Decolonizing anthropology has become a rallying cry across the four subfields of Anthropology–Socio-Cultural, Biological, Archaeological, and Linguistic. At the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology, one among the few remaining programs in the country that expresses a commitment to a four-field education, efforts to critique and re-envision the anthropological canon have taken diverse but disparate…
Category: Collaboratory Blog
New 5×5 Team – Ancient Theories of Love and Friendship
This project will bring together ethicists, classicists, and scholars of ancient Greek philosophy to discuss ancient Greek theories of love and friendship. The sessions, each lead by a different faculty member, will center on a close philosophical, linguistic, and historical examination of ancient Greek source material concerning love and friendship. Team members (5) bring a…
New 5×5 Team – Historicizing the Public/Private Distinction
This 5×5 convenes a group of scholars broadly interested in interrogating the historical origins of the public/private distinction in economic and political life. They are interested in understanding how the divide between private and public life is understood, how that divide has changed historically and fed into evolving conceptions of the common good, and how…
New 5×5 Team – Critical Approaches to Sound
This 5×5 cohort consists of scholars interested in critical approaches to sound more broadly, and music, more specifically. They come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (History, English, American Studies, Musicology), but share an interest in how sound and music provide a critical lens into a global histories of race and empire. They intend to…
Thinking Through Election Overload: Patriotism and Country Music
Thinking Through Election Overload: Patriotism and Country Music: Who Owns What? Remember the Olympics? Just a few months ago, Americans from across the political spectrum came together in a three-week ritual of raucous flag waving, chanting, and cheering. But those good feelings barely survived the Closing Ceremonies. Also immediately after the Olympics, a wave of…
Collaboratory Announces Second Annual Research Orientation Series
The Humanities Collaboratory is offering its second annual Research Orientation Series beginning in September 2024. This is a series of four events created for new humanities faculty at the University of Michigan. Participants will leave each event with a clearer understanding of the landscape of humanities scholarship funding and armed with contacts to provide help…
I Walk Under the Earth; Lightly in a Cloud of 300,000 Points. A Portal to the Ancient City of Teotihuacán Through LiDAR Surveys, Digital Preservation, and Immersive Storytelling
The center of the Mesoamerican universe lies twenty kilometers northeast of Mexico City in the ancient city of Teotihuacán. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the site receives 4.5 million visitors annually. The Aztecs called it the place where the gods were created, and it remains Mesoamerica’s cosmological and spiritual heart. As…
Collaboratory Presents Work at New Directions in the Humanities Conference
The Collaboratory took its work on the assessment of non-traditional forms of humanities scholarship on the road to present a workshop at the New Directions in the Humanities Conference hosted by La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, June 26-28. The Collaboratory, in its current iteration, has been tasked with creating tools and sharing resources to support and promote collaborative,…
Nishnaabeg Team Celebrates Learning Opportunities
Two members of the From Revitalization to Reclamation: Reinforcing Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies at the University and Beyond Proposal Development Grant team attended The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) conference in early June. Kayla Gonyon (Lecturer in American Culture, Ojibwe Language) and Skyelar Raiti (Undergraduate Research Assistant) traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, where the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC)…
Do Androids Study Electric Humanities?
AI is everywhere you look these days. What used to only be a part of science fiction books and movies is now helping write papers, draft invitations, produce fanciful images, and even streamline our google searches. However, while AI has shown itself to be a helpful taskmaster, it is not without cause that many of us are ambivalent…
Music and AI
Music and AI is one of three new 5×5 teams we have accepted in April. This team is led by Julie Zhu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts and Technology. This team will explore how the impact of AI on composers and musicians, as well as how it can be utilized for creation and research in…
The Ambivalence Project Celebrates Launch of Guidelines
The Ambivalence Project, partnering with Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, has launched their messaging guide, “Ambivalence as an Opportunity for Social Change.” It can be downloaded for free at: http://goodwinsimon.com/ambivalence. The Ambivalence Project, led by P.I. Valerie Traub, was composed of 5 faculty, 2 graduate students, and 1 staff person located in LSA and the Medical…
Collaboratory to Host Research Infrastructure Events
The Collaboratory, as part of our effort to build lasting humanities research infrastructure, is offering a series of upcoming orientations. On March 7, “Research Resources: Landscape of External Funding,” will give humanists a slimmed down peek into what the search for external funding looks like and help early career faculty to identify potential funding institutions. The…
Project Reflections — Expanding the Reach of Global Feminism with Professor Abigail Stewart
We reached out to Abigail Stewart, Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies, to discuss her work on the Expanding the Reach of the Global Feminisms Oral History Archive project grant. Read below about her experiences working on this team and with the Collaboratory. “Working on the various stages of the…
A New Phase for the Humanities Collaboratory
We are delighted to announce that the Office of the Provost and the College of LSA have agreed to support Humanities Collaboratory activities for two more years. The Collaboratory and our scholars have learned a great deal about innovative, diverse, team-based, 21st -century humanities research. In this new phase we will build on these lessons…
Collaboratory to Host Research Resources Orientation for New Faculty
The Hummanities Collaboratory with the Office of the Vice President of Research and the LSA Office of Research is hosting a New Faculty Orientation to discuss funding avenues available to humanists at the University of Michigan. For more information or to make any suggestions on materials used at the orientation, please contact Kristin Hass (kah@umich.edu). The orientation will be October 27,…
Making Projects Accessible
By Stephanie Rosen, Ph.D. Early in the process of seeking support for a collaborative project in the humanities — or any field — researchers must demonstrate the expected impact of that project’s deliverables. This early stage is also the right time to start thinking about accessibility, one important facet of impact. Here, accessibility refers to…
Collaboration: Is the Pecking Order Doing More Harm than Good?
Margaret Heffernan’s TED Talk Drawing from an experiment with chickens, entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan explains how our cultural obsession with individual success is threatening our potential for collaboration and productivity.
Undergraduates and the Humanities Collaboratory
What’s it like to be an undergraduate researcher on a Collaboratory project? Mollie Fox has given an account on the Karanis project blog: An undergraduate in the Collaboratory
Precarious Networks
We have little control over what Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms do with our data; software that worked perfectly well yesterday locks us out of our archived experiences today. Meanwhile, apps like Uber and Waze promise us the ability to transcend sovereign boundaries. Access across borders, access to devices and platforms, are based…