Ramapo College awarded $150K grant for digital history projects in North Jersey

Ramapo College has several digital projects to preserve North Jersey history that will benefit from a $150,000 grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Efforts to document and preserve the stories of notable local women, Indigenous people, African Americans and immigrants will all be supported by the awards announced in January.

The Mahwah college received a three-year grant from the endowment, a federal agency that funds research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities. It was the largest among eight awarded to four educational institutions and one museum across New Jersey.

Sarah Koenig, an assistant professor overseeing the grant for Ramapo’s School of Humanities and Global Studies, said she’s excited because it will allow for various projects to be completed or come to fruition.

“We’ve been doing this work, and it’s been piecemeal. So now, with this grant, it really gives us the ability to embark on some of the projects we have been dreaming of,” Koenig said. “The fact that it’s such a large grant, I think, is a real show of faith in the work that Ramapo has been doing to support digital humanities, and also a show of faith in Ramapo as the college that can do this.”

Projects that the grant will support include:

Mapping the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Nation, producing a digital map of historically and culturally significant sites for the Indigenous Ramapough people in the area encompassing Mahwah and Ringwood and the New York town of Hillburn.
The Penny Colman Collection of Historical Landmarks of Women, which features images of landmarks in tribute to women with New Jersey roots. The collection was donated to the college by author and photographer Penny Colman, a longtime Englewood resident.
Englewood Makes History, an archive of diaries, photos, family letters and other materials founded by Penny Colman’s son David Colman, an associate professor at Ramapo. The archive chronicles the history of African American residents in Englewood’s 4th Ward and immigrant communities in the 3rd Ward.

Koenig said the grant will support the advancement of the “digital humanities” field.

“It’s essentially a field that combines the tools of the humanities,” she said. “So think creative writing, close reading, cultural analysis, language work, history — all these different fields. It takes these fields and combines them with digital technologies and methods.”

Expanding the digital footprint

Koenig said the impact will go beyond the development of the individual projects. The grant will help the college train faculty members and students in the technologies and methods necessary to carry out digital humanities work. It will also fund digital workshops for members of community organizations and for local high school students in the summer.

Susan Hangen, the dean of the School of Humanities and Global Studies, which offers nine majors and has 221 students, said the award will enable the school to launch a full center for digital humanities and help students and faculty alike.

“Faculty in humanities fields across the college will learn how to design their course assignments in new ways so that students learn how to do data analysis, data visualization, digital mapping and website creation, for example, alongside philosophical, historical and literary research,” Hangen said in a statement.

“Students feel great pride when they are able to contribute to projects that matter to people beyond the classroom and when they see the relevance of the humanities to everyday life,” she added.

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