This semester’s independent study students are exploring how digital tools reshape storytelling, preservation, pedagogy, and public memory. Their projects reflect the heart of digital humanities: combining technical experimentation with human questions about culture, history, and experience.
Together, these projects demonstrate a constellation of practices common to digital humanities. From fabrication to scanning, storytelling to immersive analysis, these students are building bridges between technology and the deeply human work of meaning-making.
3D Printing for High School History Classrooms
Damian is exploring how 3D printing can transform history teaching in high schools. By designing and producing tactile historical objects, he investigates how materiality shapes student learning and engagement.
In digital humanities terms, this work bridges fabrication and pedagogy. It asks how digital models become physical artifacts that invite embodied learning. Rather than treating history as abstract text on a page, 3D printing reintroduces scale, texture, and spatial thinking into historical inquiry. Damian’s project highlights how emerging technologies can deepen access and spark creativity in classroom environments.
Visualizing Travel Narratives: Marco Polo and the Silk Road
Dominik is investigating how to visualize Marco Polo’s travel narrative as a lens onto the cultural and technological exchanges that flowed across and around the Silk Road. The challenge is substantial: Polo’s account is not a straightforward itinerary but a layered, often contradictory text blending observation, hearsay, and literary convention.
One main challenge is visualizing the flows rather than the stops—the movement of technologies (papermaking, gunpowder, silk production, navigation instruments), religious ideas, and trade goods that Polo’s narrative gestures toward. Most existing tools handle point-to-point journeys competently but struggle to represent overlapping networks of exchange, temporal depth, or the uncertainty inherent in historical sources. How can we represent the difference between what Polo claims to have seen and what scholars believe actually happened?
3D Scanning Peruvian Artifacts at UNM’s Maxwell Museum
Vanessa is conducting high-resolution 3D scans of Peruvian artifacts housed at the Maxwell Museum. Her project focuses not only on digitization, but on documenting workflows and establishing best practices for future scanning initiatives.
This work contributes to digital humanities by strengthening the infrastructure of preservation and crearting a pipeline for digital engagement with fascinating cultural artefacts. Careful documentation of process ensures that digital surrogates are not simply technical outputs, but responsibly created cultural records. By formalizing workflows, Vanessa’s research supports sustainability, reproducibility, and ethical stewardship in museum digitization projects.
Museums and Immersive Digital Technologies
Beth is surveying how museums are adopting immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and interactive installations. Her research not only synthesizes implementation stories, theorizes case studies, and peels back the onion-layers of contexts, like how these technologies are situated in museum contexts, and how these technologies (re)contextualize historical narratives for museum visitors.
Digital humanities thrives on critical engagement with tools. Beth’s project asks important questions: Are immersive technologies enhancing interpretation or overshadowing it? How are institutions framing digital experiences within broader narratives of history and culture? How can immersive experience differentiate what’s real from what’s fabricated? Her work contributes to a more reflective, theory-informed approach to digital innovation in museums and how AI is changing options.
Campus Food Stories and Memory
Grace and Dillon are collecting food stories from across campus to understand how personal food memories shape identity, belonging, and community.
Their project sits at the intersection of oral history and digital storytelling. By gathering narratives and curating and cohering them for public engagement, they demonstrate how digital humanities methods amplify everyday experiences and their echoes. Food becomes an archive of emotion, migration, ritual, and care. Through structured collection and presentation, their work makes clear how food experience informs personal and cultural understandings of food.