We’ll keep doing the work that shaped our first year: researching how AI can deepen humanities inquiry, developing 3D pedagogy for humanities courses, supporting classes and individual scholars as they build digital projects, and refining and expanding Xanthan so more people can publish work they own. The new directions below grow out of that work, extending what we can do and who we can reach.
Maps already run through our work, from student websites to the terrain of the Santa Fe Trail printed for students to hold, and our AI research has shown how much technical drudgery these tools can take on. AI-assisted mapping brings the two together. We’re developing workflows that use AI for the tedious parts of historical mapping—georectification, layer alignment, feature extraction—without surrendering interpretive decisions to the model. AI does the lift; humanists do the reading. That opens spatial analysis to researchers who have the questions but not the technical fluency to master the many tools involved, and it makes historical maps practical for courses that could never take on a full GIS unit.
Our first year showed that student research can find a real public audience when it’s built for one. Nine collaborative class websites went live, and students found that writing for the open web is harder and more interesting than writing a paper for a single reader. The next step is data. Humanistic data—maps, timelines, networks, demographic patterns—rarely reaches public audiences in forms that invite engagement rather than mystification. We’re developing visualization approaches designed from the start for general audiences: things you can explore without training, that still carry the interpretive weight of the scholarship behind them.
In year one, our tools and workflows for open web publishing supported 14 courses and 180 students, along with workshops on portfolio websites. They’re ready for more people. We want to work with more faculty who want to put their scholarship online in durable, scholar-controlled formats: research websites, annotated document collections, interactive exhibits. The class sites already built here show what’s possible.
Partnerships are growing the same way. We worked with eight campus partners in our first year and scanned artifacts at the Maxwell Museum, while student researchers took on 3D printing for high school history classrooms. We’re building toward more partnerships where scanning, analysis, and fabrication serve research and community needs at once—with archives, K-12 programs, and museums—and toward positioning UNM for external funding as a hub for AI and cultural heritage.