This fall, the Department of History welcomes Kalani Craig to our faculty as an associate professor. Professor Craig is a medievalist and digital historian who describes herself as working at the intersection between software development and historiography.
Prior to working in academia, Craig spent ten years managing websites and worked for companies like Time Warner Cable and Websense. In her work as a historian, she uses her technical skills to design digital tools and platforms that can be used in research, classrooms, and communities. She’s interested in text mining, spatial history, and network analysis and uses those digital methods to explore medieval European history. Before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Craig was an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington.
Craig’s interest in digital methods grew naturally out of her work in medieval history. A vast quantity of medieval archival materials have already been digitized because of their fragility which makes them easier to explore with digital tools.
“There's this really rich community of practitioners that made it possible for me to see that going back to medieval history didn't mean leaving behind my high-tech self. . . I was able to craft something for myself that really suits who I am as a person and who I am as a scholar.”
Digital tools for research, classrooms, and communities
Building digital tools that can be used for academic research, in the classroom, and by communities is a key focus of Craig’s work.
“I'm a tool-building kind of digital historian, but the public history theory—the idea of community engagement, the idea of community driven goals, the idea of public facing work that's accessible to anybody and not just an academic historian—is at the root of that tool building,” she said.
Instead of writing a book for her tenure project, Craig created Net.Create, an open-source network analysis tool that can be used for humanities research and teaching. Most network analysis tools strip names and dates out of the data, which are details essential for historical research. The tool that Craig and her team created keeps those details in the dataset so network analysis can be used in humanities research and classrooms to create visualizations of the relationships between things like people, places, and events. The tool is being used in diverse ways, from a 6th grade English classroom, to helping a researcher track how the carceral state shaped women’s lives in 19th century southern Indiana.
Craig has also worked with a team of researchers to build a community archiving tool, called DigitalArc. It’s designed to require minimal technical skills and allows users to create a digital archive website for community, personal, or familial history projects. The tool is currently being piloted with community partners in Indiana and Ohio.
She’s also using DigitalArc to build virtual medieval pilgrimages that can be mapped onto locations in local communities. The goal is to host a community pilgrimage day where participants can explore medieval pilgrimage sites across the world without leaving their city.
In addition to building tools, Craig collaborates with several academics as the “methods person” on projects. One project explores the history of early modern ivory in Southeast Asia using XRF spectroscopy (a chemical analysis process) to analyze the chemicals in an ivory tusk. The results reveal the elephant’s diet and origin. The project requires a large database which is where Craig comes in.
“I’m helping think about how machine learning and database management and structure of the chemical analysis together with the structure of the human generated museum information about a particular specimen can be combined to help us analyze the movement of ivory over time and how ivory, elephants, and people have interacted to shape environmental history in Southeast Asia,” she said.
Craig is an innovative historian and is usually leading the way for digital history in previous academic departments she’s been part of. She is excited to join a culture of innovation at Illinois and that several history faculty members are utilizing digital methods in their work.
“The history department in particular here has done some things that shape its engagement with digital history in a way that is different than a lot of other departments I've seen out there,” she said. “I’m looking forward to the challenge of stepping into a department that already has decided that digital history is important to it and and figuring out what that looks like.”
Teaching digital history skills
This fall, Craig will teach a class called Medieval Saints and Sinners. Each week, students will learn about a different saint and sinner from the same century and learn a new digital history skill.
“My goal is to break the idea of what it means to be a saint or a sinner, because it's all culturally constructed. So we're going to look at why these saints and sinners are emblematic of that time period . . . to think about the ways that history changes our conception of what is good and bad.”
In the future she’ll teach classes on digital history methods that teach students how to use digital technology as a historian and how to reject the choices that technologists and data scientists make “in circumstances where the history gives us really good reasons, rooted in people's experience of the past, to say that's not how we should use technology.”
Her favorite part of teaching is seeing students have “aha moments in the mistakes.”
“I make a lot of mistakes and so I try to show people that when I'm in the classroom so they're comfortable making mistakes. I think the best way to invite people into a new discipline is to make it accessible and to show them that everybody's still learning, no matter how good they are at it already.”
When she’s not teaching or building digital tools, Craig enjoys what she describes as adrenaline junkie hobbies like gymnastics, hockey, and knitting. Her first ever publication wasn’t an academic paper, but a knitting pattern. In true Craig fashion however, the pattern contains a computer that you can use to track your stitches in a knitting project.