Project Lead: Prof. Weiwei Luo • Assistant Professor of History
Vivero Fellow (2026-2027): Jude Morgan
This project will create a sustainable, accessible website for “The Historian as Detective,” a 100-level History methods course organized around a central question: how do historians construct an account of the past from incomplete, uneven, and sometimes contradictory evidence? The proposed website will provide a structured digital environment in which students can investigate and curate collections of primary sources and participate in building new collections for future classes.
The website will serve both as a teaching resource and as a site of student production. It will organize materials into primary-source “case files.” Each case file will bring together a small cluster of related documents around a historical problem, event, person, or controversy. Rather than presenting a single authoritative narrative, it will invite students to compare evidence, identify gaps and contradictions, evaluate provenance and perspective, and develop interpretations that remain accountable to the available sources. After working through instructor-created case files, students will learn how to construct their own small primary-source collections. Selected projects may be revised and added to the archive, with clear attribution and faculty review. Students will therefore learn not only how to read sources but also how archives are constructed: what is preserved, what is omitted, how materials are classified, and how those choices shape historical interpretation.
The first stage of the project will establish the site’s architecture and create several model case files. Each primary-source entry may include an image or scan, a transcription, a translation when necessary, citation and provenance information, descriptive metadata, a brief contextual note, and prompts for analysis. Sources will be searchable by period, geographical location, source type, historical theme, and relevant course unit. By the end of the initial project period, the principal deliverables will be a functional and accessible website, a searchable archive containing several pilot case files, standardized templates for future additions, and documentation for maintaining and expanding the site. Each offering of “The Historian as Detective” can add new materials while refining the archive’s organization and interpretive possibilities, improving its cumulative design.
A Vivero Fellow will collaborate with me on selecting an appropriate Grinnell-supported platform; designing the site’s navigation and visual identity; developing templates for documents and case files; creating a consistent metadata and tagging system; and uploading and organizing the pilot collections. The Fellow will also help establish standards for accessibility, image description, aand copyright attribution. User testing with students will identify points of confusion and guide revisions to the site. Because the archive is intended to grow across multiple iterations of the course, the Fellow will also prepare a concise contributor guide and workflow that future participants and students can follow.
