IWU Student Projects

Encountering the Other on the Silk Road

This project was desiged to explore European medieval ideas of race through encounters on the silk road. Using a variety of visual medium, the site explores representations of Islamic subjects designed to define a foreign identity that was seen as both inferior and a constant threat. The site is designed for an audience of fellow students to encourage exploration of primary sources to complicate understandings of historical constructions.

Team: Abror Akmalov and Marybeth Thommes

This project was developed in the 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Seeds of Change: Indigenous Plants in Downtown Bloomington

Working with the McLean Museum of History, which had planted indigenous plants along the square, this group created a site that allowed users to identify the plantings and better understand the values of native plants, as well as encourage environmental action. The team worked to make a digital experience that encouraged interaction with, and knowledge, of the physical world it referenced.

Team: Emma Basener, Jackie Moreno, and Shenqing Zhang

This project was developed in the 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Turning Pages: 175 Years of IWU's Library Spaces

Drawing on the resources of the Tate Archives & Special Collections, this group analyzed the changing ways space--to house books, to conduct research, to express identity--was defined and used in IWU libraries over the years. The project creates a narrative to invite students--present and past-- to understand the ways IWU's libraries have responded to changiung needs and to encourage further exploration of archival materials.

Team: Mannat Kandal, Rokin Prottoy, and Dagan Turcotte-Cutkomp

This project was developed in the 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Book Censorship in Florida

Book titles being challenged for removal from schools have seen an unprecedented rise in the last few years. Our team worked to analyze changes in political trends, language choice of pro-censorship organizations, and media sharing of national organizations to analyze pro-censorship groups strategies and trends. We chose to look at Florida because of its high amount of book bans, pro-censorship organizations, and significant changes in voting trends.

Team: Paige Griffin, Hadi Imtiaz, and Ethan Sanders

This project was developed in the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Chocolate Representations in Pre-Columbian Indigenous Art and Post-Columbian European Art

This research explores how chocolate was used in Europe compared to the New World and how that is reflected in art. It further investigates how art embodies the cultural understandings of chocolate and what conditions, influences, and events led chocolate to become represented in various ways.

Team: Rose Abraham and Georgia Sharwarko

This project was developed in the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Exploring Photography in Pilsen

Pilsen Days is a book made up of a collection of photographs taken by the Japanese photographer Akito Tsuda during his time as a college student in the early 1990s at Colombia College Chicago. Through a mixture of different types of portraits, these environmental photographs depict members of the Pilsen community in a photojournalistic way that feels organic and personal. In this project, I have chosen to display some of Mr. Tsuda's photographs from his Pilsen Days collection alongside photographs taken by my peer and I to explore different themes that Mr. Tsuda demonstrates in his photographs, and how we interpreted those same themes in our own work.

Creator: Cynthia Castro

This project was developed in the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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IWU Global Storytelling

The IWU Global Storytelling Project (GSP) was born out of the need to provide high-quality and authentic teaching materials that were accessible to anyone at any time. The collection was built as an open-source audio collection of stories. Each audio file has been recorded in different languages by volunteer readers. In the summer of 2023, the IWU Digital Humanities Fellowship allowed the project to change its direction towards the creation of a model for the preservation of languages through oral stories and through it, the preservation of culture as well. The project was also expanded to include data on the readers of the stories, and also to contextualize the cultures of the languages spoken for each story.

Team Members: Olivia Daoud, Abhirup Das, and Lena Turlakova

This project was developed in the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Power and Gender in Macbeth

Before using any digital tools, looking at the scene I had chosen to analyze for this project I hadn’t put much thought into how each of the times that fear is mentioned, it had a different way in which it was used. With analysis, it allowed me to see things that other researchers haven’t found yet which is cool because they can build their research off of my data to uncover more things that haven’t been discovered in Macbeth yet..

Creator: Nycole Clark

This project was developed in the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program.

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Bloomington-Normal Community Health Blueprint

Using textual analysis to generate keywords, this team selected possible health initiatives from a large clearinghouse of such practices, and then used both textual and environmental analyses to recommend specific approaches.

Team: Amber Anderson, Amanda Victoria Balaba, Alex Dawson, and Leah Matlin.

This project was developed in the 2022 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program. It was funded, in part, through the American Rescue Plan: Humanities Grants for Libraries, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA) made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

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Exploring Education with Digital Humanities

Using textual analysis and data visualization tools, this team sorted through multiple factors, seeking correlations between socio-cultural-environmental factors and educational attainment scores.

Team: Zoe Hovde, Kacie Moore and Josh Reed.

This project was developed in the 2022 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program. It was funded, in part, through the American Rescue Plan: Humanities Grants for Libraries, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA) made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

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Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Playwriting

This team connected Hurston's anthropological research to her plays, in ways that invite a variety of users, from high schoolers encountering her work for the first time to theater goers to dramaturges producing one of her works.

Team: Mishwa Bhavsar, Ellie Kurtz, Julia McMahon, and Leah Rosen.

This project was developed in the 2022 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows program. It was funded, in part, through the American Rescue Plan: Humanities Grants for Libraries, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA) made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

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