The best collaborations start before you have it figured out. Please come with a tingling of an idea, a half-formed question, a sense of an aesthetic, or a project you’re not sure is even possible. We want to help brainstorm possibilities from the outset!
Whether you’re a teacher looking for a digital home for a class project, a student bringing an assignment to life, a researcher wondering what AI could do for your source materials, or a community partner whose history deserves more than a PDF, we can help you move from idea to working form. Bring us the question before the platform is chosen. Interdisciplinary teams and community collaborations are especially welcome.
No scheduled studio hours this summer, but we'd love to connect—email us anytime to set up a consultation. amaranth@unm.edu
We’re especially eager to help faculty and students explore how AI can make technical beginnings less intimidating without making judgment optional. You don’t need a technical background or a fully formed idea, just a question or a hunch. Maybe you have a collection of texts you’d like to search in new ways, or you’re wondering whether AI could help students engage differently with primary sources.
If you’re wondering what AI can actually do for humanities research, our AI + Humanities Research page walks through real use cases: exploring patterns across archival collections, making oral histories searchable, and helping students build projects that would have required a development team a few years ago. Humanists are not late to this conversation. The skills humanists constantly refine, including evaluating sources, recognizing bias, and asking whose voices are missing, are exactly what separates meaningful AI use from mechanical AI use.
Some of the most interesting work we do connects university research to communities whose histories, materials, and stories deserve scholarly attention and public visibility. We’ve helped community partners make oral history collections searchable, built public archives from materials that were sitting in boxes, and worked with faculty on projects that reach well beyond the academy.
Community-engaged projects often look different from traditional research collaborations: they take longer to scope, they require sustained relationships, and the questions of who the work is for matter as much as the methods. We welcome that complexity. If you’re thinking about a project that involves community partners—whether you’re a faculty member, a student, or a community organization—come talk to us early. These conversations are better before the scope is set.
Many grants from the NEH, Mellon, NSF, and others now expect or encourage public engagement: a way for research to reach audiences beyond the academy. We can help you design that work so it is more than an afterthought.
We are most useful when we join early: before the platform is chosen, before the budget is fixed, and before the public component has been reduced to “we’ll make a website.”
If you’re writing a grant proposal, we can work with you to plan a realistic digital component: a project website, a collection of ScrollStory essays, an interactive archive, or an oral history series. We can also help describe the infrastructure and labor clearly, so the public work sounds like part of the research rather than decoration around it.
If you already have funding, we can help shape the public side of the project: design, infrastructure, workflow, documentation, and revision. Everything we build is open-source, sustainable, and yours to keep.
This kind of collaboration works best when it starts early. If you’re even thinking about a grant that might have a digital or public dimension, reach out. The earlier we can talk about possibilities, the stronger the proposal.