Women of Ancient History An interactive, crowdsourced map, WOAH raises the visibility of women working in various fields associated with ancient history. Visit the project site Principal investigator(s): Sarah Bond Project status: Ongoing Project web link: http://woah.lib.uiowa.edu/

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International Writing Program Map The map project that the Studio built for the International Writing Program aims to visualize a mass of unruly data consisting of the nearly 1400 writers from a fluctuating number of countries, close to 190. Because of the program’s longevity—nearing now 50 years—its roster and aggregate counts reflect, among other things, the considerable changes in the world’s geopolitical map since the program’s founding in 1967. Thus, what at that point counted as one country—Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, USSR, German Democratic Republic—could some decades later split into two, six, ten, new ones, or disappear completely, with a writer’s national identity left uncertain in the political spectrum: should pre-1993 Soviet writers be aggregated alongside Russians after USSR disintegrated? How to graphically render writers coming from the same geographic space, but which some preferred to call, in the spirit of political dissent, “Burma” and others, more formally, “Myanmar”?  Etc. The ruling principle of the site design was to allow whenever possible a writer’s preferred self-identification by creating new features whenever necessary. In addition to basic search categories, such as year of participation, gender, genre, age, or profession, the map makes it possible, for instance, to identify participants who write in more than one language—an attempt to inflect the map software’s geopolitical infrastructure with the emergent and increasingly common condition of transnationality. The site’s timeline feature—where the user can observe historical patterns—makes apparent long-term changes in the program’s focus and reach: thus for instance after more than a decade of Taiwanese participants only, Mainland China surfaces on the map in 1979.  Finally, the map also makes visible the blank spaces, the countries from which no writer has so far participated in the IWP. One by one, the data in this category will hopefully be shrinking further with each coming year. We are grateful to designer Mark NeuCollins for his willingness to patiently take on the many automation-resistant design challenges. Visit the project site Principal investigator(s): Nataša Ďurovičová Project status: Ongoing Project web link: http://iwp.uiowa.edu/page/iwp-timeline-map

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LitCity LitCity takes you on a tour of Iowa City’s rich literary history.  Explore the spots in this UNESCO City of Literature that inspired writers – where they lived, where they wrote, and the places they wrote about. Visit the project site Principal investigator(s): Lauren Haldeman Project status: Ongoing Project web link: http://litcity.lib.uiowa.edu/

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