Course Projects
The Digital Humanities Center supports, on average, ten courses each year in integrating digital humanities projects into the goals of the course. We support faculty (often in collaboration with other centers) by sharing resources, helping with assignment design, scaffolding learning digital tools into the syllabus, running workshops, supporting students through our open hours, providing training in digital methods (through the Thinking Digitally Summer Institute for faculty), and more.
Check out a few of the course projects created in collaboration with the DHC below!
Hurston and Hughes in the 1920s
Professor Monica Miller’s course Home to Harlem focuses on the writing and collaboration of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes in the 1920s. Using StoryMap JS, the students in this class plotted the individual and collective artistic growth and experimentation of Hurston and Hughes, reimagining the mapping process as not just physical, but also conceptual. Some students chose to map the travels of Hurston and Hughes and what they learned as they “wondered and wandered,” others chose to map the new ideas and expressions that Hurston and Hughes were working to advance.
Creators: Monica Miller, the students of Home to Harlem Summer 2021 (Audrey Fouts, Eliza Buttrick, J Madden, Siri Gannholm, Flosha Diliena, Mira Kittner, Irish Tudtud, and Annie Zavitz)
Examining Sustainability at Barnard
Examining Sustainability at Barnard was a project conducted by the DHC’s first summer cohort. Incorporating principles from the Design Justice Network, the cohort set out to raise awareness on the technological landscape of Barnard’s campus. This interactive Scalar book examines the environmental impact of the conditions and materials of Barnard’s technology to better understand its connections to racial, gender, and class inequity. Elizabeth, Gabriela, and Miranda also imagine a more sustainable campus at Barnard based on circular economy models.
Creator(s): Elizabeth Burton, Gabriela Arredondo, Miranda Jones-Davidis (DHC Summer Cohort 2020)
The Golden Age of Versailles
In the many iterations of this course, Professor Laurie Postlewate has led students in explorations of the cultural significance and production of Versailles under the rule of King Louis the XIV. In collaboration with IMATS and the DHC, students of this course series have learned about web-development in weekly labs. These courses have culminated in students presenting their own websites featuring interactive maps using Glitch and StoryMapsJS. These websites drew inspiration from literature about Versailles with a consideration of the arts, architecture, music, and dance of the period.
Creator(s): Laurie Postlewate, the students of The Golden Age of Versailles, Spring 2020 (María Álvarez, Xiaoming Zhang, Sophie Battat, Brenda Huang, Antonia Bentel, Mariah Rust, Maya Corral, Carla Melaco, Camille Marchini, Elizabeth Meyer, Rachel Van Vort, and Lisa Sholomon)
Worlds of Ntozake Shange
The Worlds of Ntozake Shange is a collection of student projects emerging from a two-semester Barnard course. Drawing upon the works of poet, playwright, and Barnard graduate Ntozake Shange, the Barnard Archives’ Shange collection, the archives at the International Center of Photography and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and their own personal and creative drives students created projects that respond to and refashion the work and critical concerns of Shange and the Black Arts Movement as a whole.
Creator(s): Kim Hall, the students of The Worlds of Ntozake Shange, Fall 2015-Winter 2016 (Danielle Fox, Nicole Hines, Dania Lewis, Mei Suet Loo, Melissa Louidor, Nadia Mbonde, Kiani Ned, Oluwayemisi Olorunwunmi, Amanda Perry, Sophia Richards, Gabrielle Smith, Clarke Wheeler)
Interpreting Central Park Through Centuries
For this assignment, students in the Fall 2019 course Nature, Tourism and the North American Landscape used HistoryPin to produce analyses of historical and contemporary texts and images related to the middle portion of Central Park as a tourist destination, working in small groups.
Creator(s): Elizabeth Hutchinson, students in Nature, Tourism and the North American Landscape (Blakey Bessire, Max Campbell, Bryn Evans, Virginia Girard, Amanda Hardin, Emily Hayflick, Meng-Hsuan Lee, Eric Mazariegos, Katherine McCarthy, Katie Pratt-Thompson, Elizabeth Press, Anne-Laure Razat, Sydney Sheehan, Julia Shipley, Ashley Williams, Elle Wolfley, Fran Zhao, Shuni Zhu) with the help of TA Katherine Fein and Madiha Choksi from the Barnard Library
American Monument Cultures
Students in the multiple iterations of the American Monument Cultures class taught by Professor Elizabeth Hutchinson have produced projects spanning multiple technologies. With the discourse on historical representation bustling in public discussion, the course considers the origins and functions of several public monuments in NYC. Student research projects have included interactive maps and podcasts that interpret the significance of a monument's creation and ongoing presence. These podcasts were produced in the Spring 2019 American Monument Cultures course. In pairs, students worked on a monument of their choice, interpreting the significance of its creation and ongoing presence.
Creator(s): Elizabeth Hutchinson, the students of American Monument Cultures (Lauren Anuszewski, Kristin Arsenault, Aliett Buttelman, Abigael Conran, Imma Duverger, India Halsted, Cleo Li-Schwartz, Ottilie Lighte, Nicole Ostrow, Allison Salwen, Alexander Starr, Elle Wolfley) with help from Meredith Wisner and Sylvia Korman from the Barnard Library
Art of Native America
For this assignment, the students in the Fall 2018 class North American Art and Culture produced pages in a Scalar book about the exhibition of this name, which was the first permanent installation of Native American art in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and commented on each others' posts. The assignment asked them to think about how exhibition displays make rhetorical arguments about the significance of what is on view and, in particular, how Settler Colonial museums display the cultures of internally colonized peoples.
Creator(s): Elizabeth Hutchinson, the students of North American Art and Culture (Natalie Arenzon, Peyton Ayers, Emily Berger, Aliett Buttelman, Julianne Castro, Demme Durrett, Luke Ebora, Tatjana Freund, Katherine Gallagher, Kate Gerhart, Hannah Glodell, Tanushree Goel, James Gonzalez, Rita Gonzalez, Dominique Groffman, Nina Havivi, Sam Hershgold, Danielle Hill, Cara Hudson-Erdman, Jessica Joyce, Haley Kane, Carson Kraft, Beatriz Labadan, Catherine Lemel, Shelly Lim, Emma Malenka, Elliott Morelli, Ethan O'Neal, Elise Peters, Brigid Riedy, Ivanna Rodriguez, Allison Salwen, Tuesday Smith, Wenxi Song, Audrey Ussery) with the help of TA Katherine Fein and Madiha Choksi from the Barnard Library
The View from Ginling
The View from Ginling is an ongoing project to digitize and present via student-created online exhibits the papers of Matilda Calder Thurston (1875-1958), a missionary and graduate of Mount Holyoke College who in 1915 founded Ginling College, women’s college in Nanjing. The View from Ginling uses digital tools to tell Ginling’s story, a story of political upheaval in early 20th century China, and to transform and decolonize the archive and the traditional missionary narrative.
Creator(s): Gale Kenny, the students of Religion in the Archive Spring 2018 (Athena Abadilla, Kristen Akey, Sarah Ambrose, Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn, Sarah Broniscer, Juliana Clark, Jessica Cruz, Elayna Gleaton, Nina Havivi, Ariella Napoli, Alice Noah, Willa Smith, Helyn Steppa, Angela Xia), site designer/technologist Corey Tegeler
Jacob Lawrence's Harlem
“Jacob Lawrence's Harlem” is a three-part digital exhibition created by students working with images produced in Harlem in the 1930s by neighborhood residents and socially-conscious reformers. It was created in a course celebrating the centennial of the birth of Jacob Lawrence, whose revolutionary images gave visual expression of the experiences of Harlemites at home, at work and at play. Students combined close visual analysis, historical research and an engagement with written documents from the time to produce exhibitions on the themes of their choosing.
Creator(s): Elizabeth Hutchinson, the students of Jacob Lawrence's Harlem Spring 2018 (Mar Alvarez, Paige Berlin, Jocelyn Cheng, Kaitlin Coyle, Christine Forbes, Kumi Hinson, Louisa Mascuch, Halima Mossi, Charlotte Oswald, Sydney Pickins, Paloma Raines, Ashna Shome, Jacqueline Tavs, and Sadie Yudkin) with the help of Meredith Wisner from the Barnard Library and Abby Lee from IMATS.
Golden Age of Versailles: "Parquet to Parterre"
"From Parquet to Parterre" is a video lecture that explores the relationship between the highly ordered geometric forms of Baroque social dance and the correspondingly geometrical garden designs of the same period. Augmenting Ms. Turocy’s lecture on dance and garden design at Versailles and the philosophical, moral, and social functions of both art forms in 17th/18th century France are demonstrations by both professional dancers of her company and student dancers from Barnard, as well as visual juxtapositions of Versailles’ dances with its gardens.
Creator(s): Laurie Postlewate, Catherine Turocy (artistic director of NY Baroque Dance Company), members of the New York Baroque Dance Company, Barnard student dancers