The Global Midwest initiative attempts to rethink the Midwest as a major force in this century’s global economy and culture. Image: Humanities Without Walls, University of Illinois
The environmental history of the Great Lakes Basin will be digitally documented thanks to a $75,000 grant recently awarded to the University of Michigan.
Paul Conway, a U-M associate professor of information, received the grant through Humanities Without Walls’ Global Midwest initiative. It supports collaborative research on the region’s cultural and economic history.
The Humanities Without Walls groupis based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The project aims to collect digital aspects of Great Lakes environmental history in one place. The web-based tool intends to make research and learning about the area more efficient.
The website will include photographs, maps and documents explaining Great Lakes environmental history and industrial and social changes.
“The aggregation is a tool that will provide services to search and save information,” said Conway, who’s also working with Robert Michael Morrissey, an assistant professor of history, and Robert Markley, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The website, to be completed late in the summer, will include information from digital collections from the University of Minnesota, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Conway’s long-term goal is an even bigger collection of data to help students and professors find Great Lakes information.
It’s an experiment that asks if “there is really value added when the information is aggregated.
“We hope the answer is yes,” said Conway.