Milestones
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Milestones
2004
Global Interconnections: Imagining the World 500-1500 CE is taught by 5 faculty members at the University of Texas, Austin—Dean Richard Lariviere, Cynthia Talbot, Denise Spellberg, Roger Hart, and Geraldine Heng—and 2 visiting faculty, Xinru Liu and Ray Kea. A report on Global Interconnections appears shortly after in the Medieval Academy of America Newsletter. Articles and talks describing the learning experiment follow.
Four graduate students in the seminar present at conferences and publish articles based on their term papers. A student from the seminar, Robert Gee, traveling by air, boat, and camel, visits the Timbuktu manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali.
2007
The first planning workshop on the Global Middle Ages is organized by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Medieval Studies and the University of Texas Medieval Studies program, and held at the Twin Cities campus. Workshop participants include professorial faculty and graduate students from several universities, representatives from 2 supercomputing centers, the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) and TACC (the Texas Advanced Computing Center), and 2 of the founders of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).
Participants from Texas include Susan McIntosh (Rice University), Kairn Klieman (University of Houston), Denise Spellberg, Roger Hart, Geraldine Heng, and their graduate students. Participants from Minnesota include Ann Waltner, William Phillips, Gabriela Currie, Cathy Asher, Arun Saldana, Marguerite Ragnow, and Susan Noakes. Workshop participants make decisions on how to name projects and communities, define terms, and set chronological parameters.
An advisory board is established, chaired by Peter Schmidt (University of Florida), Hayden White (Stanford University), and Herbert Kessler (Johns Hopkins University).
2008
G-MAP is 1 of 3 humanities projects chosen by SEASR, the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research at the NCSA, to demonstrate experimental data mining of electronic scholarly materials held in various silos. SEASR, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is given a database on medieval Africa and Asia compiled by the University of Minnesota. A demonstration workshop by SEASR showcasing the results follows in 2009.
2009
MappaMundi wins a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant in a multi-institutional effort helmed by Kevin Franklin of iCHASS (Illinois Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The NEH grant provides funding for mini-residencies at supercomputing centers for MappaMundi and 2 other digital humanities projects to see how supercomputing—which has thus far mainly served the sciences—can meet the needs of multi-faceted humanities projects.
Susan Noakes leads a group of SCGMA members to a mini-residency at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and Geraldine Heng leads a group of SCGMA members to a mini-residency at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC).
2010
Susan Noakes convenes a planning workshop at the University of Minnesota on Digital Constantinople / Byzantium / Istanbul, 300-1600 CE, a project to be helmed by Paul Magdalino (University of St Andrews and Koç University, Istanbul).
2011
Susan Noakes convenes a planning workshop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to discuss the creation of a digital project on Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili coast, to be headed by Peter Schmidt.
2012-2013
Geraldine Heng holds the Winton Chair at the University of Minnesota for “paradigm-shifting research,” and designs the Winton Seminar, Early Globalities I and II, attended by graduate students, faculty members, and a postdoctoral fellow. Heng and Susan Noakes convene Early Globalities I: Eurasia and the Asia Pacific in fall 2012; Heng and Michael Lower convene Early Globalities II: Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic, in spring 2013.
Visiting scholars who lead the Winton Seminar are: Christopher Atwood (Indiana University), Valerie Hansen (Yale University), Cynthia Talbot (University of Texas), Richard Lariviere (Field Museum), Geoffrey Wade (Institute of South East Asian Studies, Singapore), Michael Puett (Harvard University), Susan Whitfield (British Museum and the International Dun Huang Project), Evelyn Edson (Piedmont Virginia Community College), Astrid Orgilvie (University of Colorado-Boulder and INSTAAR), Chapurukha Kusimba (Field Museum and University of Illinois-Chicago), Susan McIntosh (Rice University), Reuven Amitai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Ramzi Rouighi (University of Southern California), Renata Holod (University of Pennsylvania) and Timothy Pauketat (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
On-campus seminar leaders are: Geraldine Heng, Susan Noakes, Michael Lower, Gabriela Currie, Maguerite Ragnow, and Anjelica Afanador-Pujol.
2013
The University of Texas at Austin is awarded an Andrew W. Mellon / CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) digital humanities grant in data curation ($130,000) for a 2-year postdoctoral fellow who will be instrumental in the creation of MappaMundi. After an international search, Ece Turnator, a Byzantinist economic historian with a 2013 PhD from Harvard University is selected as the CLIR / Mellon Fellow.
2014
Ece Turnator and colleagues in the Technology Integration Services (TIS) department of the University of Texas Libraries begin designing the new Global Middle Ages platform. The TIS design team comprises Aaron Choate, Jade Diaz, Jennifer Hecker, and Matthew Villalobos.
Geraldine Heng and Lynn Ramey (Vanderbilt University) coedit a special issue of Literature Compass on the Global Middle Ages for the journal’s Global Circulation Project (issue 11.7, featuring 10 articles on literatures in 10 languages). Articles in the issue address global literatures, subjects, genres, events, legends, and histories, written in a variety of languages: Malay, Franco-Italian, Arabic, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Mongolian, and Mandarin.
Contributors to this first issue of a journal treating global premodern and early modern literatures are: Su-Fang Ng, Alexander Wolfe, Rebecca Gould, Leila K. Norako, Gloria Hernandez, Christopher Taylor, Jerold Frakes, Margaret Kim, and Anna Czarnowus.
Marguerite Ragnow and Gabriela Currie of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, begin work on a special issue of Digital Philology on Global Cosmology, Cosmography, and Cosmogony.
2015
The Global Middle Ages platform and MappaMundi portal are launched on October 1. Lynn Ramey joins Heng and Noakes as a new Co-Director, with special purview of MappaMundi. Stephen Nichols takes on the role of chair of the International Advisory Board for GMAP.