Amaranth is UNM’s digital humanities studio: a research and teaching space where faculty, students, and community partners investigate how digital methods can deepen humanistic inquiry, strengthen public scholarship, and build the digital literacy students need for an AI-shaped world.
Amaranth is not a makerspace or a service shop. The equipment, software, and publishing systems matter, but only because they let us ask better questions: How can AI help humanists work across larger archives without giving up interpretive control? What happens when students build public work instead of disposable assignments? How can community projects preserve context, credit, and care? What forms of scholarship become possible when research is designed for readers, listeners, viewers, and participants beyond the classroom?
Our work is deliberately pedagogical. We help people build things, but the deeper goal is capability: students who understand how digital systems shape knowledge; faculty who can integrate emerging methods into courses without surrendering intellectual rigor; community partners who can share materials in forms that remain useful and accountable.
We work with instructors to make digital work part of humanities courses without turning the course into a tech demo: collaborative class sites, AI-assisted primary-source projects, public exhibits, maps, audio, and physical models. The goal is students who can direct a digital project, evaluate its outputs, and explain why their choices matter.
Bring students into the work →AI is not a shortcut around humanistic judgment. It is a new research environment that needs close reading, source criticism, provenance, and ethical attention. We build accountable methods for transcription, corpus exploration, image description, structured data, and public research.
Explore AI + research →Amaranth's research program runs from AI-assisted humanities workflows to digital cultural heritage, tactile pedagogy, open documentation, and community collaboration. We experiment carefully, document what happens, and share what we learn before it hardens into boilerplate.
Where we're headed →A 3D print is not automatically pedagogy. It becomes useful when it helps students compare, handle, question, and remember. We study how replicas, terrain models, and scanned objects can make scale, texture, and spatial relationships part of humanities learning.
Tactile learning →Websites, oral histories, podcasts, exhibits, and interactive narratives are not containers for scholarship after the real work is done. They are forms of argument. So are the workflows behind them: documented, version-controlled, reusable records of how knowledge was made.
Think through form →We work with faculty, students, interdisciplinary teams, and community partners from the first question through the public life of a project. Come early, before the format has hardened. The best conversations are about what the work is trying to discover, teach, preserve, or make possible.
Collaborate →Some of the most interesting collaborations start as a half-formed research question, a course you want students to experience differently, a collection that deserves a public life, or a digital method you are not sure how to evaluate. We want to hear about it.
We work alongside you from the first question through the public life of a project: framing the problem, choosing methods, designing assignments or workflows, building iteratively, and deciding how the work should be shared and sustained. Whether it is a class integration, an AI-assisted research project, a community collaboration, or something you have not quite figured out yet, the point is not simply to produce a thing. The point is to learn what the process makes thinkable. Read more about our studio ethos →
