At Amaranth, we investigate which tools, techniques, and technologies that can make humanities come alive outside the page. We’re always exploring to see what’s worth bringing to projects. We share what we learn honestly: what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently. Let’s be clear: technology is a means to an end, and the end is more visibility and vibrancy for the humanities.
Sometimes our reseaerch seems like quicksand. What’s true about VR headsets, 3D printing, or AI this semester is not going to be true next year. But the work is still important. The library is filled with books that aren’t relevant as current scholarship but played a key role in advancing understnadings in their day. Our work contributes to not just current practice, but shaping how humanists can help shape these tools.
The most urgent question in our studio isn’t “how should we use AI?” It’s something harder: how can we help humanists help shape AI? Humanists have spent centuries developing tools for exactly the problems AI raises—evaluating the authority of sources, understanding how knowledge gets constructed, asking who benefits from a particular framing. Those skills aren’t supplementary to good AI use. They’re foundational to it.
At Amaranth, we’re investigating how simple technology work can be a great entry point into AI. We’re asking how the act of sharing your scholarship publicly changes the precision and ambition of your thinking. And we’re building open, transparent workflows that model accountable and guardrailed engagement with AI.
What changes when students can hold a 3D-printed architectural capital instead of looking at a photograph? When a terrain map becomes something you can trace with your fingers rather than interpret through a flat screen?
We’re investigating how 3D fabrication changes learning and research in the humanities—how physical objects restore scale, texture, and direct comparison to inquiry that photographs can’t. Our projects range from printing Romanesque and Gothic capitals for art history courses to creating terrain models that make geographic relationships tangible in ways no image can.
Open scholarship isn’t just a publishing preference. In an AI era, it changes the kind of thinking you do. When your work is public, the pressure to be precise—in your argument, your evidence, your framing—is different. Visibility is a forcing function for clarity.
Xanthan is our open-source web framework for humanities projects, built from years of studio practice. It’s free to host, requires no vendor lock-in, and is designed so that AI assistants can understand and modify it—making sophisticated web publishing accessible to scholars who’ve never written a line of code. Every site built on Xanthan is an experiment in what sustainable, scholar-owned digital work looks like.
A curated archive of 3D-scanned objects—historical artifacts, architectural details, museum pieces—built to support teaching and research. Each scan in the collection is an experiment in what digital reproduction can reveal about material culture: what you gain when you can rotate an object on screen, and what you still lose compared to holding it.
The Amaranth Research Group brings undergraduates into live research questions at the intersection of humanities and emerging technology. Current projects include 3D printing for high school history classrooms, digitization of museum artifacts, campus food stories and oral history, and immersive technologies in museum interpretation.