The African American Heritage Trail of Kansas City is a city-wide collaboration led by the Kansas City Historic Preservation Commission. Drs. Sandra Enríquez and Diane Mutti Burke partnered with the AAHTKC to conduct listening sessions with community stakeholders and create content for the trail. Students enrolled in one of Dr. Enríquez’s courses produced, under her supervision, entries for 23 historic sites featured on the AAHTKC website.
Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox has created a Digital Tutorial for Ancient Greek based on John William White’s First Greek Book, which was originally published in 1896. The book contains a guided curriculum for Classical Greek built around the language and vocabulary of Xenophon’s Anabasis. This digital tutorial is an evolving edition that is designed to run on both traditional browsers, tablet devices, and phones. Each lesson includes drill and practice exercises in addition to the text itself. The site also includes tab-delimited files so that the vocabulary and grammar can be imported into flashcard programs.
The Visual Explorer for the Language of Greek Tragedy attempts to use social network graphs as a tool to visualize linguistic data drawn from Greek tragedies. You can read about this project in an article that was published in the Proceedings of the 2010 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities. This work has expanded more recently to the study of Sentiment Analysis in Greek Tragedy.
Alltag im Krieg, or everyday life in war, is a website that publishes letters from different rural regions of Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. The aim of the project is to make primary historical sources accessible to a wide audience. This project grew out of Trug und Schein, a public-humanities “citizen science” project led by Professor of History Andrew Bergerson that focused on the letters of an ordinary German couple before, during, and after the Second World War.
Cantorales in the Americas and Beyond (CAB) is an international project led by Dr. Virginia Blanton to catalog “Spanish” plainchant manuscripts currently located outside of Spain, with a principal focus on the Americas as part of the Spanish diaspora. The CAB project is being completed in collaboration with the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission project, which is funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Clio is a digital and public humanities project created and led by Dr. David Trowbridge. It has been used by over 500 universities and organizations to create over 39,000 entries and 1,500 walking tours, interpretive trails, and virtual tours of museums and sites. The project connects over a million people to nearby history, art, and science each month through its website and mobile application.
Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox directed the Cultural Heritage Language Technologies project from 2002 until 2005. This project was a collaborative project to create computational tools for the study of ancient Greek, Early Modern Latin, and Old Norse in a network of affiliated digital libraries. The project appeared in the May 2005 issue of D-Lib.
Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox published this book with Chandos Press in 2005 arguing that digital libraries as they were being constructed at that time needed to take into account the needs and approaches of digital humanities and bring these techniques to broader user audiences in libraries.
This project was directed by Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox and funded by the National Library of Medicine in 2004 and 2005 to create Greek and English digital editions of works by Hippocrates. These texts are also part of the collections of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts.
Since 2017, Professor of History Andrew Bergerson has been working with colleagues and students from UMKC, UMSL, and universities in Germany, Vienna, and Poland on virtual, interuniversity graduate research seminars researching and writing the history of German migration to Missouri.
The Guadalupe Centers Centennial Projects, led by Drs. Sandra Enríquez and Theresa Torres, are a multifaceted public history and public humanities effort that documents, interprets, and disseminates the history of the longest continuously operating Latinx social service organization in the United States. The projects celebrate the Guadalupe Centers’ century of serving the Kansas City community, while placing the story of the Latino community in mainstream narratives of the region.
For their project Knowledge Graph for Spanish American Notary Records, Drs. Viviana Grieco, UMKC Professor of History and Latin American and Latinx Studies, and Praveen Rao, MU Associate Professor in the Department of Health Management & Informatics/Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, are using recent advances in deep learning and knowledge management to develop a tool to manage and analyze about 220,000 pages of digital images of seventeenth-century manuscripts available at the Archivo General de la República Argentina (National Archives) located in Buenos Aires. This software will enable twenty-first-century scholars to expeditiously read and analyze seventeenth-century Spanish American notary records and efficiently find relevant content in these documentary collections.
The LatinxKC Oral History Project, led by Dr. Sandra Enríquez, documents and archives the historic and contemporary experiences of the Latinx community in the Kansas City area through oral histories. The project is a collaboration between undergraduate and graduate students, the Center for Midwestern Studies, and LaBudde Special Collections at UMKC. This team has collected over 20 oral histories and has created a publicly accessible component featuring interpretative essays and interview clips. Audio and video files of the interviews are deposited at LaBudde Special Collections.
In the early 1940s, University of Kansas City President Clarence Decker wanted to establish the first school of fresco painting in the United States. He offered Spanish artist and political refugee Luis Quintanilla a position as resident artist and the opportunity to train apprentices while painting murals on the walls of the Liberal Arts Building (present day Haag Hall). A team of historians, art historians, experts in art conservation, and Spanish language and culture have produced a website to recover this moment in UMKC’s history (the University of Kansas City joined the University of Missouri System and became UMKC in 1963). The project is led by Dr. Viviana Grieco, Dr. Alberto Villamandos, and campus historian Chris Wolff.
Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights was curated by Dr. Christopher Cantwell, Stuart Hinds, and Kathryn B. Carpenter, with contributions from UMKC Public History students. The Making History exhibit explores the activism of gays and lesbians in the decades before the uprising of gay youth at the Stonewall Riots, “including Kansas City’s surprisingly pivotal role in helping to launch America’s gay rights movement.” Documenting the rise of gay and lesbian community groups, the exhibit explores how community played a part in the pursuit of gay rights, and especially how local groups and community members from Kansas City contributed to these historical efforts. The exhibit was produced in partnership with Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America, UMKC, and the Center for Midwestern Studies.
The Adair Chantbook Project in the CODICES lab directed by Drs. Jeff Rydberg-Cox, Virginia Blanton, and Nathan Oyler has three goals: 1) to use a home-built, multispectral imaging system to perform detailed study of palimpsests in a medieval chant book owned by LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries; 2) to develop an alternative, deep learning model that will allow us to derive visible light multispectral images from normal RGB images; and 3) to apply both direct and indirect methodologies comparatively, testing their efficacy on the UMKC chant book and on two additional heritage documents held by other libraries in the Kansas City region.
The New Letters Digital Archive Project directed by Drs. Jeff Rydberg-Cox and Christie Hodgen seeks to create a comprehensive digital archive of New Letters magazine, which has been published at the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1934, and is one of the oldest and best-regarded literary journals in the country. No digital archive of the magazine yet exists. We seek support to begin the process of preserving this rich literary history in a digital format that will be made free and accessible to the public. This project is in its very initial phases. Elements of the archive will be posted here as they emerge. For current issues of the magazine, please visit the New Letters website.
Profiles in Kansas City Activism is a collaborative digital history project with the support of Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P., directed by Drs. Sandra Enríquez and Rebecca Davis in the Department of History. The project website features biographies of major activists in the greater Kansas City metro area along with oral histories, photographs, and documents that highlight diversity and change in our city’s and state’s history.
Dr. Virginia Blanton conducted a visual and textual study of an illuminated manuscript created in 1902 to honor St Didier of Langres.
Show Me Missouri is a statewide collaborative digital exhibit that tells the story of Missouri and Missourians through the lens of 200 historically and culturally significant objects. Drs. Sandra Enríquez and Diane Mutti Burke were instrumental in developing and leading this project, and UMKC students helped produce content for the website.
Statistical Methods For Studying Literature Using R is a hands-on workshop that Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox initially ran at the University of Kansas’s Digital Humanities Forum/THATCamp Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities in September of 2011 and expanded with a more literary focus at the University of Kansas 2012 Digital Humanities Forum. The purpose of these two workshops was to introduce the R environment, describe data structures in R and ways to format data about literary texts for statistical analysis, and provide practical examples of methods of using R to answer questions about literature. It was further revised for an additional workshop at the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Study in the fall of 2014.
This digital exhibit was curated by students enrolled in English 309WI: Rhetorics of Public Memory at UMKC during the 2023 spring semester. The course was designed and taught by Dr. Jane Greer, Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English. The exhibit focuses on women workers at Kansas City’s Donnelly Garment Company (DGC) and features copies of letters written by women workers in the late 1930s as they resisted the organizing overtures of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Dr. Virginia Blanton conducted a visual and textual study of an 1887 illuminated manuscript, the Weckerlin Legendary, a devotional book that describes the lives of saints lives.
