At Amaranth, we investigate which tools, techniques, and workflows can expand what humanists can study, ask, and share. 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. The tool is never the point. The point is whether more people can encounter humanities work with curiosity, context, and care.
Our research agenda is a pipeline, not a set of unrelated experiments. AI-assisted analysis helps researchers work across larger collections. 3D scanning and modeling create richer records of material culture. 3D printing turns some of those records into objects that can travel into classrooms and community conversations. Xanthan gives the work a public, durable home. Documentation makes the process reusable instead of mysterious.
The human-centered part is the throughline. We want students, faculty, and community partners to understand how the work was made, where judgment entered, what the tools missed, and what another person could responsibly do next.
Sometimes our research 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. For good reason, the library is filled with books that aren’t relevant as current scholarship. They played a key role in advancing understanding in their day. Our work contributes not just to current practice, but to how humanists might use these tools in future iterations.
AI has opened research territory that was genuinely out of bounds before: exploring patterns across thousands of documents, making oral history collections searchable, building interactive archives students can construct themselves. We’re investigating what these workflows actually look like in practice—what works, what misleads, and how to build AI-assisted research that keeps humanists in the editorial seat.
That work raises a harder question too: 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. We’re building open, transparent workflows that model accountable, critical engagement with AI—and we document what we learn as we go.
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. Physical objects, in different ways from photographs and diagrams, offer an experience of scale, texture, and direct comparison. 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 changes the kind of thinking you do. When your work is public, you face more pressure to be precise in your argument, your evidence, and your framing. 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 its code. Xanthan makes 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 about humanities, technology, storytelling, and public memory. 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. Several projects are community-engaged, connecting student researchers to partners outside the university. Students leave these projects with real capability—knowing how to direct a research workflow, work across disciplines, and take intellectual responsibility for what they build.