History Ph.D. candidate Josh Fitzgerald has received a 2017-18 Julie and Rocky Dixon Graduate Innovation Award!This fellowship is designed to support doctoral students who are interested in developing their skills and experience in innovation and/or entrepreneurship in preparation for careers outside of academia. Fellowship recipients will carry the title of Dixon Fellow and will join a community of current and former UO graduate students who have combined learning and innovation.

As a thankful Dixon Award recipient, Josh will be interning with the Wired Humanities Projects (WHP), mentoring under world-renowned Mesoamerican specialist Stephanie Wood, Ph.D., in preparation for a postdoctoral career as a museum specialist in digital humanities. He plans to work on two innovative projects throughout the year. First, in collaboration with the UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH) and WHP, he will be a consultant for an upcoming exhibit at the museum. This exhibit will focus on a set of rare mapas (maps), pictorial manuscripts that depict cartographical, genealogical, and cultural information from Mexico’s colonial period. The project includes a state-of-the-art interactive museum display, based on dynamic application software, to enrich visitor experiences. This feature bridges content from WHP’s Mapas Project (a virtual Mesoamerican map hub online) with the physical objects housed at MNCH. Josh will be the project manager helping to design and implement this exhibit and the digital component.

Josh’s second project concentrations on digital scholarship and content creation for WHP. He will be a researcher for several of WHP’s groundbreaking initiatives, chief among them the new “Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.” The “Visual Lexicon” will be a Unicode syllabary and searchable database of pictographs and symbols, linking key examples across primary sources and accompanying peer-reviewed content. The “Visual Lexicon” seeks to increase research opportunities, ease analysis, and introduce new types of evidence to a wider community of learners. And Josh will help to facilitate this vision. He also plans to integrate the “Visual Lexicon” with MNCH’s mapas exhibit. He is very excited about this opportunity to hone his digital humanities and public history skills while finishing the dissertation next year.