Event Title

Humanities in the Lab: Experimenting with Local History

Presenter Information

Susan M. Merriam
Gretta Tritch Roman

Location

PSY-106

Start Date

3-11-2017 3:30 PM

End Date

3-11-2017 4:30 PM

Description

This project demonstration centers on the ethos and work of Bard College's Digital History Lab (https://eh.bard.edu/dhl/), founded under the auspices of Bard's Experimental Humanities Program in 2016 with the support of a Mellon Foundation Digital Humanities grant. The lab serves a two-fold purpose. First, it develops interactive digital projects based on the history of Dutchess, Columbia, Ulster, and Greene Counties in upstate New York by working with a range of constituencies, including local residents and historians, archivists, librarians, and Bard faculty, staff, and students across disciplines. Second, the lab seeks and promotes projects that welcome the local community to design research questions, work in new ways with the college, and tell alternative histories. By inviting local communities to contribute to project development and planning, the lab actively nurtures new forms of community and community engagement. This ethos is fundamentally shaped by a traditional understanding of the humanities, which encourages a spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and openness. The integration of the community into these academic processes not only promotes personal investment in the work of the lab from outside the college but also proves to be mutually beneficial to the students in gaining new perspectives on their place in this local history.

Additionally, and equally important, the lab is especially attentive to histories and communities that have been understudied relative to some of the more famous historic sites in the Hudson Valley. Lab projects focused on the culture and economic history of local apple farms, the documentation of a retirement-home cemetery near the campus, and a stretch of road running from Bard to a prison in which the college runs a degree program each enable the lab to uniquely illuminate aspects of place and experience that have impacted a range of constituencies, thus creating what might be termed a "people's history." An important aspect of the lab is to privilege community-sourcing of histories, for instance the more traditional collection of oral histories as well as experimentations in artifact documentation with a "mobile history van" and an interactive digital tool to populate historic maps with the research conducted by individuals currently living in these landscapes. Because the organization of this humanities lab allows for a number of projects to be in production simultaneously, it accommodates the natural intersections of topics and methods to inform the work of the lab. This project demonstration will discuss these projects in the context of our larger aims for the lab and will welcome a discussion about the relationship of the academy and its neighbors.