The MDHI provides grants for undergraduate research projects, community partnership projects, course development and off-site training.
The MDHI is proud to have supported the following projects during the 2017-2018 grant year:
Undergraduate Research Grants:
Community Partner Grants:
Course Development Grants
The MDHI is proud to have supported the following projects during the 2016-2017 grant year:
Undergraduate Research Grants:
Interrelations Between Media and Site of Memory in Ghana
Ashley Omoma
Content type: Documentary photography, audio, and 360 degree filming
This project focused on documenting sites of memory in Ghana and using those materials to teach high school students in Bethlehem about their connections to the African disapora and the legacies of slavery. The visual representation highlighted the connection between the continent of Africa to the town of Bethlehem.
Community Partner Grants:
Reclaiming the Past, Inventing the Future: A Local History Lens to Citizenship Preparation
Tom Hammond
Partner: Building 21, Allentown School District
Content type: Digital mapping
Lehigh undergraduate students used historical reserach and digital mapping tools to design and develop and a series of innovative socio-historical investigations for use at Allentown School District's Building 21 school.
VAST (Valley Against Sex Trafficking)- Lehigh University Digital Storytelling and Public Scholarship Community Partnership
Sarah Stanlick
Partner: Valley Against Sex-Trafficking (VAST)
Content type: Digital audiovisual production and editing
Through this grant, Lehigh undergraduate studetns worked to create digital vignettes and training materials for VAST that are used with providers, clients, volunteers and students. Additionally, the project will organized two arts events designed to raise awareness about sex trafficking in the Lehigh Valley .
Cultural Place-Making Through the Arts
John Pettegrew
Partner: Doug Roysdon, Anna Russell and Avi Setton
Content type: Oral history interviews
This project conducted interviews with Bethlehem artists about the role that that artists and arts supporters to the economic and cultural vibrancy of Bethlehem. These interviews will be used at a later stage to create a documentary film about the role of the arts in the revitalization of Bethlehem.
Course Development Grants
Bethlehem and Beyond
Scott Gordon
This new course for first-year students teaches students about a Moravian community that was located just north of Bethlehem, called Christian’s Spring. Students build off of previous student work about Christian's Spring (christiansbrunn.web.lehigh.edu) by conducting new research and using this digital platform to communicate what they will learn about the built environment of Christian’s Spring, about the people who lived and worked there, and about the labor and learning that constituted the community’s purpose.
WGSS 001: Expanding Community Engagement in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Curriculum
Suzanne Edwards
Through this grant, Professor Edwards added a community engagement component to the introductory course in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program. The course now includes an activism project, and the grant was used to develop a digital database for communication with community partner organizations for current and future collaboration with WGSS faculty and students.
Archaeological Field School
Cameron Wesson
This modified course used cutting edge technology like drones to communicate the research being done in an archaeological dig in Scotland. The focus of this grant was to disseminate the course findings to much larger audiences by presenting the real-time progress of the expedition via a dedicated course website featuring photographs, videos, blogs, as well as 3D scans of landforms, excavations, and individual artifacts.
Journey From the East: Chinese Bridge at Lehigh
Dong-Ning Wang and Kiri Lee
This modified course incorporated digital storytelling, expanding on a previous courses by developing and digitizing content about the local Chinese community, emphasizing connections between Lehigh and China, and documenting and dramatizing the footprints of the Chinese Diaspora in Bethlehem for over a century.
The MDHI is proud to have supported the following projects during the 2015-2016 grant year:
Undergraduate Research Grants:
Southside Stories
Sonja Gorman, Brett Lay and McKenzie Otus
Content type: Oral histories and digital storytelling
This project aimed to create a digital forum to share the stories of members of the Southside community, including residents, local business owners, and members of the Lehigh community. Students collected stories of residents through photography, interviews, and short videos that capture the story each individual would like to share. The students created a photo gallery and hosted an open-mic style community event to celebrate the stories of all past and future participants in our project. This project draws from the work and model of a 2015 Mountaintop Project, “Bethlehem Unbound,” but with a new team of students and a new focus on the digital platform for sharing the stories. View their website here.
Developing Digital And Visual Media for Community Feedback on South Bethlehem’s Western Gateway Plan
Julie (Tru) Taylor
Content type: Visualization and digital methods for community feedback
This project developed interactive maps, streetscapes and other graphical images conveying existing land use patterns and proposed projects in the western gateway area of South Bethlehem. These digital and visual materials are used for soliciting additional citizen input on the Western Gateway Plan at public events (celebrations, festivals, etc.) to gather information about resident perspectives on the kinds of development they want. The interactive visual maps, streetscapes, and other graphical will help citizens to envision what a meaningful built environment looks like to them by indicating the kinds of services and amenities they would value in their community.
Chronicling the Outsider Perspective on the Moravian Bethlehem Community
Patrick Zager and Elizabeth Cornell
Content type: Interactive website and timeline (visualization)
This project analyzed literature written about and influenced by the Bethlehem Moravian community, ranging from the eighteenth-century to present day. A primary focus of the work was to compare and contrast the authors’ works, and their perspective on the community. The students aimed to build an interactive digital website with a timeline charting these different written works.
Move Your Feet
Min Jun Kim, Kris Datta, Chris Zadra
Content type: Documentary film and virtual reality visualizations
This is a video/documentation project about dance culture in Bethlehem. The final project was an immersive, curated space that engaged participants to experience dance through many mediums in an effort to tell the story about the relationship between our community and dance.
View one of the videos created by the Move Your Feet team here
Brown and Whiteboard
Sam Waldorf, Royce Kok, Jenna Smalley
Content type: Gathering community feedback, documentary photography, social media and website development
This project engaged with the South Side community about their vision for the future of Bethlehem by asking passerby to illustrate their ideas for what the city could become. Students stood on the sidewalk near various points of proposed development with a whiteboard, to ask passerby to draw what kind of development they would like to see. A final symposium will be open to the community to show the variety of ideas people presented in their illustrations.
View the Brown and Whiteboard project website here and their group's Facebook page here
Digitizing South Bethlehem Outdoor Art Installations
Jooyoung (Toby) Lee
Content type: Digital map, walking tour
This project created a digital map and walking tour of public art works in South Bethlehem. The student photographed a variety of public art works, researched them, and created a digital map containing photographs and information about each art work.
View the public art map here
Community Partner Grants:
Women of Bethlehem Steel
Julia Maserjian and Seth Moglen
Community Partner: Steel Workers’ Archives and Bethlehem Area Public Library
Content type: Oral histories and digital archive
This project created a digital archive specifically chronicling women’s experiences as workers at one of the largest steel companies in America, Bethlehem Steel. These stories are underrepresented in archives and are an important part of the history of gendered employment practices and workers’ rights in the United States. The project migrated existing digital oral histories into a more robust framework and collect new oral histories and photographs. The oral histories are hosted within an existing site, Lehigh’s Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture. To collect more oral histories, the researchers will held a storytelling event.
View the Women of Bethlehem Steel archive here.
Girl Scouts Digital Storytelling Patch Program
Natasha Vermaak and Emily Sechrist
Community Partner: Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania
Content type: Digital storytelling and podcast
This project worked to develop a podcast program and digital podcast archive for a new Girl Scout badge that integrates digital storytelling with scientific inquiry. A collaborative GSEP-Lehigh University 1-day Patch Earning Program will be held at Lehigh in the spring of 2016. Girl Scouts visited a research group to interview the people involved and see live demonstrations. The Girl Scouts took audio recording throughout the process and they edited the content to tell the story of their excitement, wonder, surprise, discovery, and learning throughout the experience. They used the tools of storytelling and sound design and production to create a fun and informative podcast of their experience (3-5 minute length). They shared their podcast and what they’ve learned with the patch earning group, their troops, friends, families, and the greater online community. Podcasts will be collected in an online digital archive.
Listen to the podcast they created here
Creating Digital Content for a Diverse Community
James Peterson
Partner: PBS39
Content type: Digital audiovisual production, editing and broadcasting
This project employed graduate and undergraduate students to work directly with producers and cinematographers at PBS39 in order to produce a series of digital “interstitials” – short, digital audiovisual segments -- each designed to localize and commemorate important month-long celebrations of diversity and identity. The students collaborated with professionals at PBS to produce one interstitial each for Latin American Heritage Month, Black History Month, and Women’s History Month. Watch the interstitials that the students made below:
Hispanic Heritage Month
Black History Month – 16th Street Baptist Church
Black History Month – Emmett Till
Women’s History Month
The Red Badge of Service: Military Obligation in Modern American Culture
John Pettegrew and Evan Reibsome
Content type: Oral history interviews
This project brought veterans from the community together in a reading group to engage with one another about popular conceptions surrounding the military such as duty, masculinity, heroism, sacrifice, patriotism, adventure, and fear. The veteran participants contributed oral histories to The Veteran's Empathy Project. Partners include Thomas Applebauch of the Lehigh County VA.
Course Development Grants:
Video Blogging at the Alehouse Cinema
Michael Kramp
Students in this Introduction to Film class attended film screenings at the Frank Banko Alehouse Cinema on the South Side of Bethlehem, then analyze the films and create video blogs that review each film. The video blogs were shown by the Alehouse Cinema as previews for the screenings at the cinema. Partner: Frank Banko Alehouse Cinema.
View the students videoblogs here
Art 52/196
Anna Chupa
Professor Chupa used an MDHI course development grant to bring renowned photojournalist John Isaac to provide a 5-day residency at Lehigh, to provide instruction for her students in community documentary photography.
Public Access for Historic Exhibitions: Digitizing the Scrapbooks of the Lehigh Art Gallery, 1928-1940
Nicholas Sawicki
In his Advanced Seminar in Art History, Professor Nick Sawicki's students researched a series of hand-assembled scrapbooks produced at Lehigh University between 1928-1940. These scrapbooks documented exhibitions at the Lehigh Art Gallery, which was the first public art gallery in the city of Bethlehem, playing an important role in gathering community members together in Bethlehem's past. Sawicki's class set out to digitize these scrapbooks to make them publicly accessible on a micro-site hosted by the Lehigh Digital Library initiative.
The following examples are some previous projects undertaken at Lehigh that incorporated digital humanities and community engagement. While these projects were not sponsored through the Mellon grant, they embody the spirit of the MDHI’s objectives of drawing together digital technology and community collaboration.
Beyond Steel Digital Archive
by John Kenley Smith, Julia Maserjian, Friends of the Lehigh Libraries. This site digitized letters, books, photographs and oral histories following the area’s industrial boom in the mid-19th century and the later decline of heavy industry.” (2007) Additionally, the site hosts a mapping project of early 20th century residents and businesses in Bethlehem.
Still Looking for You
This digital project explores the history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania through the memories of the many people who have worked in, lived in, or visited the city. The project was created by Jessica Aberle, Colin Foley, Annie Johnson, Julia Maserjian, Scott Rutzmoser and Rob Weidman.
Student Documentary videos
Students from Documentary Video classes taught by John Pettegrew and Julia Maserjian class produced documentary videos. Student projects included films featuring a former steelworker’s reflections on the rise and fall of Bethlehem Steel (2007), urban renewal in the South Side of Bethlehem (2008), on immigration to the South Side (2008), barriers to fresh, affordable food in the South Side of Bethlehem (2011), and an examination of labor relations at Bethlehem Steel and the Sands Casino (2013).
Bethlehem Unbound: Storytelling, Beyond the Book
This project, undertaken through the Mountaintop Initiative, was conducted by three students--Juan Palacio Moreno, Elijah Ohrt and Margaret Kelly-- who worked under the supervision of Mary Foltz, Sarah Stanlick and David Fine. Students explored the role that storytelling plays in a community’s social and political life.