Project Leads: Jon Andelson (Professor of Anthropology), Mark Baechtel (Lecturer and Director of Forensic Activities & Club Sports), & Mark McFate (Digital Library Applications Developer)
Vivero Fellow (2022-2023, 2023-2024): Mikey O’Connor
Vivero Fellow (2021-2022): Senay Gokcebel
ROOTSTALK began as an on-line publication project of the College’s Center for Prairie Studies, funded initially through a grant from the Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership in 2015, followed by an Innovation Fund grant in 2017. Jon Andelson is the journal’s Publisher and Mark Baechtel its Editor-in-Chief. Our central purpose with the journal has been to shine a light on the prairie region in all its aspects–natural and cultural, past and present. In a sense, we are promoting the idea of “becoming native to this place,” a goal that Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, hopes will lead to improved health–in a broad sense–for the land and the people of this region. We publish non-fiction, fiction, poetry, photography, art, music, and video. We are interested in the prairie as an ecosystem, but also in the people who have made and continue to make the prairie region home–from First Nation peoples to later European, African American, and Latinx immigrants, among others—and in the vibrant artworks which portray the life of the region.
In 2024-2025, the team of three faculty and staff who are engaged in producing the Center for Prairie Studies journal, Rootstalk: A Prairie Journal of Culture, Science, and the Arts want to enhance the journal’s workflow and consistency by developing a “Contributors’ Gallery.” This would be a searchable listing of all past contributors to the journal, a group that includes current students, alumni, current and former faculty and staff at the college, and others, with their bios and headshots and links to their content pieces in all issues of Rootstalk.
The ”Contributor’s Gallery” we have in mind could be similar to the page returned by the existing “Content Types” (see https://rootstalk.grinnell.edu/categories/) feature, but with considerably more polish. The new feature would also save us time in the workflow since bios and headshots for past contributors would be more easily updated and duplicates eliminated for authors who have published more than one piece of content with us.
The Vivero Fellow would research all past contributors, identify any multiple content authors and reduce their bio and headshot to a single version, and change the structure of the digital editorial workflow to build the gallery and bring it into play. The structural changes would expose the student to some static web development concepts, specifically using the Hugo (https://gohugo.io) framework.
