This statement details my accomplishments as an Associate Professor of History at IUPUI. My record of research, teaching, and service demonstrates that I have met and exceeded the expectations for promotion to Full Professor with a case demonstrating significant excellence in research, teaching, and service equally. I have completed four years as Associate Professor and submit this document as part of the 2022-2023 promotion cycle.¹ The following demonstrates my achievements in research, teaching, and service to the Department of History, School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI campus, IU System, and my professional communities. For the purposes of this statement, I concentrate on in-rank (2018-2022) research, teaching, and service and the cumulative body of work that demonstrates my national and international reputation.² (I will note where materials included were at the rank of Assistant Professor explicitly.)

Research: My dynamic research agenda includes completed peer-reviewed research grants, presentations, digital products, and publications in three areas: (1) interdisciplinary research at the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities; ³ (2) critical sport history; and (3) Native American and Indigenous History. Within these areas, my research methods seek to (1) document, analyze, and explore lived experiences of historically underrepresented individuals and communities in their American experiences; (2) comprehend, interpret, and elucidate how theories of race, gender, cultural hybridity, power, and representation can be interwoven through our historical understanding and contemporary lives; and (3) increase access to cultural heritage materials and critical discourse about scholarship by developing and using culturally-sensitive and audience-directed protocols for digital technologies.

In rank, I have published seven peer-reviewed articles, three encyclopedia/companion entries, and a number of digital products based on physical and digital archival research.⁴ My article, “Neither Computer Science, nor Information Studies, nor Humanities Enough: What is the Status of a Digital Humanities Conference Paper?”, with Laura Estill (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada) is forthcoming in Fall 2022 in Digital Studies/Le champ numerique, the flagship journal for digital humanities research in Canada. It analyzes disciplinary and regional conventions for the status of conference papers throughout their lifecycles: submission, review, presentation, and in some cases publication. Focusing on national and international digital humanities conferences, while acknowledging disciplinary conferences that inform digital humanities, the paper blends close readings of conference calls for papers with analysis of review practices to examine what constitutes an acceptable conference submission in relationship to disciplinary conventions, peer review, and publication outcomes. My co-authored article,The Circus We Deserve? A Front Row Look at the Organization of the Annual Academic Conference for the Digital Humanities,” was published in Fall 2022 in Digital Humanities Quarterly, the flagship journal for digital humanities in the U.S. Co-authored with Estill, Élika Ortega (University of Denver, USA), Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh, Scotland), Deb Verhoeven (University of Alberta, Canada), and Glen Worthey (University of Illinois, USA), it studies the annual Digital Humanities conference via a Reflection-in-Action approach encompassing experiences of the co-authors, who were formally involved in organizing the conference over the past decade. By analyzing the selection of Program Committees, choice of conference themes, preparation of calls for papers, peer review process, and selection of keynotes for the last seven years of the conference, we argue that conferences are central mechanisms for agenda setting and fostering a community of digital humanities practitioners, but existing structures and processes inadequately address concerns around representation, diversity, multilingualism, and labor.

Complementing these are articles in Native American and Indigenous Studies which focus on decolonial research methods. Editors at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal, the leading international journal in Indigenous Studies, solicited my response to the “Land Grab Universities” project which uses digital methods to show how land grant institutions benefit from land expropriation. Thus, with Roopika Risam (Dartmouth College, USA), and Meredith McCoy (Turtle Mountain descent, Carleton University, USA), I published “The Future of Land-Grab Universities”, which expands understanding of how universities benefit from legal and illegal occupation of Indigenous lands. We subsequently collaborated with Megan Red Shirt-Shaw (Oglala Lakota, University of South Dakota, USA), and Elizabeth Rule (Chickasaw Nation, American University, USA) on a Mellon Foundation grant ($149,663) for Landback Universities, focusing on how land use relates to university decolonization.

With Carolyn Heitman (University of Nebraska, USA), I published “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data” in The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Interrogating how the culture of open access and public data consumption conflict with many Indigenous communities and their data cultures, we identify how current trends in data consumption and representation by non-Native scholars working with Native American and Indigenous cultural data have led to continued infringements on Native sovereignty. With almost 1100 views and 200 downloads, I was encouraged by my colleagues to seek to expand my work in Indigenous data sovereignty which led to the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph (Canada) and the Digital Scholarship Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Through the Fulbright, I have joined researchers exploring digital methods for publishing and linking data on the internet through the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project. LINCS, led by Susan Brown (University of Guelph, Canada), converts large datasets into an organized, interconnected, machine-processable set of resources for cultural research, allowing information to be contextualized, verified, and disseminated as trusted knowledge online. Partnering with LINCS, I explore the use of technology in the production of archival-based historical knowledge as it structures our engagement with Indigenous communities. I also consider how linked open data might offer researchers the possibility to decolonize physical and digital archives assembled in the process of colonialization. I am completing that work in tandem with my residency at the University of Scotland where I am incorporating Scottish data practices into my multi-site study. I anticipate submission of the resulting article in Fall 2023.

A key aspect of my scholarly research, especially in Digital Humanities, is the establishment of long-term collaborative research partnerships that bring together faculty, staff, students, and technologists to explore the intersections of technology and scholarly practice.⁵ As an associate professor, I received $417,733 in externally peer-reviewed funding as well as $30,247 in internal research fellowship funding.⁶ Discover Indiana II was a two-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public: Production Grant. Dr. Rebecca Shrum, myself, and our graduate assistants worked with 20 community partners across Indiana to produce 21 tours comprising 171 individual stories about Indiana History that deliver interpretive stories about the history, culture, architecture, and people of the state.⁷ As part of that work, we have launched partnership with Indiana Humanities, the state-wide humanities agency, to develop digital tours complementing the six-stop tour of the Smithsonian’s Museums on Main Street project, WaterWays. Discover Indiana now offers 434 individual stories and 45 tours written by students at IUPUI, community partners, and project staff. Between January 1, 2018 and February 15, 2022, Discover Indiana reported over 37,000 users comprising more than 73,000 individual page views from more than 122 countries. I am particularly proud of this effort as it has exponentially grown the historical knowledge of Black, Indigenous, migrant, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented peoples in Indiana. I anticipate continuing work related to this project including seeking additional external support.

As of May 2022, my research has resulted in seven national and seven international peer-reviewed presentations, and one invited regional, two invited national, and three invited international presentations as an associate professor.⁸ Notably, I was invited to speak at the 2018 Mascots, Myths, Monuments, and Memory Symposium sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian. Joining Ibram X. Kendi, Bree Newsome, and others, the program explored the “history and contest memory of racialized mascots, Civil War Monuments, and other public memorials.” I was the only academic working in American sports culture included on the panel—a clear demonstration of the importance of my work to journalists, cultural heritage institutions, and academics. My expertise was recognized by my peers when my article (written at the rank of Assistant Professor) “Towards a Praxis of Critical Digital Sport History” was awarded best article of the year (tied) for the Journal of Sport History in 2018.

My future research work has been carefully designed to move my research agenda forward.⁹ I am co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Sport Studies-Sport History, a three-year digital publication project with Murray Phillips (University of Queensland, Australia) and David K. Wiggins (emeritus, USA) that will result in more than one hundred entries. I am also completing an article on research in open peer review, another on ontology, and have begun work doing a citational analysis of the Journal of Sport History.

Teaching: Historians find evidence, evaluate it for authenticity and bias, establish its historical context, determine what it means, and communicate their findings to others. Whether in-person or online, my teaching philosophy centers this practice by engaging with material that presents complex historical concepts around issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and experience. Based on my national reputation I was solicited to write my monograph, A Primer for Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles (Duke University Press, June 13, 2022).¹⁰ The book is a guide for college and high school instructors teaching research-based digital history for the first time and experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. Representing the applied nature of digital history, which merges innovative research with training students in cutting edge methods, I analyzed dozens of digital history syllabi to uncover trends in teaching of digital history and incorporated my own digital history pedagogy. The monograph takes readers through the process of selecting research data, identifying learning outcomes that seek to develop new scholarly insights, and determining which research methods students will use in the classroom. I outline popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization; digital archives, exhibits, and collections; and audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. By centering a feminist, decolonial perspective based in active, engaged research. I illuminate how digital history enhances understanding of which histories are told and, more critically, how they are told and who has access to them.

My teaching has been recognized by my peers as a model for their own classrooms. In 2019, I was a finalist for the Open Educational Award sponsored by IUPUI University Libraries, building on the 2017 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Multicultural Teaching recognizing my diligence in building multicultural pedagogy in History, American Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Four peer reviews of my courses have been completed (Martin Coleman, Introduction to American Studies; Eric Saak, American History II; Nancy Robertson, American History II; Jason Kelly, Introduction to Digital Humanities). My colleagues note that courses I teach are “well organized,” with “explicit learning goals” and materials that are “diverse, relevant, interesting, intellectually substantial, and pedagogically rich.” These reviews counter student dissatisfaction, where evaluations have ranged from just below the department averages to slightly above, reflecting national trends in gender-driven bias.¹¹ My international recognition as a teacher is demonstrated through invitations to teach at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria, Canada), the Digital Humanities @Leipzig (University of Leipzig, Germany) Summer School, and numerous peer-reviewed and invited workshops in the US, Canada, and Europe. With Laura Estill (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada), I was contracted in 2021 by Routledge Press to develop an edited collection on teaching Digital Humanities Workshops (accepted; 2023).

My teaching assignments mirror my research interests by encouraging incorporation of digital history and digital methods. I have taught extensively in both traditional (semester-based courses) and non-traditional (online; sprint courses; workshops) academic formats. At the undergraduate level, I have taught 861 students in just 4 years in American History II, Introduction to American Studies, Introduction to Digital Humanities, Introduction to Native American History, American History I, and African American History I. I have also taught 38 graduate students in Introduction to United States History and co-taught Professional Development for Historians with Stephanie Rowe. Importantly, I led the revision of the Master of Arts degree in our program¹² and developed the following courses: Introduction to Digital Humanities (revised), African American History II, and the Professional Development Course.¹³

My courses challenge students uncomfortable with not just course content (which centers diverse histories) but also their roles in the classroom. My students are not passive receivers of exam content. Instead, I position them as partners in selection of course materials and assessments and shaping the classroom environment. My courses ask students to stretch their capabilities by decentering traditional long-form written essays used in many History and American Studies courses to focus on a variety student-driven materials; flyer and visual presentation creation, persuasive memos, short public appeals and opinion columns,  and digital projects presenting new forms of scholarly argument.¹⁴ I am particularly proud that my peers have adopted my American History II, Introduction to American Studies, and Introduction to Digital Humanities courses for their own teaching. My co-developed course, Professional Development for Historians, has been adopted by Larry Cebula (Eastern Washington State University, USA); Lindsey Passenger Wieck (St Mary’s University, USA); and more. My peer-reviewed article “The Unessay as Native-Centered History and Pedagogy” (Teaching History: A Journal of Methods), which explores how non-traditional course products decenter specific forms of knowledge and authority in the history classroom, will be forthcoming in 2023.

I completed an effective teacher course with the Association of College and University Educators to expand my teaching repertoire on “implementing approaches to design an effective course and class, establishing a productive learning environment, using active learning techniques, promoting higher order thinking, and assessing in ways that inform instruction and promote deeper levels of learning.” My teaching is bolstered by my leadership of the Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching institute (HILT), a four-day workshop for digital humanists that offers nine to eleven classes per year led by internationally-recognized digital humanists. While impacted by the pandemic from 2020-2022, HILT has served almost six hundred faculty, staff, students, museum professionals, librarians, and members of the public. It has been recognized by the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations as one of seven major international training opportunities for digital technologies, methodologies, pedagogies, and theories.

My work at IUPUI has significance beyond our institution. With Stephanie Rowe, I co-authored “Defining Professional Development and the Challenges It Brings – Part I” and Part II on professional development and pedagogy for History@Work, a publication of the National Council on Public History. With Simon Appleford (Creighton University, USA), I am co-creator of DevDH.org, an open-source digital humanities methodology project that comprises an online repository of training materials, lectures, exemplars, and links that offer best practices to beginner, intermediate, and advanced digital humanists. It merges my research, teaching, and service in digital humanities by aligning research methods and skills with training modules and lectures. Since its launch, the project has reached 16,403 users, with more than 22,000 page views from 115 countries.¹⁵ Currently, Appleton and I are completing a co-authored monograph, Getting Started in the Digital Humanities: A How-To Guide for Digital Research, which will be published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. based on DevDH.org. Getting Started offers three major interventions: 1) presenting the first, full-length guide to developing digital research from inception to fruition that is not tied to any one discrete discipline; 2) addressing the increasing need for training materials for academics, particularly early career humanists, who may be new to digital research; and 3) demonstrating that project development and management within the humanities must rely on best practices and standards that address the need to reproduce and track humanistic thought processes.

As an Associate Professor, I do not have required undergraduate or graduate advising responsibilities; however, I maintain an active and mentoring advising relationship with undergraduate and graduate students at IUPUI and other academic institutions.¹⁶ In rank, I served as a committee member on one doctoral committee, committee member for four master’s thesis, and consultant for a second doctoral thesis. In addition, at the rank of Assistant Professor, I have chaired five master’s student theses, including that of Alysha Zemanek who earned the Indiana University Graduate School Chancellor’s Scholar award. The award is based on student educational achievements and represents the top student in every school. Further, I mentored a colleague (Stephanie Rowe) as she undertook her first teaching assignment and mentored two adjunct faculty in their teaching at the undergraduate levels (Debra Back and Scott Shoemaker).

Service: I am actively involved in service activities within the university and my profession. Notably, I served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (2016-2018), Steering Committee Member of the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations (2016-2018), and Digital History Liaison to the Ryan White Papers Project at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (2017-2018). I also served on the selection committee for the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History (2018-2021), sponsored by the American Historical Association. These are in addition to my active role as a reviewer for journals, grant funders, and international associations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Whiting Foundation, National Historical Publications and Records Commission, American Historical Review, Journal of Working Class Studies, The Public Historian, American Quarterly, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Taylor & Francis, Canada Foundation for Innovation, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

During my time as an Associate Professor, I was my appointed the 2020 Program Chair for the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organization’s annual conference and co-chair of the 2019 and 2021 Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH) annual conference. In the case of the former, I was appointed by ten international digital humanities associations who charged a co-chair and me with development of the academic program, from the call for papers, through the review process, to the creation of panels and the selection of keynote speakers. My work on the DH2020 conference entailed significant research-based labor including co-development of a new classification schema and establishment of an open peer review structure. These elements are discussed in my forthcoming research articles on conference management.

I am member of the advisory board for eight digital humanities projects including the Tracing Race and Class on the Indianapolis Landscape project, AudiAnnotate Extensible Workflow (AWE) at the University of Texas at Austin, Carnival Project at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, Representing Historical Data with Linked Open Data Methods: Modeling George Washington’s Enslaved Community Project, The American Yawp, A Colony in Crisis: The Saint Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789, High Performance Sound Technology for Access and Scholarship Project, and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. I also serve on the advisory board for the International Journal of Arts and Humanities Computing (UK) and Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) (Canada) in addition to a number of appointed committees for the North American Society for Sport History.

My most significant service commitment during my time in rank has been my work as founding co-editor (with Roopika Risam) of Reviews in Digital Humanities. Established in January 2020, Reviews in Digital Humanities is a peer-reviewed journal facilitating scholarly evaluation of digital humanities work. Reviews responds to a critical gap in the peer review process for digital scholarly outputs (digital archives and collections, multimodal scholarship, exhibits, visualizations, games, tools, applications, etc.) culminating in monthly journal issues pairing 500-word project overviews submitted by project directors with 500-word reviews. In addition to providing rigorous peer review, Reviews intervenes in problems of project discovery by building a registry of digital humanities projects tagged with keywords for time period, topic, and method. Our success was recognized in March 2020 when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation solicited a proposal to support Reviews. That $66,000 investment has led to publication of more than 22 issues featuring more than 100 project reviews. We have 16,688 users from 124 countries including more than 74,892 unique page views. The transformative nature of Reviews is demonstrated by Mellon requesting that we submit a Phase 2 proposal totaling more than $350,000 and nomination for the international Digital Humanities awards, as well as the use of Reviews in college classrooms, as evidence for tenure and promotion cases, and as an example of transformative open access publishing by the MIT Future Knowledges group and PubPub, which provides the journal’s technical infrastructure. Importantly, we are currently preparing two peer-reviewed articles on peer review as a scholarly model of communication.

With my service to the entire campus, I seek to create an equitable and welcoming environment that fosters research excellence, transparency, and teaching and learning. I lead an active campus-level service commitment: IFC Distance Education (2016-2018), which supports distance and online educational programs; IFC Research Affairs (2016-2023), which establishes faculty and campus research policies; IFC Library Affairs (2014-2020), which advised on policies and resources for the campus library; and the Athletic Affairs Committee (2016-2023), which provides faculty review of campus athletics programs. I also chaired Library Affairs (2021-2023) and Athletic Affairs (2019-2021). In my role as Chair of Athletic Affairs, I worked with colleagues to develop a campus-wide Missed Class Time policy which established a more equitable approach for students to use when missing class for university-sponsored activities. Equity and access also inform my work as a member of the IUPUI Public Access to Research Data Working Group (2020-2021), governance board member of the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IU Bloomington), and member of the IU Digital Humanities Working Group (2015-2018)

Through my service within the School of Liberal Arts, I have worked to encourage innovation, diversity, and inclusion. I was Vice-President/President Elect of the Faculty Assembly (2021-2023) and served as a member of the SLA Executive Committee (2021-2023), Ad Hoc Committee on Department Financial Statements (2018-2020), Fiscal Crisis Recovery Committee (2017-2020), Online Course Development Working Group (2015-2020), and the Resources and Planning Committee (2016-2020). Notable achievements of this work include co-developing an equitable compensation schema for chairs and directors of SLA departments and programs, leading development of a Memorandum of Understanding process for all faculty within Native American and Indigenous Studies that has been adopted as a model by other programs and departments and contributing to peer review of my colleague’s applications for sabbatical. At the department level, I have completed all service as assigned including analysis and development of a curricular teaching rotation for Americanist faculty (2017-2022) and developed the History H195: Introduction to Digital Humanities General Core assessment portfolio.

The following selected career highlights demonstrate my national and international reputation:

• published two monographs; eleven refereed articles; one special issue of a journal; three encyclopedia, handbook, or companion articles; three invited articles, three major digital projects; more than two dozen journal issues (as co-editor); and nine review articles;
• earned $2,880,405 in peer reviewed funded research during my career from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada, and Indiana University;
• secured a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph, Canada (2020-2023) and the Digital Scholarship Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2022-2023);
• won best article in the Journal of Sport History (2018);
• received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Multicultural Teaching (2017);
• served as School of Liberal Arts Faculty Assembly President (2022-2023), Vice-President (2021-2022), and chair and committee member of numerous IUPUI Faculty Committees;
• served as President (2016-2018) and elected Executive Council member of the Association for Computing in the Humanities (2013-2016), and elected representative to the Steering Committee of the International Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations (2016-2019);
• served as co-chair of the Digital Humanities 2020 Conference Program for the International Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (2018-2020), co-chair of the 2019 and 2021 Association for Computing in the Humanities Conference Steering Committees, and program committee member for the International Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and the Association for Computing in the Humanities.

My activities outlined here (as well as those in my curriculum vitae) demonstrate my expertise as national and international leader. Merging innovations in digital tools, platforms, and methods with cutting-edge approaches to research and teaching, the enclosed dossier for full professor illustrates my ongoing commitment to the disciplines of history and digital humanities, the department of History, the School of Liberal Arts, and the larger IUPUI campus.

1. Please see the Research Load and Expectations Document for details on my position description and its associated expectations.
2. My curriculum vitae provides complete details on all academic research, teaching, and service. Please see the updated curriculum vita as curriculum vitae post-submission.
3. Reviewers unfamiliar with the discipline of Digital Humanities, Digital History, and Digital Scholarship are welcome to consult the Digital Scholarship document for definitions and explanations of these fields of scholarly research.
4. For more details on these publications as well as other peer-reviewed publications, please view the Discussion of 3-5 Significant Publications document, which includes complete analytics for selected publications. The updated document is now available as Discussion of 3-5 Significant Publications Post-Submission.
5. To assist in clarity regarding my contributions to this collaborative work, please consult the Documentation of Individual Contributions to Collaborative Work document, which details my explicit contributions to each research team.
6. A complete overview of these grants including grant narratives are available in the Significance of Grants document.
7. Please see selections from the evaluative survey completed by our partners which speak to the impact of Discover Indiana.
8. Please consult the Significance and Impact of Research Presentations document for details on each presentation including acceptance rates. Slides and other associated materials are available in my curriculum vitae.
9. Please consult the Future Plans for Ongoing Research document for details on all proposed work for the next five years.
10. Please see the Primer document for initial reactions on social media to this recent release.
11. Please see the Student Evaluation document for summary evaluation information.
12. Please see the full Masters of Arts curriculum revision proposal for details.
13. Please consult the Impact of Instruction on Student Learning Outcomes document for details on student impact in selected courses.
14. See the Disseminated Scholarship of Teaching and Learning document for details on open-access teaching products and publications.
15. Please see the DevDH.org citation document for more details on our impact.
16. Please see the Evidence of Undergraduate or Graduate Student Research and Mentoring document for specifics on my mentoring activities.

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Academic Statement at the Rank of Assistant Professor