Western Michigan University’s (WMU) Center for the Humanities was conceived in 2011 as an interdisciplinary hub for ideas, collaboration, and public engagement. Recognizing humanistic scholarship is not a monolith, scholars university-wide were asked to serve on an advisory board representing the diverse disciplines found at the university. The traditional focus at the Center for the Humanities (the Center) was engagement via public programming - the flagship being a large-scale, yearly thematic public lecture series. Topics such as “truth”, “freedom”, or “courage” were explored through speaking events featuring well-known intellectual powerhouses such as Angela Davis, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram Kendi, Jerry Saltz, etc., alongside scholars from our university, region, and nation-wide.
The COVID-19 Pandemic disrupted the Center’s immediate programming and established methods of engagement, as well as caused a re-examination of our areas of service/engagement and resource allocation. Public health and safety concerns halted in-person events, and while we tried to engage through online events, attendance suffered (National Endowment for the Arts & National Opinion Research Center, 2023). With our whole lives being conducted in front of a computer screen and on Zoom, our audience had digital fatigue. Even as conditions improved, COVID-19 caused many to rethink their level of engagement/comfort in public spaces. As future thematic programming was contemplated, the advisory board discussed the need for human reconnection and reinvention in the new world we live in. Thus the Center’s Publicly-Engaged Humanities Faculty Mini-Grant program was conceived. The program created a new era of humanities engagement at the Center by supporting WMU faculty via microgrants to launch digital humanities projects. By reallocating resources that once funded singular on-campus speaking engagements, the Center would usher in a new area of programming by supporting multiple faculty members to explore sustained public-humanities engagement via digital scholarship tools and curricular innovation.
Promoting and building collaborations in digital humanities had been a goal since Digital Projects Librarian Amy Bocko joined the Center in 2018, and the Mini-Grant program created a much-needed library pipeline for outreach, interdisciplinary collaboration, and promoting the University Libraries’ digital toolkit. Bocko became the Center’s Associate Director in 2022 and the administration of the Mini-Grant program her primary area of responsibility. The program created a natural pathway to support growing a community of practice in digital humanities, digital storytelling, and community-driven archives, while establishing a visible partnership between the University Libraries and Center for the Humanities (Rosenblum & Dwyer, 2016).
The program’s inaugural year saw a natural theme emerge of documenting and uplifting the voices and histories of traditionally under-served communities. While the proposed focus and subject expertise varied amongst the inaugural cohort, there was a continuous thread of capturing, presenting, and preserving hidden narratives of diverse communities. Each successful awardee proposed varying methods to meet their project’s technical goals; from this, Bocko identified a unified need on-campus to create collections of accessible, sustainable digital materials, provide technical know-how for audio/video capture, digital platform/toolkit support, and long-term digital preservation. By developing a unified methodology, the technological aspects of the projects could be streamlined to ensure the integrity and sustainability of the content generated and create a model of support for new digital technologists to build their confidence and keep them from “reinventing the wheel”. With each acceptance letter sent, Bocko added project examples using available Library tools (e.g. Scalar, ScholarWorks) and the offer of consultation/collaboration. All four awardees were enthusiastic about collaboration and were ultimately very successful in meeting their goals during the project period. Throughout the grant period, the Center hosted lunches/check-ins for the awardees to meet one another, share experiences, and troubleshoot. The mutual goals of collecting and celebrating untold stories, creating student-centered learning experiences, openness to collaboration, and growing their digital toolkits made for a naturally synergistic environment to grow a community of practice spanning disciplines.
One awardee, WMU World Languages and Literature Professor Dr. Li Xiang used her microgrant as a launch pad for curricular innovation/classroom engagement with the sustainable output of growing an archive documenting the lived experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) immigrants. Given the increased violence and bigotry to Asian communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic, this was a timely, important subject. Dr. Xiang used her Mini-Grant funds to support experiential learning and launch “Telling Our Stories: A Video Collection Celebrating AAPI Heritage”. Xiang’s research focuses on pedagogical innovation and strategies for secondary language learners (in particular, Mandarin Chinese in a high school language immersion program); she created an engaging curriculum where her students explored the experiences of immigration via collecting oral histories from AAPI-community volunteers, spent a day immersing themselves in Chinese culture in Chicago’s Chinatown, all while growing their Mandarin-language skills and creating an enduring archive of first-person narratives documenting the lived experiences of AAPI immigrants. Her students performed research, developed interview questions, and interviewed volunteers Dr. Xiang recruited. The class assignment culminated with her students presenting snapshots of the lives of the interview volunteers in Mandarin, a field trip for a docent-led visit to the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, and spending a day experiencing Chinese culture and cuisine in Chicago’s Chinatown (Xiang, 2023). Xiang’s project is now in the third year of adoption and has generated enthusiasm and support with stakeholders on-campus and beyond. “Telling Our Stories” serves as an example of how modest faculty microgrants can be a catalyst for innovative, student-centered pedagogical curriculum redesign, sustainable digital storytelling collaborations, and humanities connection and engagement.
As the University Center for the Humanities Mini-Grant program enters its third cycle for the 2024-25 school year, the proceeding cycles have been successful in establishing a community of practice for digital humanities practitioners, curricular innovation, long-term partnerships, and creating new collections of untold stories. We have successfully balanced our commitment to providing engaging humanities-centered public programming with a desire to cultivate and support burgeoning digital scholarship on our campus by the strategic reallocation of resources and outreach efforts.