Summer 2024 Research Groups

Daniel Groll will be leading a research group of students who have won a Hanson Ethics Fellowship for summer research in any topic related to ethical inquiry. While students will be pursuing their own projects, they will do common readings, develop research skills, exchange ideas and present results of their research to each other over the course of the summer. The students will be doing research on the permissibility of paternalism, the nature of moral motivation, Chat GPT and plagiarism, the ethics of experimental education movements, and the nature of cults (versus religions). Funded by the EthIC Joan Hanson Fund

The Virtual Viking Longship Project

Since the summer of 2023, an NEH-funded multi-campus research project has been developing Virtual Reality experiences centered on the Viking Longship in collaboration with museum partners in Minnesota and Europe (https://virtualvikings.sites.grinnell.edu). Students from Carleton and Grinnell College work in teams to create an immersive VR application for visualizing the social and cultural roles of a Viking Age longship by forming a DH community of inquiry and practice that cultivates deep competencies in spatial computing within the context of a liberal arts education.

This summer, the Principal Investigators are looking to bring on six undergraduate Student Research Partners at Carleton: 2 Subject Matter Researchers, 2 3D Artists, and 2 Software Developers. The positions are paid SRPs over the summer, and ideally continue to contribute to the project during the school year through 1- or 2-credit independent study.

This is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to cutting edge Digital Humanities research that will lead to concrete deliverables to add to your portfolio. Student co-authored outcomes will include: (1) an open-source minimum viable product (MVP) VR experience made in consultation with museum partners in the US and Europe; (2) experience design documents outlining future development; (3) presentations on our findings at major DH and History conferences; and (4) open-access articles detailing the project’s strategies and recommended best practices.

The Project

The Viking longship is easily one of the most recognizable symbols of the Viking Age. This period spanned roughly three hundred years (ca. 750 – 1050 AD) and saw the expansion of the people, language, and culture from Scandinavia across a large portion of the Northern Hemisphere. A key technological innovation that facilitated the Viking expansion, the longship figures prominently in the literature, language, funerary rituals, rune stones, coins, jewelry, and tapestry of the period. In collaboration with the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County in Moorhead, MN and the Viking Museum Haithabu in Schleswig, Germany, the Virtual Viking Longship Project will create an immersive, standalone VR experience for visualizing the social, linguistic, cultural, political, and economic roles that the longship played in the Viking Age. 

For a video overview of the project, see introductory proof of concept video on YouTube.

Position Descriptions

All team members will work closely with faculty, staff, and other students to design, develop, evaluate, and distribute virtual reality (VR) experiences for use in teaching and research contexts. Onboarding will consist of training modules to learn scrum methodologies, 3D modeling, Unity programming, VR development, design thinking, design document writing, and relevant primary and secondary sources regarding the social and cultural roles of a Viking Age longship.

• Subject-Matter Researcher 
  The primary responsibilities of the Subject-Matter Researchers will be to perform humanistic research in order to find, evaluate, and use primary and secondary resources about Viking Longships to guide project development; to disseminate research findings to other team members and the public; and to work with other team members in moving the project forward in a timely and professional manner. The Subject-Matter Researchers will give short workshops and presentations on lessons they have learned during project development internally to team members, and share the work externally with the public by contributing entries for a project blog and publishing interim research outputs to the web using tools like ESRI StoryMaps.
• 3D Artist 
  The 3D Artists’ primary responsibility will be developing 3D assets for VR experiences. They will work closely with the Subject-Matter Researchers to model historical artifacts based on textual, material and visual evidence; develop foundational proficiencies in Blender, a powerful open-source 3D modeling software; and work with the Software Developers to learn the Creative Core components of the Unity game engine, including shaders and materials, lighting, visual effects, and user interface design.  In addition to contributing entries for project blogs, the 3D Artists may also be required to give short workshops and presentations on lessons they have learned during project development. 
• Software Developer 
  The Software Developers’ primary responsibility will be programming the interactive elements of the VR experiences by learning to use the Unity game engine and version control; getting familiar with the specific requirements of VR hardware support; and using the Unity XR Interaction Toolkit and Oculus SDK alongside custom C# scripting to build for VR. In addition to contributing entries for project blogs, the Software Developer may also help with various other aspects of the project and be required to give short workshops and presentations on lessons they have learned during project development. 

Funded by the Humanities Center Student Research Fund

For the past decade, I have been working on a project analyzing English workhouses during the long eighteenth century (c. 1660-1834). While I have published several articles on my research, I have not completed a book-length study, in part because it is so difficult to accomplish a genuinely national study, when unpacking the specific local context of each workhouse is very challenging. Last fall, two valued colleagues and frequent collaborators from the University of Cambridge and University of Keele proposed that we pool our local studies and write a book together. We will begin that project this summer, and it will result in a monograph that locates the English workhouse within the broader history of social welfare, asking not only how these institutions were run, but also how residents (“inmates” in the parlance of the times) experienced life inside the workhouse. While the history of social welfare is a rich field, we really do not have a comprehensive study of English workhouses before the “New Poor Law” was created in 1834. This book will thus fill a real gap in the historical literature.

The student research partners will work on pieces of the project that are selected to give them a breadth of research experience while also focusing narrowly enough on a specific topic to allow them to have a finished “product” to share at the end of their research. Specifically: 1) They will complete a literature review that situates the English workhouse within the larger field of Enlightenment-era policies that are seen as embodying both rising humanitarianism and increasing social control. They will be asking if, in the framework of the eighteenth-century, we should see this institution as an ethical, enlightened response to rising poverty and economic dislocation in the early stages of industrialization. 2) They will complete a mapping project that I have been working on, using ARC-GIS to map the location and changing prevalence of workhouses through data collected by England’s parliamentary inquiries. 3) Each SRP will select a subset of documents to transcribe and analyze, so that each will have her own small project to complete.

Professor Ottaway has hired 4 students funded by the Humanities Center Student Research Fund.