jess lamar reece holler

  

• graduate student
• the university of pennsylvania/western kentucky university

hi -- my name is jess! i'm a phd. student in english literature at the university of pennsylvania, and a master's student at western kentucky university in folk studies. i work on the history of print agricultures and regionalism at the intersection of popular reading history and the history of agriculture, 1900-1950s, and i am keenly interested in using this sort of work to bring archival access to agricultural history & heritage to contemporary agricultural communities -- and, especially, to food & farm educators. i've had some wonderful introductory orientations to the world of digital humanities, and worked with omeka last year to help build a digital edition for a collection of early 20th century farm magazine readers' letters to a popular farm magazine. i'm eager to build on these introductory foundations, and to continue to push myself to find ways to make my research publicly useful -- especially for K-12 students and educators, and for communities.

i am especially excited about learning from digital humanities tools in public history to think about applicable models for public folklore & folklife programming! i dream of building relational databases -- democratic digital archives -- that allow communities to develop their own resources and navigate their own landscapes of memory. right now, i'm just starting out -- but the vision stands. excited for the chance to learn & grow at THATCamp!