Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) provides UMD students of all backgrounds, disciplines, and levels of experience with the opportunity to engage in scaffolded, multidisciplinary team-based projects.
VIP Team Information
VIP Team
The Immersive Realities in Digital Humanities Workgroup (IRiDH)
VIP Faculty Mentors:
Dr. Marisa Parham
Department of English & Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
Meeting Location, Day & Time:
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Hornbake 0301
Team meetings and demo/practice hours, Fridays, 1:00–3:00 pm
Weekly self-scheduled work and play hours available Tuesday–Thursday, 1:00–6:00 pm
Description:
How do we use new or unexpected technologies to tell complex stories about research and other kinds of intellectual experience in ways that people can see, feel, and interact with?
Immersive Realities in Digital Humanities (“eye-ree DH”) workgroup members discover, design, and build innovative forms of digital and experimental scholarship. Our work pushes the boundaries of scholarly communication by bringing together storytelling, research, and emerging technologies, including interactive narrative and gaming, extended reality (XR), hybrid bookmaking, physical computing, and craft-based media.
No prior experience is required. People working with IRiDH gain experience in a range of technical and creative skills as they design and manage projects, collaborate with other thinkers, and develop sustainable tools for digital and experimental storytelling. IRiDH projects translate research into engaging, multimodal forms, broadening what counts as scholarship and creating new ways to reach diverse audiences.
Some current IRiDH projects include VR experiences built from photogrammetric scans of family homes seemingly lost to diaspora, interactive projection experiences that help users feel rhythm and flow in poetry, an “essay game” introducing African and Afrofuturist literature, a memoir told through forms inspired by vintage videogames, an augmented reality quilting project, and a system that translates data onto punch cards used to drive knitting machines! We also develop game jams, arcades, zine workshops, and much more.
You are welcome to join any of our existing projects and are also encouraged to develop your own.
Despite the diversity of our projects, we share a willingness to experiment, make, and discover new forms of expression. At IRiDH, students learn to think across disciplines and collaborate across levels of experience, refining their ideas and taking creative risks while attending to the ethical and creative challenges of representing lived experience, social difference, and embodied knowledge through multimedia forms.
Students learn by participating in ongoing projects, caring for equipment and supplies, and supporting public events. They gain hands-on experience across full creative and technical pipelines, from concept and research to design, development, and public presentation, while learning to assess, curate, and maintain shared resources.
Students grow into roles that match their interests—technical, creative, or organizational—and are encouraged to develop their ideas using the resources of IRiDH’s affiliated labs and initiatives, also housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). These include the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities initiative (AADHum), NarraSpace XR, the Small Games Lab, and Soft Souls Foundry.
If desired, students may also join in developing and facilitating workshops in public libraries and other community venues across the DMV.
Methods:
At IRiDH, we learn through exploration and experimentation with old and new technologies. We draw technical and expressive methods from arts, crafts, and creative computing traditions to support humanities approaches to producing, interpreting, and communicating both personal narratives (as sites of inquiry) and other kinds of humanities research. The medium is the message, and the medium is often, for us, also the method.
Our basic process is iterative: we play, we theorize, we design and build— then we think, revise, and build again!
Majors:
All majors are welcome. Our current workgroup, for example, includes students from across the university, from the arts, humanities, engineering, and animal science.
Preferred Interests:
We are looking for students who are intellectually curious, interested in taking creative risks. We are looking for students who can be patient with themselves and others, and who are interested to learn whole and holistic processes for using, making, and assessing innovative expressive technologies.