Current Projects
Current projects associated with the IRIS Center are listed below along with any relevant links to external sites and biographical information.
This page will be updated on a continual basis as the IRIS Center staff accumulates data on ongoing member and affiliated researcher projects.
| The Wide, Wide World Hypertext Archive |
| This project, directed by Jessica DeSpain, comprises a fully searchable hypertext archive of the illustrations, cover designs, and textual variants of the over 100 editions of Susan Warner’s novel, The Wide, Wide World. These editions span a period of 100 years and their originals are housed in six different repositories. Because Warner’s novel is a representative example of a text that was steadily reprinted in both Britain and America, the archive provides a compelling narrative of marketing, publishing and reading history from 1850 to 1950 and serves as a valuable teaching resource for both book history and literature courses. |
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| Nar and Phu (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal): Field Research for an Audio-Visual Archive of Comparative Lexical and Discourse Material |
| Nar-Phu (Ethnologue: NPA, ca. 500 speakers, 84˚15E; 28˚40N) is a Sino-Tibetan language of Nepal which has shown a sharp decline in speakers due to emigration and the influence of national and other regional languages. This project provides documentation and archival quality data on Nar-Phu towards a comparative lexical database with other related and regional languages of Nepal. This project will also provide a transcribed, annotated corpus to facilitate analyses of the discourse function of morpho-syntactic structures. Additionally, this project will provide for the community a Nar-Phu/Nepali word-book aimed at primary school use, and copies of recordings for community archive and reference. This project is directed by Kristine Hildebrandt with assistance from student researchers Carl Bringenberg, Devang Patel, and Joshua Yardley. |
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| Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Culture (GRASAC) |
| GRASAC is an international research consortium led by Dr. Ruth Phillips, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Its membership is composed of both individuals and institutions in three non-exclusive constituencies: aboriginal community members, museum professionals and academic researchers. Membership is dependent upon members’ ability to contribute something of value to the goals of the project. I have been a core member since its founding in 2004, and a Board member since its constitution in 2007. A foremost aim of GRASAC is “virtual repatriation,” that is to provide aboriginal community members with access to items in museum collections and archives in virtual space instead of, and/or in preparation for, physical access at museums and/or actual repatriation from museums. GRASAC has begun to accomplish this goal by creating the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing (GKS) system, which consists of an original software design for entering detailed and multimedia records in an online searchable database. Additionally, through collaborative collections-based research with members of the GRASAC core group, GKS records are richly layered with the various kinds of expert knowledge the GRASAC members bring to the task, as well as series of digital images for each item that systematically document its formal, technical and functional attributes. This project is locally supported by Cory Willmott. |
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| The Company Quilters Keep |
| How do the work, practices, and ideas of communal and solitary quilters compare? Anna-Maria Kretzer's anthropology senior project (2011/2012) explored the differences and similarities among members of a quilting circle, a solitary quilter, and a professional art quilter. The themes of this study included the meaning and iconography of quilts, the social context of their creation, and transmission of quilting knowledge. Some relevant topics within these themes are the tension between art and craft and the inheritance of quilts and quilting expertise through generations. The project culminated in an exhibit that was hung in the Morris University Center Gallery, May 5th to 18th, 2012, and a permanent virtual exhibit built in the Gallery software program. Enter the virtual exhibit by clicking the title or thumbnail here. See the Senior Project presentation by clicking the link to the Anthropology Senior Project page. |
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