a wonderfully organized and presented workshop thanks to NEH and Bethany Nowviskie!

Here Ginny shows us a photo of Stephanie Wood and Susan Garfinkel (of the Library of Congress) taken during an exercise in Open Mapping in gardens designed by Thomas Jefferson.

WHP, in collaboration with Dr. Jonathon Richter (Director, Center for Learning in Virtual Environments), Professor Gabriela Martínez, and graduate students Alina Padilla Miller and Yasmin Acosta-Myers, has just received news from NEH that we have won another grant (“Digital Dissemination and Impact” Supplement) to underwrite the creation of “Virtual Oaxaca” — a map-based, three-dimensional space where we can capture and keep alive our journeys around Oaxaca this summer using simulated islands in Second Life (and, later, Open Sim).  We will be adding still images, videos, drawings, and curricular materials to the various spaces we will create (archaeological sites, artistic communities, museums, and the ethnobotanical garden), enabling their preservation and dissemination, while also creating a rich educational experience for teachers and students alike.  This relates to our NEH-funded Summer Institute, but it is one step toward our vision of a larger, Virtual Americas project.  The Smithsonian Latino Center, MERLOT, and the New Media Consortium are partners in this exciting new Virtual Oaxaca endeavor.  Our local partner, CLIVE, is housed in the UO’s Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE).

We just received the good news from Larry Johnson, CEO at the New Media Consortium, that we have won the contest for a free sim island in Second Life good through the end of September.

Our plan is to create a Virtual_Oaxaca, where we can attach all the wonderful photos, video clips, and curricular materials interested teachers will be gathering and sharing during the NEH Summer Institute, July-August, 2010. Here’s the NMC’s blog with our fuller proposal.  Larry said, “We got many great proposals, but yours was by far the strongest.”  Thank you, Jonathon Richter, for your brilliant contributions to this project!

Our work with indigenous language preservation and manuscript studies is featured in the alumni magazine of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences.  Check it out!

Thank you Anne Conaway for your fine writing and for your concern to show connections between our work with indigenous colleagues in Mexico and the outstanding work of the Northwest Indian Language Institute!

We have chosen our 30 participants for this summer’s institute in Oaxaca.  Congratulations to those of you who have been selected!  We received 227 applications, which made the selection process an agonizing one — we had so many stellar applicants that we had to turn away.  We can only hope that we will have the honor of doing this again next year (and beyond), and those who were not selected with apply again.  (Photo by Yasmin Acosta-Myers, Graduate Research Associate with the project.)

The Oregon Humanities Center Director, Barbara Altmann, interviews WHP Director, Stephanie Wood, on the campus talk show, UO Today!  The focus is the Nahuatl Dictionary, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation, for Documenting Endangered Languages. This program aired on Channel 23 on Wednesday, February 10, at 8:00 p.m., but you might download the program for viewing on your computer:  <http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/?p=882>.

Additional viewing times include: Channel 29 on Tuesday at 11:30 p.m; Wednesday at 11:30 a.m; and Friday at 12:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m.

We are pleased to announce a co-sponsored symposium to take place in Warsaw in June with a focus on Mesoamerica, pre-Columbian and Colonial. Professor Justyna Olko of the University of Warsaw has invited Stephanie Wood, WHP Director, to co-organize this symposium. Besides presenting her recent research on indigenous views of Spaniards, Stephanie will lead a workshop on WHP’s Mapas Project.  The program for the symposium has been established, with participation from the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, but additional colleagues and students are still welcomed to register and attend, and participate in discussions!

Ginny White and Stephanie Wood have been selected from a sizable, national applicant pool to participate in an NEH institute, Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, that will take place in late May at the University of Virginia.  Ginny and Stephanie teamed up with Jon Jablonski and Karen Estlund of the UO Libraries to apply jointly for this honor.  Jon and Karen were chosen to participate in the first tracks, which took place this past November, and Ginny and Stephanie have just heard that they have been chosen for the final track this spring.

WHP continues to explore GIS applications for its Mapas Project (Mesoamerican indigenous authored pictorial manuscripts and maps) and its forthcoming Age of Exploration European maps. Undergraduate assistant Aaron López, a GIS major, is also assisting with this project, looking especially at GIS applications for the maps in the Codex Cardona.