We are excited to announce the 2016 Faculty Programs Recipients!
The selection committee, comprised of faculty from across the 5C’s and members of the DH@CC staff, received over thirty applications for our 2016 programs and choosing our final group of recipients was a difficult process. Digital Humanities at the Claremont Colleges (DH@CC) takes an expansive and inclusive approach: scholars who use digital methods in their teaching, research or publication and/or are considering the digital, as humanists, in their teaching, research or publication.
The Summer Institute recipients are: Tanja Srebotnjak, Erika Dyson, Nancy Macko, Todd Honma, Paul Faulstich, Tamara Venit-Shelton, Sarah Sarzynski, Char Miller, Virginie Duzer, and Kyla Tompkins.
The Course Development recipients are:
Vivien Hamilton, History, Harvey Mudd College
Professor Hamilton will be redesigning the course Popular Science since the 19th Century. This course will examine the ways in which science has been written and displayed for non-specialist audiences from the early 19th century to today. As the course moves into the late 20th and early 21st century, they will examine popular science online, on websites, blogs and comics, asking how and whether these new modes of communication allow greater engagement and participation from more diverse communities. Additionally, Professor Hamilton hopes to work with the class to write simple python scripts in order to engage with digitized primary sources.
Anne Harley, Music/Humanities, Scripps College
Professor Harley has proposed to redesign the course Mobilizing Art: Creating Activist Performances. THe course exAMINES the following questions: How does political art function differently than activist art? What strategies do effective activist art and political art deploy? What can we learn from late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century activist and political art performance in the U.S. and Asia, as it played out in visual art, theatre, music, dance and multimedia? The course culminates in the deployment of student-directed and student-performed activist art works coordinated by members of the class and presented publicly, and/or for the students of the Scripps College Academy. With support from this grant, one project will focus on the collection and curation of an activist archive/exhibits focusing on activism, and art activism in particular, at the 5Cs.
Kathleen Yep, Asian American Studies, Pitzer College
Professor Yep has proposed to redesign the course ASAM94: Community Health which examines the following aspects of human existence: wellness and injustice. As an interdisciplinary course from the discipline of Asian American Studies, ASAM94: Community Health explores how social factors (poverty, war, migration, citizenship status, language barriers, age, and racial ideologies) negatively impact wellness in Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities. Inspired by C.Wright Millsʻs “sociological imagination” or the intersection of history and biography, this class will combine digital humanities and community engagement to document life stories of immigrant and refugee elders. The project draws from a six-year partnership with Literacy for All of Monterey Park (LAMP). LAMP is an adult and family literacy program that furnishes language classes, computer classes, citizenship classes, and individual tutoring. College students will facilitate English-as-a-Second-Language conversation classes with and for Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant and refugee elders at LAMP. Using Ira Shorʻs and Paulo Freireʻs critical pedagogies, the Claremont College students will digitize photographs and personal artifacts and record immigrant and refugeeʻs stories of chronic stress and wellness.
Harmony O’Rourke, History, Pitzer College and Ruti Talmor, Media Studies, Pitzer College
Professor O’Rourke and Professor Talmor proposed a new course that will examine contemporary Africa from a historical perspective, focusing on African art, culture, and politics since the 1970s. The broad purpose of this course is to expand our understanding of how to generate knowledge about the more recent past outside of traditional sources and in a manner that privileges diverse perspectives within civil society.Through the use of digital tools such as Omeka, WordPress, and video, students—in collaborative projects—the students will be challenged to locate and digitally curate a diverse set of primary sources in order to build complex understandings of African experiences after colonial rule. These projects will be accessible to the general public as well, with the goal of engaging with both local and global—especially African and African diaspora—audiences.
Ethel Jorge, Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Pitzer College
Professor Jorge has proposed to redesign an upper division Spanish course Los Angeles, The City and Its People which explores the lives of Angelinos and the urban spaces they inhabit; the presence of the Latino community and other ethnic groups in the city; racial backgrounds and their contexts; and economic inequalities, frictions, and social struggles, historical and contemporary. The class includes weekly daylong exploratory field trips in Los Angeles, selected readings, classroom discussions, reflection papers, and a capstone project or paper. This project aims to add to the course some of the technological and social media skills that students will need to thrive in the 21st century, and to integrate digital humanities with language learning and critical pedagogy. It will also enhance the community engagement aspects of the course through recorded interviews of community members, GIS studies of neighborhoods, and students’ own explorations of significant areas of the city using mobile technologies on site.
Feng Xiao, Asian Languages & Literatures, Pomona College
Professor Xiao has proposed a new course entitled Chinese Language in Society. Using a systematic data-driven approach, this course introduces the current trends in research on Chinese language learning (e.g., sociolinguistics and second language development). It addresses two broad questions: how a second language is learned? and how social and cultural norms are encoded in the use of Chinese? Students are expected to increase their understanding of the mechanism of second language acquisition and knowledge of Chinese linguistics. They will also develop their academic skills such as using statistical software (e.g., SPSS), searching digital databases (e.g., MLA, LLBA, and PubMed), and doing corpus analysis. In essence, the proposed course attempts to situate the domain-specific learning in the context of domain-general learning theories, which prompts an interdisciplinary perspective on learning Chinese language and culture.
Dru Gladney, Anthropology, Pomona College
Professor Gladney has proposed to redesign the course AN 150: Anthropology of Religion, Myth, and Ritual. There has never been an digital dimension to the course. The central question of the course will be the quest for meaning through religious myth and ritual as evidenced in sacred social space. Students will be asked to digitally interact with and map sacred social spaces through a wide variety of texts and media. This project aims to add to the course some of the technological and social media skills that students will need to thrive in the 21st century, and to integrate digital humanities with language learning and critical pedagogy. It will also enhance the community engagement aspects of the course through recorded interviews of community members, GIS studies of neighborhoods, and students’ own explorations of significant areas of the city using mobile technologies on site.
Jonathan Petroupoulos, History, Claremont McKenna College
Professor Petropoulos has proposed to redesign the interdisciplinary course History 88: Museums and Leadership. It is a history, art history, politics and leadership studies course, all at once.Museums and Leadership is divided into four units: the first concerns the history of art museums in the West, from the British Museum and Louvre in the 18th century to the Met and vanity museums today (among other topics). This unit engages intellectual history (Kant, Winckelmann, and others had a lot to say about museums), and, of course, art history. The second unit focuses on antiquities in museums. The third quarter explores Nazi art looting and restitution issues, focusing on leadership issues that arise in conjunction with this issue. The final unit is about how museums function (boards, etc.), how museums are evolving (the above-mentioned “vanity museums”), and how the art market relates to museums. The students will be given more freedom in the redesigned course to determine their own questions and direction. The goal is that students undertake a digital project that they can then present to the class. This work can be topical (the expansion of the Met, which now holds over 3 million objects), or issue-oriented (e.g., the problem of forgeries), or even activist (e.g., combatting the looting of antiquities by ISIS in Palmyra and other parts of the Middle East).
If you are tall enough, and I’m not, you could peer out of the large, north-facing, four-pane window in the 
Fast backward 115 years, a difficult act of imagination that historic photographs can stimulate. Consider this black-and-white shot from the Claremont Colleges Digital Library, shot at the corner of what was then Warren (now College) Avenue and 7th Street, roughly a block south of Honnold Library. The mountains are vastly more prominent in this more unstructured terrain: the dirt road barely intrudes as you eye is caught first by the snow-capped high country. Filling the fore- and middle-ground is the alluvial fan that over the millennia has built up as floods roared out the canyons, carrying tons of debris into the valley below. This rough ground—which the Tongva called Torojoatngna, the 
Its indigeneity has been buried beneath hardened roadbeds, gridded streetscapes, and the manifold structures that constitute the Claremont Colleges; an environment that signals its distance—historically, intellectually, even by the choice of which species to plant and where—from that earlier time and place. This was a distancing freely chosen: Pomona College’s first landscape architect, 
