The University of Iowa Graduate College and UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio have selected eight graduate students for the 2026 Digital Scholarship & Publishing Summer Fellowship Program. 

 
The eight-week program, which runs June 15 through Aug. 6, provides mentored digital scholarship development through coursework and hands-on application, along with training in tools and techniques to support innovative research and creative work. 

 
Fellows will present their research and digital project progress at a public event at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 5, in the Franklin Miller Screening Room (Adler Journalism Building E105). The public is welcome to attend the presentation event and reception.  

2026 fellows and projects 

• Maya Arthur, poetry, MFA 

Arthur will create a short-form video examining shifts in Black self-representation in Paris from the 1900 Exposition to the early 20th century. Combining archival materials, animated visuals, and original poetry, the project explores changes in visual expression and artistic presence. The work will also serve as a component of her MFA thesis. 

• Akachukwu Ikefuama, journalism and mass communication, PhD 

Ikefuama will build digital research skills, including web data collection, dataset organization, text analysis, and visualization. By examining a sample of online newspapers across Germany, Nigeria, and the United States, he plans to use digital methodologies to measure precarity in these nations. This work supports his dissertation on journalistic working conditions across multiple countries through comparative analysis of text-based data. 

• Bryan Kendall, pharmacy, PhD 

Kendall will examine commercial development and infrastructure differences of pharmaceutical trade routes between the eastern and western United States. Using a sunken steamboat that was wrecked in the Missouri River near Omaha in 1865 as a case study will give insights into Midwest and U.S. history. 

• Ei Miyauchi, sociology, Ph.D. 

Miyauchi will develop a data visualization project based on prior research into attitudes toward immigration across multiple countries. The project will illustrate similarities and differences in survey responses across several dimensions. 

• Ollie Oliver, library & information science and book arts, MLIS, MFA 

Oliver will create a map and census of book arts tools to document and connect access to specialized equipment. The project is designed to help artists locate and share resources and expand access beyond institutional settings. 

• John Tappen, American studies, PhD 

Tappen will build a digital site that integrates data visualization and qualitative analysis to examine trends in nonstandard employment in the United States. The project will combine statistical data with historical and cultural materials. 

• Samuel Taylor, geography, PhD 

Taylor will develop a digital storytelling project that translates satellite-based water quality monitoring and machine learning results into accessible formats. Using GIS tools, the work aims to improve understanding of environmental data for decision-makers and stakeholders. 

• Zachary Vanes, cinematic arts, PhD 

Vanes will digitize issues of Multi-Images Journal (1978–1980) to create an accessible archive. The project will support research on the transition in audiovisual media technologies and enable further analysis of the publication. 

A collaborative digital humanities project supported by the University of Iowa Libraries has launched. A Just and True Return (JTR) is led by Cory Young, assistant professor in the UI Department of History. 

Developed with technical support from the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio (DSPS), JTR is a publicly accessible database of Pennsylvania’s surviving county slave registrations. The project brings together documents from more than a dozen repositories across three states, highlighting the lived realities of gradual abolition. 

The interactive website features essays written by descendants of individuals recorded in the registrations, offering historical context alongside an interactive map that allows users to browse records by county. These elements work together to humanize the data and expand how scholars and the public engage with the history of slavery in the United States. 

“People rarely put ‘Pennsylvania’ and ‘slavery’ in the same sentence,” Young said. “Yet these records remind us that in order for a state to become the first to abolish slavery, it had to exist there.” 

Young said the project is intended to help students, scholars, and descendants more easily discover the thousands of people whose lives were shaped by Pennsylvania’s system of gradual abolition. 

Young received funding from a 2024 Arts and Humanities Initiative standard grant, a competitive, internally reviewed grant program.

View A Just and True Return database.

The University of Iowa Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio is excited to announce the launch of Genetic Privacy in the U.S.: Insurance and Law Enforcement Use, a collaborative digital project developed with the University of Iowa College of Law and the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

This project builds on a comprehensive 50-state survey published in 2021 and aims to inform individuals and policymakers about how the use of genetic information by law enforcement and for life, long-term care, and disability insurance is regulated on a state-by-state basis across the United States. Within this site, users can explore interactive maps and visualizations of how states regulate what genetic data is available to insurance companies and law enforcement, as well as protective features that can help to strengthen regulation of sensitive genetic information.

“The goal of this project was to work with data visualization experts to develop a website aimed at educating policymakers, journalists, and others about the importance of key issues related to genetic privacy,” says Anya Prince, UI professor of law. “Genetic information is powerful. It can reveal insights into identity, predispositions to disease, family members, and ancestry. It is therefore not surprising that people care deeply about the privacy of their genetic information. United States federal law is fairly quiet on this front.”

Federal regulation gives privacy protections for genetic test results within clinical care and research. However, many individuals undergo genetic testing outside these contexts, such as through direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies.

“Federal law does little to regulate privacy in this space,” says Prince. “Individuals are also worried about how genetic test results, no matter where they were conducted, might be used against them to discriminate.”

At the federal level, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of genetic information, but the law does not cover other entities. Explore Genetic Privacy to learn more about how your data is being protected in your state.

The project was funded by the Greenwall Foundation Bridging Bioethics Research & Policymaking Grant Program.

The University of Iowa Graduate College and UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are excited to announce the 11 graduate students selected for the 2025 Digital Scholarship & Publishing Summer Fellowship Program. These individuals will soon take part in an eight-week learning experience that provides mentored digital scholarship development through course work and hands-on application, as well as training in skills and tools they will use as they pursue innovative ways of thinking about and sharing their creative endeavors. Fellows will present their research and digital project progress at a public event on Tuesday, Aug. 5, at 1:30 p.m. in the Franklin Miller Screening Room (AJB E105). 

Margaret Bowlin, English, PhD

For her project, “Letters from Clarissa,” Margaret will create a digital newsletter which will serialize the 789 letters from Samuel Richardson’s classic 18th-century epistolary novel, Clarissa. All of the letters in Clarissa are dated and occur from January through December, allowing the reader to feel as though they are going through Clarissa’s troubles alongside her. As an additional piece, she will be creating an optional weekly newsletter to summarize the relevant scholarship on Clarissa for that week’s reading.

Sophia Craig, English, PhD

This summer, Sophia plans to implement adaptation theory and Adobe Premiere Pro into a video essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Mike Flanagan and Michael Fimognari’s television miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). In doing so, she hopes to present literary and film analysis to a public-facing audience via accessible platforms like YouTube.

Mahsa Falah, sculpture and intermedia, MFA

For the Digital Summer Fellowship, Mahsa plans to create an interactive map that uses social media footage, testimonies, and open-source data to expose patterns of state violence. The focus for now is on protesters who were deliberately targeted in the eyes by security police in Iran which according to the Human Rights Organization in Iran, these attacks have resulted in 138 injuries. She will use 3D objects as symbols within an interactive map based on data capture of a geographic space to create a stylized immersive map. This project is not just about documenting violence, it is about resisting erasure and transforming collective memory into action. This project will serve as both an archive and an interactive space for audiences to explore digital traces of repression.

Nick Goergen, sculpture and intermedia, MFA

Through his research, Nick aims to identify potential artistic uses of local invasive plant species. To do this, he will be collecting specimens of non-toxic invasives and assessing their yield of tannins, resins, dyes and fibers for potential use in the interdisciplinary artistic practice. He proposes to create a database/website/log of his explorations and trials with these invasive plants in an effort to document and distribute my revelations. Due to the localized nature of invasive species, he fears that they are ill understood because research on such a localized phenomenon is not likely to have direct national applications except for in rare occasions.

A H M Mainul Islam, geography, PhD

Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) is the only oak species that is found in all 99 counties of Iowa. It has been recognized as the official state tree since 1961 due to its longevity and historic cultural significance. Although “oak” as a species was the declared official state tree, bur oak came out top due to its statewide prevalence. This tree is also considered as a keystone Midwestern species that is ecologically and economically important due to its crucial role as an essential food source for wildlife habitat and timber source for wood products. The emergence and growing intensity of Bur Oak Blight (BOB) threatens this vital ecosystem.

Economically, BOB has already caused a loss of $19 million to the forest landowners in Iowa and wood product businesses. A decline in bur oak trees can add more risk to Iowa fish and wildlife recreation generated economy of approx. $1.5 billion. BOB has been impacting bur oak trees in Iowa since 1990s and is now confirmed in 96 counties out of 99 counties. Importantly, these counties are home to 32 million bur oaks and unchecked blight spread could trigger irreversible impacts through permanent loss of mature bur oaks.

However, the extent and severity of the disease within these counties remain unquantified and unmapped utilizing non-destructive remote sensing techniques. Therefore, Islam’s study aims to understand the scale, severity, and progression of blight in bur oaks to inform management strategies and protect ecosystem integrity. It also underscores the importance of studying bur oaks and blight as a pressing environmental and economic concern for Iowa.

Godwin Paintsil, music education, PhD

The open-access digital music teaching and learning resource is dedicated to integrating Ghanaian music-making traditions into the teaching and learning of music-making in the Ghanaian school music program. The digital resource encompasses curated Ghanaian music teaching and learning plans, decolonizing music scholarship, and Ghanaian folk songs that Ghanaian teachers can readily access to teach music-making in the classroom. These materials are specifically designed to focus on developing Ghanaian students’ learning and academic success, developing their cultural competence, and supporting their critical consciousness. This digital resource will provide hands-on materials to empower Ghanaian music educators in unearthing the joy inherently present in music-making among Ghanaian children.

Stephani Rodriguez, Spanish creative writing, MFA

Stephani will develop the second season of Aquí Estamos, a podcast originally created as a class project in “Teaching and Learning Languages” and recognized as the best project of the fall 2024 semester. Initially conceived as an educational tool offering real-life Spanish-language content, the podcast has since evolved into a platform for exploring the intersections of language, migration, and identity.

In this second season, titled Aquí Escribimos (Here We Write), Stephani proposes a more focused approach centered on Spanish-speaking writers who live in—or have lived in—the United States. The title plays on the identity of the original project, Aquí Estamos (Here We Are), shifting the focus from mere presence to the act of authorship—an act of self-definition through language. Each of the three episodes will highlight a different writer’s journey, examining how migration has shaped their creative process, their relationship to language, and their sense of identity. This approach not only showcases the diversity within the Spanish-speaking community but also emphasizes how writing can be a way of reclaiming space and voice within the experience of migration.

Kaitlin Smrcina, ceramics, MFA

This project examines relics—historical and religious artifacts—and their modern “counterparts” in pop culture. Kaitlin will make a digital archive comparing ancient relics with contemporary objects to highlight the role of belief in shaping cultural significance. Through research, interviews, and film analysis, she will explore aesthetics, adoration, and the American Dream in the digital age.

Maryam Torkashvand, geography, PhD

Kinship networks were one of the most important sources of support in the 19th century, especially when family members lived close to each other. In her project, Maryam will construct spatial kinship networks from a unique, large-scale family tree of 40 million individuals born between 1760 and 1940, linked through blood or marriage. Specifically, she will map the networks of US-born brothers and brothers-in-law based on their birthplaces and connect them through blood or in-law ties to understand where and how families maintained close connections. This analysis helps better understand the spatial foundations of family cohesion, which can be seen as the hidden structure behind the formation of American society.

Sarah Witmer, journalism & mass communication, PhD

Sarah will leverage Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to investigate a   transformative informal justice movement that recently exposed corruption within a school district in Oregon. Centered on a case study of one influential TikTok creator, the project will trace how their video content—posted incrementally over time—mobilized a digital community, crowdsourced critical information, and catalyzed public attention toward systemic institutional failures. The final product will be an ANT-inspired map graphic that visualizes the interconnected human and technological elements that co-construct evolving narratives of crime and justice.

ANT is a theoretical and methodological framework that examines relationships between human and non-human actors. That framework will guide this analysis by illuminating how various actors—including the content creator, audience members, TikTok’s platform affordances, and algorithmic dynamics—collectively shaped the case’s momentum. The ANT map will offer a powerful lens to understand the distributed agency behind informal justice work and the social impact of participatory digital investigations.

Patrick Zamba, epidemiology, PhD

Patrick will use the creative, script writing, editing, and audiovisual skills developed during this fellowship to create animated educational video content for infection prevention and control in diverse communities.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Our Rightful Place in collaboration with the University of Iowa Libraries Iowa Women’s Archives. This digital collection of oral history interviews, data visualizations, archival stories, and more celebrates the history of women in Iowa politics. This project originally grew from the work of 50-50 in 2020, a nonpartisan organization in Iowa founded with the goal of training and mentoring women of both political parties to hold seats in the legislature. 

“In coalition with other groups, 50-50 in 2020 also organized a number of events to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment and share stories of women’s political achievements with people across the state of Iowa. As a part of this commemorative work, Jean Lloyd-Jones spearheaded the development of an oral history project documenting the experiences of women like herself who had served in the Iowa legislature. In 2018, Jean began discussing this idea with John Culshaw, Jack B. King Librarian at the University of Iowa. Those conversations led to the creation of this website as a collaboration between the University of Iowa Libraries and 50-50 in 2020. 

To ensure that the Libraries would be able to sustainably maintain that website and continue interviewing legislators in years to come, Jean Lloyd-Jones and her granddaughter, Michal Eynon-Lynch, endowed a staff position at the Iowa Women’s Archives to continue the project into the future. The archivist in that position will continue to solicit and conduct new interviews with each new cohort of women elected to the Iowa legislature, as well as politicians not yet interviewed for this project and extended interviews with select participants. 

In 2024, this website was redesigned to acknowledge that, with the passage of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the investiture of the Jean Lloyd-Jones and Michal Eynon-Lynch Women in Politics Archivist, the project has evolved beyond its initial concept. As part of the redesign efforts, the project was renamed Our Rightful Place: Iowa Women in Politics to more accurately convey its current scope.” 

Explore more of Our Rightful Place and check back for updates as we share this new resource. 

Intro

This summer I began work on a publishing project called Rampage Party Press, which I’ll spend the next year developing as my thesis project to complete an MFA in Book Arts. Before this program, I received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I studied poetry. In so many ways, Rampage Party Press is the culmination of my last five years of study and work, and I’m very grateful for the time, funding, and support that the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Fellowship offered me this summer. I have long-term goals of starting my own publishing house, but for now, Rampage Party Press will be an online poetry magazine with accompanying handprinted broadsides (basically just a fancy word for poster).

Part One

Before I get down to business, I’m going to dedicate part one of this blog post to some of my more general/abstract thoughts on poetry. If you’d rather read about what I did this summer, you can skip to part two! Here I go!

*Ira Glass voice*

The word poetry comes from the Greek word “poiesis” – which means “to make”. Poetry began as an oral form – it was spoken or sung. We have no actual way of knowing how long humans have been making (speaking/singing/chanting) poetry, because there is no physical evidence for sound, duh. But perhaps, as poet Tracie Morris argues, poetry was the beginning of human utterance, perhaps poetry came first. I think this must be true, at least in the ways that language is inherently metaphor, inherently a suggestion of the actual thing, so to utter a word is to make a symbol.

We obviously still sometimes experience poetry as an oral art form – at poetry readings, in video performances, maybe when reading a poem out loud to ourselves, etc.! Poetry has always been an expansive art form, and now more than ever we have poets making amazing video work, digital poetry, performance poetry, and other multi-modal presentations of their poems. I can’t get into all that here, maybe a blog post/thesis/PhD project for someone else.

For this post, I’ll be focusing on the visual life of poetry, because today poetry is an art form typically represented in written language on a page (paper or screen). And when represented on a page, a poem shifts to a literary and visual art form, no longer necessarily an oral performance, but essentially the script for one.

“Form is never more than an extension of content.” –Charles Olson

It’s important to consider how got to this place of poetry on a page. It was through human advancements in technology, through humans making things! We learned how to make pigments out of minerals and rocks, we developed written language, we made papyrus scrolls then parchment then paper, ever advancing printing technologies, desktop word processors, the internet, and way more that I’m neglecting here. Poetry has changed alongside, through, and because of human technologies, and will continue to do so. I find this exciting and important!

A poem’s visual presence – through line breaks, stanza breaks, white space, type orientation, or lack thereof, etc. – has massive impact on the reader’s interpretation of the poem. And even if a particular poem isn’t so concerned with the visual, the vehicle that the poem is in matters too: the dimensions of the page, the typeface, physical vs. digital, the color of the paper/ink, all of these things impact the experience of the poem.

Putting a poem on a broadside that is meant to be in the world flat, hung on a wall or passed around, instead of bound up and closed up in a 5×8 inch paperback book –  draws attention to the poem’s visual and material life and expands our understanding of what a poem is and can do.

PART TWO

*End Ira Glass voice*

On the Rampage Party Press website, I will feature a new poet every two months or so, 4-6 poems each, one of which I will print as a limited-edition letterpress broadside. At this point, you might be wondering what handprinted broadsides have to do with digital publishing! I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a quick note about the online magazine.

Online magazine

Like I said in the intro, I might print physical copies of the magazine, but I’ve known since the beginning that I want a web presence. A website can reach much broader readership than small editions of broadsides or small editions of physical magazines. Building the website has been the most intimidating part of this summer for me. I knew that the website needed to be carefully designed to handle the formal demands of poetry. Too often, I read poems in an online magazine, and if I’m on my phone or my web browser is small, whatever, the lines of the poem get cut in the wrong spots, stanza breaks become less clear – the whole visual of the poem gets distorted. This doesn’t matter if you’re reading a news article or something, but as I’ve already completely convinced you guys, poetry is a visual art form – so this is like the equivalent of a movie being 10% blurry or an abstract painting being displayed sideways. I’m still in the very beginning stages of laying out the website, so I’m not ready to show images here, but I am excited to keep working on it.

Letterpress broadsides

Back to the broadsides and how they are some sort of digital publishing! I handprint on a Vandercook SP15, here’s my favorite one at North Hall:

You can read more about Vandercook printing presses here.

I typically start by designing a broadside in InDesign, in which I digitally typeset the poem. For this post, I’ll use my latest completed print as an example. This is the digital mockup of my poem, “Make Me Wait”.

The digital file is then turned into a film negative, which is placed on a photopolymer plate, and through a process of heat and light exposure, we get a photopolymer printing plate, the type is raised and everything else has melted away. Sometimes I make my own photopolymer plates, we have an exposure unit at North Hall, but this summer I had them made by the great folks at Boxcar Press. Here is one of the photopolymer plates I used for “Make Me Wait”:

Now we have a flexible plastic plate that I can use on the Vandercook! The yellow part is the text, backwards here, and is raised higher than the blue plastic, so that the type shows up when inked and impressed on paper. Here’s the finished product:

I do handset metal type sometimes, but designing digitally and using photopolymer plates saves me a lot of time (and grief), and makes it much easier to print future editions without having to reset the text letter by letter. Photopolymer also allows me to use typefaces that I might not have access to in metal, to be super particular about size, to incorporate handwriting, and long-term: to not have to store metal type if I end up having my own press one day.

For “Make Me Wait”, I wanted to use photopolymer instead of metal type because I wanted to use Iowan Old Style for the font, because that’s the font I used in my book Green for Luck (EastOver Press, 2024). So this broadside uses the same font at the same size in the same dimensions as my book! Iowan Old Style was created by John Downer, who lives here in Iowa City, and as far as I know it has never been cast in metal.

A lot of my work could simply be done with a digital printer, which is probably what I’ll have to switch to once I lose access to the North Hall studios, but there are a lot of reasons to handprint. I can’t run a lot of handmade papers through a digital printer. On a Vandercook, I can handprint on paper with any dimensions – I save all the scraps I can and print greeting cards, zines, etc. In some ways…it’s more cost effective…maybe? And if for no other reason: I love the impression in the paper, it’s very glamorous to me.

For “Make Me Wait”, I wanted to handprint rather than digital print for a few reasons. This is a poem about letterpress, so it made sense conceptually to actually letterpress it. I also wanted to use a reduction linoleum process for the image, also for conceptual reasons, to play with the notion of time and effort, of repeated but changed image.

Lastly, of course I love the process. I don’t think anyone does letterpress printing if they don’t love the process: the ability to play with the language of a particular poem as literal material, metal or plate, to work with the machine as a collaborator, to not know exactly how it’s going to turn out, to learn as I go.

Other design thoughts that went into “Make Me Wait”:

• I initially wanted to use newsprint, as this is what poetry broadsides would historically be printed on. But this broadside was printed for the Fine Press Association Keepsake Print Exchange, which has requirements on paper thickness, and newsprint was too thin. So I ended up going with a thin-ish paper I had laying around that is a similar color to newsprint. I thrifted this paper from Crowded Closet in Iowa City.
• I also initially wanted to print in red and black for the type, because these are the two colors that printers have historically printed in, all the way back to Egyptian papyri! I did use red for the title, but straight black ended up being too dense, and showed through to the other side, so I ended up using gray for the poem.
• The repeated image was made using a reduction linoleum process, and is a discombobulated traffic light (make me wait!). After printing the gray image on the front of the print, I carved away most of the block, leaving just one circle, that I re-printed in yellow on the inside of the print.
• The fold is another play with time, pause, the form being an extension of the content. Those few seconds of a reader unfolding the print to be able to read the poem is just about that: making them wait.

CONCLUSION

So as I’ve established, and completely convinced you, poems obviously don’t exist only orally, but they also don’t have to be 12 point times new roman on a computer screen and then printed in black ink on white paper bound in a 5×8 inch book – they can and should be so much more than that!

This is my Rampage Party plan for now. I’m open to and prepared for it to change as I keep chugging, as it has changed over the last eight weeks during this fellowship!

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you’ll check back in with Rampage Party Press soon…website incoming. 

Connie Chen’s final presentation and findings from the summer, Tampons of Tauromachy can be found on video here.

The following are audio recordings in both Spanish and English produced by María G. Marroquín Perez:

Recording in Spanish:

Recording in English:

Hi, good afternoon! My name is Aileen Tierney and I’m an English PhD student going into my third year at the University of Iowa. As a Digital Studio Summer Fellow, I spent my summer learning how to code in Python in addition to reading relevant subjects in my field of study (contemporary literature) such as electronic literature, digital poetry, and how to use code as pedagogy and art rather than being a solely goal oriented tool.

I found this time during the summer really useful, since I’m in a pretty pivotal stage of my program where I’m beginning to move into independent study. Developing skills such as self-motivation and time management is especially important as I’m transitioning from being in a classroom setting with readings and expectations already selected for me, to a more self-directed pace as I begin to work towards my dissertation. There definitely pros and cons to both stages, since the responsibility of setting and following through with your own goals is… pretty hard to do, but over the summer I’ve become more and more excited about the prospect of diving solely into my research interests.

My goal for the fellowship differed from a lot of my peers’ goals since I was concentrating more on skill acquisition rather than working on a tangible project. I completed an Introduction to Python course on a great website called Udacity, which was completely free, and had resources such as Youtube videos walking through a concept and a coding area where you can try out practice problems and see whether the code works or not. I’d really advocate this as a resource if anyone’s interested in learning a coding language, since it was completely asynchronous and pretty easy to use.

Since I spent a good amount of my time merely trying to wrap my head around what is going on in a block of code, I thought it would be a good idea to show an example of a script that I wrote myself. This is one of the final practice problems in the course that I mentioned, and it’s basically a generator that takes an input, someone’s first and last name, and spits out a type of flower that also begins with your first name’s initial.  Revolutionary, I know. But I’m pretty proud of it, since it finally works. I actually was having a weird issue with it this week since it wasn’t working in my terminal for some reason, and my studio contact Nikki was really trying to help me with it and we couldn’t find out what was going on. If I were teaching a class or something I’d be like “okay let’s try and troubleshoot why this isn’t working” and heckle my students into finding the problem. But last night my system updated or something and it miraculously worked, which further confirmed my belief that sometimes walking away from something for the night or a few days, taking a lap, and coming back to it is a great and productive practice.

Going forward, I’d like to continue learning more advanced skills in Python. Which is funny because when I got to the end of the course, it basically was like “You know that really frustrating math stuff we made you do like figuring out how to code a factorial? Actually, you can just download these library packages that just does it for you.”  But you have to know what to do in the first place. I’m anticipating using Python for textual analysis and possibly more creative stuff like interactive poetry generators. As I wrap up, I’d like to thank my studio contact Nikki White for her help during the summer, the Graduate College, as well as our course instructor Stephanie Blalock for the hard work and attention she’s given to everyone, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Digital Studio in the future! Thank you for your time.

In the morning I go out to the garden and water the plants. I pick up some of the guavas that have fallen from the tree. This is my routine when I visit my parents in the winter. The guavas are yellow and pink, the size of a lime. I bring one of them to my nose and fill my lungs. “Scatter the used coffee beans,” my mom says. “It’s good for the soil.” My mom bought the guava tree when I was a child, maybe twelve or thirteen. I remember when we planted it. The stalk was narrow and would bend with the wind. The highest branch reached the beginning of my sternum.

              Now the tree stands in the middle of the yard, its crown offering shade in the clear-sky winter day of Mexico City. Over the course of my life I have seen some of the trees on my street become giants. Others have become ill and had to be felled. Global warming, pollution and pests are creating too much stress for them. We humans are often too busy to pay attention to trees. We have our worries: making a living, success and recognition, finding a partner who will understand us. But the truth is that there is no such thing as humans and nature. There is no separation.

              In an interview in 2018, the novelist Richard Powers said to me:

              “There is no separate and exceptional thing called “humanity,” and no independent entity called “nature.” All things are reciprocally bound together

              There are more than 5.2 million street trees in New York City. How many people in the city realize that the quality of their air and water depends on these plants?”

              When I came to Iowa City in August of 2023, I was stunned by the size of some of the trees on campus. I wanted to know more about the species, how old they were and what kind of challenges they had circumvented to still be alive today.

              On my first walk near the Old Capitol building, I noticed young people lying on the grass, shirtless, others playing volleyball or throwing a frisbee. I saw a woman sitting under the shade of a towering tree reading a book. That tree, now I know, is a Black Walnut. And that knowledge was a gift from someone I met in the fall of last year. In October I found out that the sciences library at the university was hosting a talk about trees. It was by chance that I stumbled upon the info poster. That day I met the person who made possible the documentary I’ve been on working on this summer: the arborist Andrew Dahl.

              The Black Walnut standing a few feet away from the Old Capitol is a State Champion, which means it’s the biggest tree of its kind in Iowa. The Champion label refers to a system that ranks the biggest trees in each state. Thanks to Dahl I’ve learned that age and size are not necessarily related. “There are very old trees that are not necessarily that big,” he said. I’ve learned about the White Oak tree, which currently stands south of the nursing building. With an estimated age of 300 years, it will unfortunately be felled in the next months because it has died. Too much stress caused by pollution and long stretches of time without water. Climate change has exacerbated the conditions.

              One of the important aspects of this project has been to document how global warming is impacting the ecosystems, in particular the way trees adapt to change in the environment. Thought trees can be resilient, the older they get, the more fragile they become. The University has implemented measures to protect some of its trees. The Black Walnut, which was once struck by a lightning, has now a system with rods and wiring that reduces the risk of severe damage by lighting strike. An American Elm, former state champion, also standing on the Pentacrest, receives injections of a fungicide to reduce the risk of Dutch elm disease, a fungal infection that has caused the death of several millions of trees since its introduction in the US in the 1930s.

              I have also developed other skills, technical and non-technical. I have been able to get better acquainted with both Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition; I have used professional video and audio recorders. When an unexpected technical challenge arose, I realized how important it is to be connected to other people and departments on campus. Having a wide network of resources is as crucial – if not more – than having a good idea and the necessary skills set to bring it to fruition.

              This summer I spent a lot of time with Andy learning about trees, what they do for us, what we can do to protect them. With the camera I’ve kept a record of what I saw on those trips with him around campus. I hope this documentary serves as an archive for future generations. How trees looked in 2024.

“As a PhD candidate in Religious Studies, I am interested in Late Antique Christian warrior saints or military martyrs, how they emerged and how their cults spread throughout Mediterranean. In this summer project, I aimed to create a geo-spatial map based on ancient Christian sources. To prepare the map, I started by scanning primary sources and collecting data in the original languages. The sources include Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, to visualize the origins of the first martyrdom culture in Christianity, specifically military martyrs. While Christian martyrdom has been extensively studied, military martyrdom has not received significant academic attention. So, I believed that discovering this data from the early Christian sources, many of which remain untranslated into English, and visualizing it through mapping would significantly contribute to the field.

In this project, I wanted to underline that military martyrs should be separated from general martyrs and evaluated in a separate category. I aim to show its importance by reinforcing it visually. Basically, what I have done and will do is to determine the name of the martyr, in which source his name was first mentioned, where he was martyred, and where his cult belief spread later, and transfer all this information onto the map.

Of course, I encountered many challenges while collecting the data in Google Spreadsheet. Scanning the literature and finding the data I wanted, takes a lot of time. This is understandable. Because I am scanning thru manuscripts and in their original languages. But the more interesting point is that since I was examining the regions in the ancient world, I had a hard time finding the current equivalents of some locations. As can be seen, I was unable to determine the current locations corresponding to the names mentioned in the texts. Sometimes, since there were multiple different locations with the same name, I had difficulty figuring out which specific location the text was referring to, or the name of the region, city or town has changed constantly throughout history, and we do not have sufficient records.

The map to which Studio has contributed more is based the database in this spreadsheet. I would like to mention that, in addition to visualizing the data thru map, I also established the technical and engineering foundation for this project over the summer. This map, to which I will make more additions, can now show all locations together and at the same time present the user with details about each location and name by selecting them one by one.

It is a big step for me to bring this map, which I will still enrich with many additions, to this stage in a short time. I would like to thank Graduate College, Studio team, and classmates who made this possible.”

To whom does history belong: to those who live it or to those who record it?

For too long, we have accepted that history is told from hegemonic academic institutions, dominated by wealthy Caucasian individuals, who say  who has access to historical knowledge.

As the popular saying goes, “History is written by the victors,” or rather, the oppressors.

But what happens with the voices that are not heard? For example, the stories of the artisans who keep alive a rich cultural tradition with their hands and creativity.

 “Herencia means Heritage” is a project that uses community engaged research and creative storytelling to highlight the crucial role of the artisans of traditional Talavera pottery in Mexico.

This project does not focus on materials, institutions or technical regulations that, although they seem to protect the cultural legacy, have served as tools of monopolization.

These regulations exclude the main characters: the artisans, preventing them from creating their own workshops, since the certification of origin is reserved for those who can pay it.

“Herencia means Heritage” aims to break down these barriers and return the spotlight to those who deserve it. Through creative research, I am seeking to bring light to the experiences, challenges and triumphs of Talavera artisans, recognizing the priceless value of their work.

At the end of the day, history should belong to those who live it. Today, we want to rewrite that history together, giving voice to the artisans who keep the tradition of Talavera ceramics alive. It’s time to listen, learn and value the stories that really matter.

(In Farsi:) برای یک زندگی معمولی. For an ordinary life.

In September 2022, when Iranians started a series of street demonstrations, everyone knew that a new social movement was taking shape. Many asked what this movement was all about; and many truly answered: abolishing a system of male-dominant gender relations. However, social movements not only criticize the status quo but also create and are moved by an image of society and life. So, I asked myself: What is the collective imagination that this movement aspires to and is being fueled by?

Looking for the answer to this question, I listened to almost every piece of music and watched almost every video that would come out over the course of the movement. “For” (or “Baraye” in Farsi) was a song that was released shortly after the start of the movement and soon drew special attention both domestically and internationally. Its lyrics were a selection of all the tweets in which users had used the hashtag “for” to say what the movement was for. The song begins with these phrases: “For dancing in the alley; for the fear at the time of kissing; for my sisters, yours, ours; for changing the rotten minds; for the shame of pennilessness; for the longing for an ordinary life…” The idea of “ordinary life” was so powerful that it immediately drew my attention to it. Was it the collective imagination behind the movement that I was looking for? And even before that, what is an ordinary life in the first place? How do people think about it? And maybe more importantly, do they think about it the same way?

I knew that to find good answers to these questions, there was nothing better to analyze other than the content people naturally create on social media. I started looking at tweets containing the phrase ordinary life, but this would make a huge body of tweets. I believe a deep engagement with the data comes from spending a lot of time reading through the texts and taking notes over and over again, but I also became interested in computational text analysis methods that let the machine find patterns in the data. These patterns might be occasionally insightful and can make the researcher think of patterns they would not have thought of otherwise. I knew that I especially needed to learn about the logic of these methods as a solely technical understanding of them would lead to not strongly supported conclusions or at best confusion.

During my time in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio Summer Fellowship, I tried to learn about computational text analysis methods, more specifically, a method called topic modeling, and acquire some of the coding skills necessary for this kind of analysis. Topic modeling is an example of unsupervised analysis that goes over a series of documents (in my case, the interviews or the tweets) and outputs a series of word lists (i.e. topics) determining how much of each topic, each document contains. So far, I have read different articles about the topic modeling approach to understand its logic and process and have finished an introductory course in Python. I will also continue my project and start coding a topic modeling program to analyze my interview transcriptions, after this fellowship.

Topic modeling can be extremely insightful as it can show us what the notion of “ordinary life” is associated with, and more importantly, how convergent or divergent the perceptions about it are. This is extremely crucial as it provides empirical evidence for the debate about whether the movement is being driven by a unified collective imagination or follows only some of the middle-class aspirations.

My name is Falak Jalali. I am a PhD student in Geography. I work with farmers in Himachal Pradesh, a hilly state in northern India. Himachal Pradesh is part of the great Himalayan ranges, which span eight countries. Over the last decade, agriculture has shifted from subsistence to high-value horticulture crops, coupled with impacts of climate change, such as frequent landslides, which have made agricultural livelihoods precarious in the region. Himachal Pradesh ranks high on factors related to social development and health. For example, its rate of education is better than the national average. Despite this growth almost 80% of the population in Himachal Pradesh depends on agriculture and allied sectors like forest, fisheries, and livestock. During my preliminary research in the region over the past two summers, I understood that farmers have a connection with their agricultural land, which makes it more than just an economic commodity. In India, agricultural land is passed down from one generation to the other, making land a part of their ancestry and identity. While policies on agricultural development are often analyzed in economic terms such as yields, productivity, and income. My research focuses on the changing relations between agriculture in the context of climate change and the growing socio-economic status in rural Himachal Pradesh. My research uses concepts from feminist political ecology and emotional geography to develop a relational understanding of agricultural transition in India. I foreground farmers’ emotional and embodied experience of laboring for ginger and garlic, high-value horticulture crops supported by the Government for regional development. Due to the state’s varied elevation, the topography and agroclimatic conditions differ even within the administrative unit at the district level. This variation shapes farmers’ practices and performance in agricultural cultivation across the state.

My summer fellowship project was to spatially represent the emotional and embodied experience of farmers cultivating the same crops—ginger, and garlic—across the southernmost district of Himachal Pradesh, Sirmaur. I believe mapping farmers’ emotions will communicate the many different ways beyond economics that shape farmers’ agricultural decisions and actions. The only barrier was that I had no imagination for realizing this idea. All I had were stories of farmers and some GPS locations of farms in Sirmaur. This summer fellowship with the Studio has been critical to improving my research and progress in my program. My mentor at the Studio, Jay, really helped me to narrow and execute the idea in a meaningful way. The classes and the conversations at the Studio gave me the space and inspiration to think creatively about my project. The fellowship broadened my vision of the many possible forms the project can take. Jay introduced me to Blender and QGIS, and through that, I could depict and communicate the topography and varied space across the small district. Over the span of two months, I have interacted with two new software and was introduced to a whole new way of doing scholarships. This project is surely a collaborative project, and I could not have reached here in my research if not for the multiple conversations with all the mentors at the Studio and my cohort. I am excited to develop this work further. I plan to visit the research site over the winter, and now I have a refined understanding of what I need to focus on and engage with to spatially represent farmers’ emotions meaningfully.

This August, ten graduate students completed the 2024 Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Summer Fellowship—marking the eighth cohort to be awarded the mentored digital scholarship internship experience since the program’s inception in 2017. At the end of the course, the fellows presented on findings, challenges, and conclusions drawn from their digital project work over the 8-week semester. Read more about their work from the students themselves on our blog.

The University of Iowa Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio (DSPS) has launched a unique digital resource for educators, students, and community members. Health Story Hub is an open access website that offers a searchable database of stories about health, illness, and healing for teachers to use in classrooms, community groups and clinics.

Kristine Muñoz, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, and Daena Goldsmith, associate dean for faculty development and professor of rhetoric and media studies at Lewis & Clark College, received a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Initiatives grant for their collaborative project titled, “Salud, to your Health! Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish.” The grant also supports developing a literary journal for undergraduate students to publish health narratives written in Spanish.

“Our proposal for the project drew on years of research that shows how powerful stories are for patients, providers, caregivers, and family members whenever they’re dealing with health issues, whether those are physical or mental health,” says Muñoz. “Storytelling is how we make sense of what happens to us, and part of healing is finding that human connection to others.”

The three-year project, which began in 2022, is a multi-institutional collaboration to create a digital database of course materials, workshops, and other resources for developing and teaching courses in narrative medicine and health humanities in English and Spanish. By supporting those who teach courses and workshops, the project encourages students and participants to learn from reading others’ stories or to write their own. DSPS worked in cooperation with the co-Principal Investigators to design, plan, and implement the Health Story Hub site and journal platform.

Goldsmith said the idea for the site grew out of collaborating with Muñoz as they each taught courses on health stories.  “We thought, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to take the things that we’ve learned from teaching in university and community settings and make those resources available to anybody who’s looking for readings, writing prompts, or assignments,” says Goldsmith.  “We’ve had a very positive response. The stories on our site have some complexity that can prompt discussion.  People have also been excited about having a place where those of us doing this work in lots of different communities or institutions can connect and share resources with one another.”

The Health Story Hub and Salud, to your Health! Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Humanities Initiatives. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article and on the Health Story Hub page, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 
I have been working on my digital archive, you can view it here.
 
HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE

HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE IS A DIGITAL ARCHIVE THAT SEEKS TO HELP GIVE REPRESENTATION TO MARGINALIZED AND INVISIVILIZED ARTISAN COMMUNITIES AS WELL AS INCIPIENT CRAFT PROPOSALS.
MISSION
HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE AIMS TO CELEBRATE AND PRESERVE THE RICH TRADITION OF TRADITIONAL HANDCRAFTED POTTERY THROUGH COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH AND THE PRACTICE OF CERAMICS. THIS PROJECT STRIVES TO HIGHLIGHT THE WORK OF HISTORICALLY UNDERREPRESENTED AND MARGINALIZED ARTISANS BY CREATING A DIGITAL PLATFORM THAT SHOWCASES THEIR ARTISTRY, FOSTERS CULTURAL DIALOGUE, AND PROMOTES THE DIVERSITY THAT DEFINES MEXICAN SOCIETY.
VISION

HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE ENVISIONS A WORLD WHERE THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF MARGINALIZED AND OVERLOOKED ARTISAN COMMUNITIES ARE RECOGNIZED AND VALUED. BY LEVERAGING COMMUNITY-ENGAGED RESEARCH, THIS PROJECT SEEKS TO BUILD A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TALAVERA POTTERY. OUR ULTIMATE GOAL IS TO CREATE A GLOBAL PLATFORM THAT BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN ARTISANS AND AUDIENCES, ENSURING THAT THE VIBRANT HERITAGE OF TRADITIONAL POTTERY IS CELEBRATED AND SUSTAINED FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.
 
OBJECTIVES
VISIBILIZE AND PROMOTE THE WORK OF MARGINALIZED ARTISANS AND EMERGING CERAMISTS, CONNECTING HISTORICAL MEMORY WITH CONTEMPORARY TRADITION AND CULTURAL FUTURE.
PROMOTE ACCESS TO CERAMIC KNOWLEDGE BY TRAINING ARTISANS THROUGH FREE WORKSHOPS IN MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES.
CONTRIBUTE TO THE CREATION OF ARTISTIC COMMUNITIES BY CONNECTING TRADITIONAL ARTISANS WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH YOUNG CREATORS.
FOSTER THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF ARTISANAL WORK BY CONNECTING TRADITIONAL CERAMISTS WITH OPPORTUNITIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART FIELD.
 
WHAT WE ARE DOING
 THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS INITIATIVE LIES IN CREATING A PLATFORM WITH INTERNATIONAL POTENTIAL THAT GENERATES SOCIAL IMPACT. IT DISCUSSES THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF ARTISANS IN KEEPING THE CRAFT TRADITION ALIVE, BEYOND BEING MERE REPRODUCTION TOOLS. FURTHERMORE, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF COMMUNITY ENGAGED RESEARCH (CER), THIS EXPERIENCE SUGGESTS THAT UNIVERSITY TEACHING OF CERAMIC ARTS CAN OPEN NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO SHOWCASE THE WORK OF THESE PROFESSIONALS AND PROMOTE THE RICH CERAMIC TRADITION INTERNATIONALLY.SINCE THE SUMMER OF 2023, WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE STANLEY AWARD FOR INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE HAS FOCUSED ON ANALYZING AND CELEBRATING TRADITIONAL AND EMERGING CERAMIC TECHNIQUES. BUILDING ON CER, WE SEEK TO BUILD A DIALOGUE WITH MEXICAN ARTISANS TO REFLECT ON CREATIVITY FROM OUR DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES AS CREATORS.USING STORYTELLING THROUGH CERAMICS, OUR WORKSHOPS PROVIDE ARTISANS WITH TOOLS TO TRANSLATE THEIR STORIES FROM STATEMENT TO IMAGE. IN THE FIRST EDITION, WE WERE ABLE TO HAVE THE WORK OF FOUR ARTISANS RECOGNIZED IN THE UNITED STATES BY THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA AND BY THE NATIONAL COUNCIL ON EDUCATION FOR THE CERAMIC ARTS (NCECA). THANKS TO ITS CERAMICS DEPARTMENT, THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA TALAVERA POBLANA POTTERY SYMPOSIUM WAS ORGANIZED, TO BE HELD IN THE FALL OF 2024 AT THE SCHOOL OF ART AND ART HISTORY AND THE STANLEY MUSEUM. TWO OF THESE ARTISANS WERE INVITED ALL EXPENSES PAID, DEMONSTRATING THE VALUE OF THIS PROJECT.

Hello,

My name is Hasan Degerli, a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies Department. I’ve been exploring ideas for a project that merges my field with Digital Humanities, and the Digital Humanities summer fellowship program at the University of Iowa Library has provided the perfect opportunity to bring this vision to life.

My project focuses on researching the names, locations, and structures dedicated to Late Antique Christian soldier martyrs, drawing primarily from original sources. The goal is to enhance this data through geo-spatial mapping. I will pinpoint the places, dates, and sites associated with these warrior saints and represent them on a map. In the process, I aim to make the information from martyrdom narratives in languages such as Greek, Syriac, and Coptic accessible to both academic and public audiences, utilizing extensive literature review and mapping techniques.

As I work on this project, I will gather crucial information that will form the foundation for my PhD dissertation. Additionally, this endeavor will produce a novel interdisciplinary study that blends religious studies with Digital Humanities. Although the data and sources are rooted in historical and religious literature, I will leverage Digital Humanities tools to visually represent and analyze this information.

While there is a considerable amount of research on early Christian martyrs, few studies have focused specifically on military martyrs as a distinct category. Existing research is limited, often addressing only a handful of specific cases from the later Middle Ages with an emphasis on artistic aspects. There is currently no comprehensive academic study exploring the origins, emergence, and spread of soldier martyrs. This summer project seeks to address this gap in the field.

This project promises to be both engaging and informative, offering valuable insights and an intriguing exploration. I would like to extend my gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Paul Dilley, for his guidance in refining this project, to the Graduate College for its financial support, and to the entire Studio team for their assistance throughout the summer course.

Ever since I was an undergraduate student of Political Science the differences between access to basic amenities like clean drinking water, clean living spaces, health etc concerned me. I decided to work in the development sector to understand the reason better and to spend my life working in service of achieving dignity and equality for at least people in my country. Even today, more than 40% of India’s population is involved in agriculture and its allied services. This makes the development of the agrarian center a central focus for the country’s growth and well-being. 

I was lucky enough to get opportunity to work in rural India through an NGO working on creating and improving livelihoods of rural population. I started working in the area since 2012 and the more I got involved the more I realized the structural roots on the inequalities and some related to the social fabric of the country like caste relations. 

Over the years, my questions evolved and as I lived with and befriended people from the agrarian communities over the country. I realized their interaction with the environment is so direct and most of their understanding and perception comes from this interaction, the experience of which is also embodied. Farm communities’ wellbeing is complex and intertwined with the well-being of the environment. I decided to explore this embodied experience and its influence in farmers life and their decision-making practices for my PhD at the University of Iowa. Most agrarian change in India is discussed in either economic or discursive ways. I material body that interacts with the environment and their felt experience is large ignored to understand agrarian changes and practices. 

My project in digital humanities is related to this work. I am visualizing the sensory perception of agrarian change and how it changes across social differences of caste, class, gender, and location. This is important to gain a qualitative perspective of the spaces which is often depicted only in terms of type of area and crops grown. It will give an understanding of the involved experience of those terrains and how it shapes practices of agriculture for the community. This will highlight the kind of intervention required to ease farmers agrarian practices and value. My hope is by focusing the emotions of farmers and their embodied experience of agrarian change we can envision and develop equitable and sustainable agrarian future. 

Iran’s political climate has experienced a series of social protests in the past few years. These episodes were caused by different issues and aimed at different ideals and demands which has given rise to the debate if they should be considered as divergent, scattered protest activities or if they all can be seen as different aspects of a single problem. While many scholars have tried to find the shared problematic of these movements merely in their political aspects, I am instead interested in looking for this common ground at the level of collective imagination, which is not solely political, but is at the intersection of culture, politics, and history. “Ordinary life” is a relatively new phrase that started to prevail among the public as an ideal that both used to exist in Iran’s contemporary past and is now going on in other nations of the world. It is not exactly clear what is meant by “ordinary life,” but Iranians seem to imagine a variety of different matters: from cultural freedoms to financial stability, from more social tolerance to a more normalized relationship with Western countries, etc. However, it is unknown if all these different matters come together to make a homogeneous perception of an “ordinary life,” which is shared by all genders, classes, and ethnicities, or if they divergently map onto different social strata in ways that do not allow for any unification.

What I have been doing this summer in the Studio’s fellowship is to learn how I can use computational text analysis methods to answer this question of homogeneity vs. heterogeneity. I have been reading about natural language processing methods of analysis and thinking about how I can incorporate them into my research as each of them comes with some strengths and limitations. I have also begun to learn introductory Python as a skillset necessary for the application of computational text analysis. My goal is to get to the point where I can understand and experiment with some of the relevant Python libraries and packages. Hopefully at the end of the summer I can write up a reflection note on what methods I have learned about, how they are relevant to my research question, and what specific Python libraries I have used and if they have worked out well. In addition to this, I am aiming to code a word cloud program as a simple first step in my programming journey.