Did you know that Big Mama Thornton first recorded Elvis Presley’s big hit “Hound Dog” in 1953,” for Peacock Records, based in Houston’s Fifth Ward? Do you want to visit archives at UH and other repositories as part of your research on the history of Houston’s music from the 1920s-the 1960s? Join our unique research project that focuses on collecting, analyzing, and refining data for a digital humanities project, The Gulf Coast Sound: Music in East Texas Coastal Region. You will have the opportunity to research on and write about Houston musicians, bands, studios, and record labels, and your work will be essential in creating content for our digital humanities project.

REACH students will learn how to conduct primary and secondary source research and engage in it. Outside of three archives visits, the project work will be virtual, with weekly scheduled check-ins with the project team.

La Louisiane en Tejas: Gulf Coast Foodways in Southeast Texas is a public history/oral history and book project focused on the influence of Cajun and Creole Foodways on the food history of southeast Texas. This work considers Creole and African American cuisine from South Louisiana alongside Cajun foodways as the rich cultural products of a Greater Acadiana that expanded over time with little regard to state borders to play a critical role in shaping regional foodways. Considered whole, the foodways of Greater Acadiana have been shaped by violence, conquest, colonialism, and migration that continues to unfold - a legacy profoundly important to the region's evolving food history. Collaborative work with this project includes: oral histories, basic research, website implementation, photography, and other duties as assigned.

The Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program’s US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) program serves as a venue for scholarship focused on the US Latino written legacy that has been lost, absent, repressed or underrepresented. The USLDH program provides a physical space for the development, support and training in digital humanities projects using a vast collection of historical newspapers, photographs and digital materials; creates opportunities and facilities for digital publication of Latino-based projects and scholarship; promotes and fosters interdisciplinary scholarly work; provides a communal virtual space to share knowledge and projects related to Latino digital humanities; and establishes a Latino digital humanities hub.

REACH students will work with Latino archival materials in different capacities from handling and arrangement of historical collections to digital projects of the recovered items that include manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, correspondence, etc. The students will receive training in archival procedures, digital humanities tools and theory.

View the ongoing projects at the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage archives.

"Sharing Stories from 1977" focuses on documenting, preserving and analyzing the 150,000+ participant stories of 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. This multi-year, multi-state, multi-institutional effort, led by the University of Houston, aims to create an open-source digital archive that spurs quantitative and qualitative scholarship as well as public engagement.

Our project highlights the myriad identities and interests of participants at this most diverse gathering of American women in U.S. history. Our primary point of emphasis is to build out digital and brick and mortar archives, capturing demographic data, biographies, oral histories and ephemera. We connect humanities students with technology and design students in interdisciplinary collaboration on historical and technical aspects of the project.

REACH researchers' tasks could include drafting biographies, research and writing of interpretive essays, conducting oral histories, completing demographic research, public relations and social media engagement, archival research and liaison work with special collections and supporting our technical teams with back end web development and data visualizations.

View the Sharing Stories from 1977 website.

Initiated with the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities program at UH in summer 2024, our project attempts to revisualize the Houston old Chinatown. Leveraging existing resources such as archives from the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston public library, Asian American Center at Rice and community-led initiatives, our project delves into these existing findings of the Chinese immigrant communities, and re-presents to the public with digital products in the end. By incorporating archival data, business directory, and personal narratives, we hope to create an interactive spatial installation that will provide a comprehensive view of the diverse Chinese experiences in Houston, providing educational and public accessible research material. This year we will continue some archival research, explore possible outlets for our spatial representations like VR/AR, storymap, timeline, etc. We will also look for external grants to apply to continue the project. The REACH intern will have the opportunity to be a part of all these.

On November 23, 1968, 20-year-old Lynn Eusan was crowned the University of Houston’s first African American homecoming queen. An important civil rights activist, both as a UH student and after her graduation, Eusan’s inspirational life and her murder in September 1971, for which no one was ever convicted, offers a rich, multi-faceted lens through which to explore Houston in the 1960s and 1970s: the fraught and sometimes violent transition from a deeply segregated to racially diverse city, its police department and judicial system, student activism at UH and TSU, and issues of gender, race, and systemic racism that we still grapple with today.

This project is comprised of research drawn from the UH MD Anderson Library’s special collections and oral histories focused on civil rights, including its collection on A.A.B.L. (Afro-Americans for Black Liberation), and the African American Library at the Gregory School, which houses local Black newspapers from the period including those that reported on the murder trial. Additionally, the project is comprised of attempts to obtain extant city, police, and judicial records on Eusan’s murder and the subsequent trial in order to call on officials to reopen the case to bring about justice for Lynn and closure for the Eusan family. Lastly, the project culminates in telling the stories that our investigative research has uncovered and pieced together, either through an article written for publication or a recorded podcast series.

What could seem more concrete, yet difficult to pin down, than the notion of a “year”? This project aims to convey some of the surprises of thinking through 1771, a single year in the literature and culture of the eighteenth-century British empire, as it was experienced by writers in three distinct locations: London, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia. And yet this single year, when viewed from the perspective of three major cities of the British Atlantic world, contains multitudes as well as an encyclopedic assortment of writing. The writings of this year, now increasingly digitized, are now available for inquiry and analysis in ways unimaginable to scholars even a few decades ago. These approaches should help us learn how to tell new stories about the authors and printers of this year, the genres they produced, and their responses to the year’s events.

The 1771 team is seeking student research assistants for its ongoing digital humanities project, which has already resulted in one collaboratively authored, peer-reviewed scholarly article and a forthcoming website to accompany its findings. The position will entail data entry and cleaning, along with some scholarly and editorial work associated with the project dataset and accompanying website. Though previous experience in digital research is not necessary, desirable candidates will be quick studies, good problem solvers, detail-oriented, and comfortable with technology.

Read more about the Year 1771 project.

View the Year 1771 project website.