Cultural Heritage, Humanities, Libraries & Archives Research Area

I-Corps Translational Strategies for Experiential Supercomputing
PI: Win Burleson (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Gustavo De Oliveira Almeida, Steven Wood (The University of Arizona)
Funding: National Science Foundation, $50,000
Project Dates: September 1, 2025 – August 31, 2026
Summary:
This I-Corps project will advance translational strategies for the NSF MRI Holodeck in the areas of health and education. The Holodeck is a first-of-its-kind experiential supercomputing environment. It is a well-integrated, immersive, collaborative, virtual/physical extended reality environment providing unparalleled tools for research collaborations, intellectual exploration, education, and creative output. It incorporates visual, audio, and physical components; novel AI technologies to enhance human-human, human-agent, and human-robot social interactions; rapid prototyping and fabrication tools; and tightly coupled interactive visual, audio, and physical experiences. The Holodeck provides a flexible, modular, reconfigurable infrastructure with a comprehensive capacity to capture and analyze behavioral, physiological, affective, cognitive, contextual and environmental data.  It is capable of providing real-time immersive data visualization and haptic experience coupled with sophisticated co-located and distributed digital twinning capabilities.
Awards: 2025 NSF Spirit of I-Corps Award

3D Research Data Curation Framework (3DFrame): Understanding 3D Data Creation, Analysis and Preservation Practices across Disciplines
PI: Zack Lischer-Katz (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Matt Cook (Harvard Library)
Funding: Institute of Museum and Library Services, $599,816
Project Dates: August 1, 2023 – July 31, 2027
Publication: “Exploring the Curation Practices of 3D Data Creators,” Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2024.
Summary:
Three-dimensional, or 3D data creation methods and virtual reality (VR)-based visualization techniques are increasingly common in interdisciplinary research and in the classroom. The 3D Research Data Curation Framework (3DFrame) project is a “Research in Service to Practice” project exploring how researchers use 3D data to align existing 3D data creation and curation methods with FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) data principles and develop methods for making 3D data usable with immersive visualization (e.g., VR) and other emerging analytic techniques. Using qualitative methods and emerging technologies, the PIs are developing a digital curation framework and an interactive toolkit that will enable digital curators, librarians and other information professionals to support the creation, curation, analysis, publication and use of 3D data in immersive viewing environments for the benefit of researchers and instructors across disciplines.

Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) Internship & Resource Development Project
PI: Jamie A. Lee (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Berlin Loa (The University of Arizona)
Funding: Mellon Foundation, $1,000,000
Project Dates: July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2027
Website: archivalfocas.org 
Summary:
FOCAS is a collective of information science faculty members representing nine academic institutions across Canada and the United States that include the University of Arizona, UCLA, University of Washington, Dominican University, Black Research Consortium at University of Chicago, University of British Columbia, McGill University, Eastern Carolina University and CUNY-Queens. With $6.5 million funding overall, each institution facilitates paid internships for Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS) students with local community archives partners—training MLIS students to respond to the needs of community archives. FOCAS is providing a model for training and cultivating the next generation of information professionals as community archives and stewards, support community archives of historically underrepresented groups and re-envisioning the archives curriculum to better understand what community archives are and do in, with and for the communities they represent. As R1 research universities and teaching-focused institutions, these universities’ regions hold community archives that are engaged in vital work to preserve and make accessible the stories of our diverse humanity.