The Future of History

When Kate McDonald and her collaborator, David Ambaras, developed Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History, they weren’t trying to reinvent the way history is presented online. But the innovative website, with its discrete “modules” of data and conceptual maps that reveal connections between modules, has the potential to do just that.

And now, thanks to a $100,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities, McDonald, a UC Santa Barbara associate professor of history, and Ambaras, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, will be able to make the website even more dynamic, collaborative and accessible.