Student Capstones
Women Workers in the News
History major and DH minor Maria Shimota mined historic newspapers to capture popular attitudes towards women workers in Oregon during and between the World Wars. Her spring 2023 capstone project, “Changing Attitudes Towards Women’s Labor: How Newspapers Reflect Popular Ideologies” is a multimedia essay featuring visualizations of trends across roughly 100 newspaper articles that Maria painstakingly curated for analysis in VoyantTools. One fascinating finding: women workers were frequently described in terms of their clothing, even in stories about the demanding, dangerous, and skilled jobs they were performing. As Maria says: “Fun fact! It doesn’t matter what a woman wears while building munitions or whether she wore a skirt while digging mines!”
Beyond the front page, there’s more to explore on Maria’s site, including a detailed project log, data management plan, presentation slides, and bibliography. You can even download the dataset and use it to pursue your own research questions about this fascinating period in U.S. history!
Check out Maria’s portfolio website
Fat & Fabulous
English major and DH minor Lauryn Cole built a public-facing, interactive version of her Honors College thesis “Fat & Fabulous: The Power of Contemporary Romance as a Site of Anti-Oppression Work.” The redesign draws on Lauryn’s work in English 410: New Media and Digital Technology, taught by Prof. Ashley Cordes and English 410: Digital Storytelling, taught by Prof. Mattie Burkert. Lauren says the medium of the project expresses her values as a researcher: “By choosing Twine to construct the story of my central thesis, I’m forcing readers to wait to find their way through the entire narrative. Their choice of hypertext to follow determines what type of information is revealed to them but prohibits the instant gratification of a birds-eye view that the original paper format would have provided.”
Mapping Other Perspectives
In English 470, UO SOJC students Bobbie Adelson, Kiele Head, Catherine Oswalt, Sesilie Stout used ArcGIS Storymaps to create a curriculum tool for local schools to teach histories of racism, oppression, and freedom struggles in the Eugene-Springfield community. Built with careful attention to state & local curriculum requirements, the interactive map and multimedia elements invite students to explore local landmarks as a portal to histories of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Japanese-American Oregonians.
These Fragments I Have Stored
A screenshot from Rye Davies’ text-based adventure game
For their major project in English 470/570, PhD student Rye Davies used Twine to craft an interactive science fiction narrative with two possible endings and many ways to reach them. As Rye explains, the game is a meditation on issues of digitization, identity, & power in archives explored by scholars like Dorothy Berry: The game was designed with data preservation and maintenance as a guiding concern. Specifically, it is meant to be used as an engaging way for archivists, data scientists, and library professionals to show a new generation the incredible amounts of responsibility and labor that attend work in these areas. If TFIHS impacted you, please remember that every day archivists are working to keep people’s memories alive! The stakes are not so different from what you’ll see Rennie experience in the game.
Dear Miss Tingle
Allia Service developed a capstone project extending her History thesis research on on Lilian Tingle, an early twentieth-century cooking celebrity who corresponded with readers through her column in the Sunday Oregonian. Her blog includes data visualizations of Tingle’s correspondent network as well as blog posts documenting her attempts to recreate historical recipes in her own kitchen.
Of her capstone project, Allia Service says: “The most exciting thing about DH to me is that it is interdisciplinary — any type of researcher from STEM, to social science to humanities can use DH tools and principles to explore their research in new ways.”
Read Allia’s historical recipe blog
Understudy-ied Theatre History
For her capstone project, DH minor Dara Willmarth (2021) researched, wrote, recorded, and edited the three-episode pilot season of this podcast about women playwrights whose works are less frequently taught and performed than those of their male contemporaries. Episode 1 focuses on Regina Anderson Andrews, a playwright, librarian, and community builder of the Harlem Renaissance. Episode 2 centers on Lady Augusta Gregory, who cofounded Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and made major contributions to the Irish Literary Revival as both a writer and producer. Episode 3 reaches back to the seventeenth century to tell the story of Aphra Behn, England’s first professional woman playwright. Listen on your favorite podcatcher, or through the companion website, where Dara has posted episode transcripts, links to scholarly sources, and bonus content.