The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Critical Mapping in the Classroom

The Ground Beneath Our Feet is a place-based, experiential humanities research and curriculum initiative at Pace University that was launched in Fall 2024, with support from a NEH Humanities Initiatives grant and the university's Student Technology Fee Fund. Students in affiliated courses research and document the history and the communities surrounding Pace campuses, using critical mapping to juxtapose their contemporary, firsthand experiences of Lower Manhattan and the Hudson Valley with their place-centered research. Course topics include New York City's 19th Century Spanish-Language Press, Hurricane Sandy, Counter-Mapping Governance and Community, and Cultural Cartography, and the data and project maps can be related and/or layered to show intersections and differences between datasets. Through custom-built, open source tools, the Ground Beneath Our Feet platform provides support for different types of place-centered storytelling: Places (a searchable map), Posts (essays with embedded places), and Paths (curated sequences of places). This talk will describe the overall vision of this project, the supporting technologies, the initial round of critical mapping in the classroom, and next steps based on student and instructor feedback. As we discuss the pedagogical importance of providing multiple tools for combining data and narrative in studies of place, we will also share our process, realizations, successes, and challenges as we seek to empower students to put technology to work for what Ruja Benjamin calls "retooling solidarity, reimagining social justice."[1] We look forward to sharing ideas and experiences with participants. [1] Ruja Benjamin, Race After Technology, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), 160. Kelley Kreitz is Associate Professor of English and Interim Associate Provost of Academic Programs and Strategy at Pace University in New York City. Her research brings together Latinx Studies, U.S. literary studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. Her book, Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century, is forthcoming from NYU Press. She was the Co-Director of a 2021 NEH working group on digital mapping in Latinx studies and serves on the advisory boards of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH). Anindita Basu Sempere is a Project Manager at Performant Software, where she works with scholars and software developers to design and deliver digital humanities projects. She has a PhD from the University of Neuchâtel's Institute of English Studies, where she studied change of place and poetics. As part of her doctoral research, she combined digital humanities methods with genetic criticism to study the intersection of place and literary creation. She holds Masters degrees from the MIT Media Lab's Future of Learning Group, Boston University's Poetry Program, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Jamie Folsom is a Partner at Performant Software Solutions, an established software development agency with a focus on the Digital Humanities. He consults with scholars in a wide range of fields, managing technology projects with them, and collaboratively developing software tools to support their teaching and research. Previously, he was lead developer for Hyperstudio, center for the Digital Humanities at MIT, where he worked on projects including Annotation Studio and the Comédie Française Registers Project, among others. He holds a Bachelor's degree in French from Vassar College and a Master's degree in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University Graduate School of Education.