Led by the Office of Global Affairs, in collaboration with the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute and Department of Digital Media & Design, an initiative is underway to create a variety of digital media telling the Armenian story--ensuring that history and heritage is not lost.
The Course
The Department of Digital Media & Design offers a special topics course, cross-listed with the Human Rights Institute and the Honors Program, in which students created a digital representation of a single Western Armenian community from the pre-1915 Ottoman Empire. Drawing from primary sources in archives, memoirs, photos, maps, interviews, and first-person narratives, the final project is a documentary video about the Armenian town of Marsovan. This has been embedded into the Human Rights Film & Digital Media initiative.
This class serves as a pilot project for a much larger initiative to recreate the lost worlds of Western Armenian communities that once flourished on their historic homelands but no longer exist in present-day Turkey. Reviving communal life, cultural, religious, educational and economic practices, the initiative aims to create a multi-dimensional world from largely print based sources for the layperson and students of history.
Omeka Online Exhibit Selections
Armenian Genocide: Through Her Eyes
Armenian Identity Preserved Through Books
Preservation of Memory and Family Through Jewelry
Film Selections
Spring 2023 Student Film Productions:
Armenian Identity: A Spirit of Survival and Unity
The Black Hole of Memory
Rupture
Fall 2020 Student Film Production: The Dildilians: A Story of Photography and Survival
(DMD 3998/HRTS 3540: Visual Storytelling Through Human Rights Archives | Instructor: Catherine Masud)
Fall 2020 Panel Discussion
Spring 2019 Student Film Production
(DMD 2200 Motion Graphics 1 | Instructor: Prof. Anna Lindemann)