Explore Pacific and Central Valley history, sponsored by the University Library. 

The Digital Humanities Summer Fellowships bring together students and faculty from a variety of disciplines to create technology-enhanced, public-facing humanities projects. Spend five weeks in an intense and fast-paced but fun experience that will challenge you to develop new skills and collaborate across fields of study. This summer the fellowships consist of two separate projects related by the topic of forced Japanese American relocation and its impact on communities at Pacific and the Central Valley. Applicants are invited to select either offering.

The two projects will be conducted in person, full-time 40 hour work-weeks, and run concurrently during Summer Session III, from July 25 – August 26. All participants will have access to the library’s array of research and technology resources and integrated support from multiple faculty and subject area experts. All undergraduates from any major or program are eligible.

Digital Delta
From Immigrants to Internees:
Walnut Grove’s Japanese Historic District

Faculty Lead: Joshua Salyers

Walnut Grove Japanese American Historic district served as a center for social and economic life for Japanese agricultural laborers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from the late 1800s until the relocation of Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent to internment camps during World War II. Originally a Chinese immigrant community, Japanese laborers created their own nihonmachi (Japantown) in Walnut Grove after a fire in 1915 offered an opportunity for Japanese architects to design buildings in this district for the Japanese community. The development and removal of Walnut Grove’s Japanese and Japanese American populations is intricately tied to the histories of labor, ethnic tensions, and politics in the United States. This fellowship team will produce a digital reconstruction of Walnut Grove’s Japanese American Historic district that tells the story of this community’s adaptations to space, race and removal.

Wellness & Resistance:
Creative Response to Crisis

Faculty Lead: Lisa Cooperman

Networks of formal and informal organizations on the Pacific campus have historically provided support for students from underrepresented groups. In 1942 Pacific students of Japanese American descent found their identities questioned and their lives disrupted by the forced relocation mandated by the President Roosevelt’s Executive Order. This fellowship team will research the strategies students used to cope with this catastrophic situation and apply them to the present using updated technology and insights gleaned from the contemporary dislocation of the pandemic. This year’s project will create new content for an app-driven interactive experience connecting Pacific students from the past to the present through community building as a resilient and productive response to stress. 

Archives visit
Braydon Ross
Student Comments
Braydon Ross

Tiger Strides: Walk with Me, Summer Fellowship 2021 

This fellowship provided me with countless opportunities for growth as a student and collaborator. Working on something very different from traditional coursework with 5 other committed team members created a wonderful learning environment for the 5-week session. To top that, the project resulted in a final product that is first of its kind, which is something you don’t often get to say.

Student Comments
Sarah Kuo

Little Manila Recreated, Summer Fellowship 2017 

It was this project and a research experiences for undergraduates (REU) I did in Belize that really connected everything for me. It was especially powerful to learn [about Little Manila] through the oral history process and being able to interview Manongs and the children and wives of Manongs, and hear first-hand what Little Manila, and its subsequent destruction, meant for their community. 

Sarah Kuo

Past Projects and Press

Tiger Strides: Walk with Me

Student-led investigations into the cultural histories of the Stockton campus. Research revealed a theme of student driven initiatives that propelled social change. To connect classmates past and present with their findings, the fellows devised a phone app for an augmented reality walking tour of selected campus sites.

Carnival or Cathedral: The Fate of the National Parks, 1929

This fellowship began the development of a Reacting To The Past (RTTP) educational game for college-aged students to learn about the creation and management of the United States National Parks – “America’s Best Idea.”

Little Manila Recreated (VR)

Select students from history, graphic arts, and computer science collaborated to bring the lost landscape of Stockton’s Little Manila to life through digital mapping and 3D model reconstruction. These students worked with local Filipino community institutions, like the Little Manila Foundation and the Filipino American National Historical Society, and interviewed community members to tell the story of this community in a gaming environment.

Little Manila

Select students from history, graphic arts, and computer science collaborated to bring the lost landscape of Stockton’s Little Manila to life through digital mapping and 3D model reconstruction. These students worked with local Filipino community institutions, like the Little Manila Foundation and the Filipino American National Historical Society, and interviewed community members to tell the story of this community in a gaming environment.