The University of Iowa Graduate College and the UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are excited to announce that 12 graduate students have been selected for the 2022 Studio Summer Fellowship program. These individuals will soon take part in an 8-week course that provides mentored digital scholarship experience, as well as training in skills and tools they will use as they pursue innovative ways of thinking about and sharing their creative endeavors.

Leia Belt, PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Studies

This summer, Leia will create a mixed methods project that pairs geospatial data of neighborhoods collected in Google maps to track change and to illustrate the social-historical context of health problems.

Madison Bennett, MFA Candidate, Center for the Book

Madison plans to work with Master Calligrapher Cheryl Jacobsen to design and digitally publish a textbook for Calligraphy: Foundational Hands, Iowa’s introductory calligraphy course.

Laura Carpenter, PhD Candidate, American Studies

This summer, Laura will focus on the use of crowdsourcing technologies to support inclusive practices in digital archiving and public history projects. She will work in partnership with the hoboing community to implement digitally-enabled participatory practices in preserving hobo cultural history for her digital archival project, Hobo Archive. This project will serve as the digital chapter for her dissertation. 

Larson Fritz, MFA Student, Creative Nonfiction Writing

Over the summer, Larson plans to dive into the nuts and bolts of how virtual environments are created for VR platforms while continuing his research for a project about the VRChat Kmart subculture. He’ll experiment with creating virtual environments of his own and research the history of virtual reality as it relates to nostalgia and memory.

Patrick Johnson, PhD Student, Mass Communication

Johnson will be spending this summer attempting to understand, organize, and visualize the current state of mixed methods research (MMR) in journalism and mass communication (JMC). While MMR is an established research practice across academia, in JMC it is more recently surfacing as a distinct, important, and pragmatic way to tackle our pressing questions. However, the language used in JMC research related to MMR is a mixed bag. Johnson intends to build a searchable database of MMR in top JMC journals over the past 10-15 years, and then visualize common trends, themes, and language use among them. The ultimate goal is to help conceptualize what MMR is in JMC and how the JMC community can move forward with a more unified vocabulary and approach, which in turn could help improve JMC graduate education and the future of JMC mixed methods research design and practice.

Mengmeng Liu, PhD Student, Communication Studies

This summer, Mengmeng plans to develop social media data scraping skills, such as python, to build a digital database for her dissertation on digital feminist activism in China. This fellowship will allow her to focus on archiving heavily censored queer feminist content.

Tommy Mira y Lopez, MFA Student, Literary Translation

Thomas plans to spend this summer designing and building a database that tracks and visualizes iterations of a literary text as it moves from its source language into a translation. 

Ellen Oliver, MFA Student, Dance

Ellen’s research this summer explores the choreographies of rock climbing through projection design and motion capture. Ellen will use motion capture software to capture and record movement data of indoor climbing routes to create video animations that correspond with both the climber and the route design. Her goal is to host a live performance at the rock wall that merges climbing, projection and video animation, blurring the boundaries of climbing and vertical dance.

Caleb Pennington, PhD Student, History

This summer, Caleb plans to create a comprehensive story map that shows the migration of people throughout the world as a result of climate related events.

Amelia Rosenberg, MFA Candidate, Ceramics

Jenelle Stafford, MFA Student, Film & Video Production

Jenelle plans to use the time this summer finishing a film project titled, “the haunting of johnson county jail” that examines and seeks to intervene with the illegibility of one local site carcerality. 

Glen Waters, MFA Student, Creative Writing

This summer, Glen plans to create an immersive virtual map focusing on the impact of The Negro Motorist Greenbook by examining the movements of Black bodies during the second wave of the Great Migration.