Beginning the spring of 2020, an extraordinary team of undergraduate students collaborated with me to transcribe a large portion of McNickle’s handwritten diary (which is housed in The Newberry Library in Chicago). Despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, our team continued to meet virtually from March through August 2020 to deconstruct and conduct the research necessary to contextualize a portion of the transcriptions.
In the fall of 2020, still working and meeting remotely, our team designed and installed a temporary exhibit called The D’Arcy McNickle Interpretive Garden in partnership with the Carolina Community Garden at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The Experiential World of D’Arcy McNickle website.
This marker, one of five, serves as the introduction to the D’Arcy McNickle Interpretive Garden temporary exhibit at the Carolina Community Garden.
Both of these projects demonstrate how McNickle’s diary writing can unlock a wealth of insights into his life–rendered as what the scholar James Clifford calls an “experiential world”–that have been previously overlooked. Both of these projects have evolved and expanded–and will continue to do so in the future.
In the spring of 2021, the URCT added A Trip To Tohono O’odham and Pueblo Country, 1942 Google Earth story map and a ClioVis timeline to the website. In the spring of 2022, students in Digital Native America (AMST 341) contributed to the development of Experiencing The Garden, a virtual tour of The D’Arcy McNickle Interpretive Garden.
Still another team, featuring a URCT alumnus and a Duke University doctoral student in History are working with me on a second Google Earth story map entitled, A Transatlantic Voyage, 1931. Our goal is to launch this latest addition in May or June 2022.