George Mason researchers receive NEH funding for Connecting Threads project

Deepthi Murali and Jason Heppler of George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media have received a level two Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), in support of their ongoing global textile history project titled Connecting Threads: Digitally Connecting Collections, Expanding Public Engagement.

Connecting Threads is a collaborative digital history project by George Mason in the United States and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Led by Murali, an assistant professor at George Mason’s Department of History and Art History, and Meha Priyadarshini, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, the project is dedicated to amplifying the contributions of Indian weavers and Afro-Caribbean consumers to global histories of dress.

"We wanted to pursue original research and scholarship while connecting collections that allow people other than us to find information about these textiles more easily, and offer our research and interpretation to a global public audience, particularly those audiences whose histories we were exploring in our work," said Murali.

The digital project includes archival and material sources from more than 12 archives and museum collections, creating a network of institutional data and scholarship on these textiles. In its first phase, the project utilized the work of an interdisciplinary team of researchers to examine the history of the Madras handkerchief, an internationally popular dress accessory made of brightly colored checked cotton.

The project's institutional partners include the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Bristol Museum and Archives in England, the University of Glasgow Archives in Scotland, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York, and Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans.

The NEH grant will allow the project team to complete building the digital infrastructure and processing of collected data, setting up the project for Phase 2 development.

"The data is a mix of things: material compiled by the Connecting Threads team but also data that we’re computationally compiling from museum open data," said Heppler, senior developer at RRCHNM and the technical lead on the project. "Having those materials in our own database allows us to structure data in a way that serves our purposes."

Heppler said they are also building public-facing interfaces for browsing and viewing the data they’ve compiled. "We’ll be making interactive visualizations, primarily timelines and maps, to follow the movement of textile materials over time and space," he said. "To me, this really is the crux of the project—to understand how materials followed people and cultural ideas."

Murali said she is eager to see how they resolve the challenges of mapping these textiles with their fragmented histories. "This is a problem that most of us who work on non-Western art and material culture history face. The incompleteness of data makes it difficult to produce meaningful digital visualizations and networks," she said. "I am really excited by the possibility that we might be able to work out a solution and further make our process accessible to others dealing with the same issues."

In the next phase, the Connecting Threads team will further expand their research into the history of production of these textiles in southern India as well as begin research on the use of Indian cotton checked textiles in Southeast Asia.

The NEH is the nation's largest public funder of the humanities. The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities.