Welcome to Guilford College’s Digital Silk Road website! As part of the Digital Directions for the Arts and Humanities supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Associate Professor of Religious Studies Eric Mortensen and Assistant Professor of History Zhihong Chen co-taught a course, HIST/REL 250: The Digital Silk Road, during the fall semester of 2016. In this integrative, collaborative course, students not only learned about the history, religions, art, music, economics, geography, cultures, and literatures of both the land and maritime Silk Roads, but also employed digital resources to construct a public, interactive Silk Road website showcasing their digital research projects.
The course was digitally supported by a collaborative team at Hege Library, especially Instructional Technology Librarian Tierney Steelberg, Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship Technologist Tamika Davis, and Instructional Design and Assessment Librarian Rachel Sanders, as well as the IT&S department at Guilford College. Our four teaching assistants (the Silkworms), Elena Sippel, Anna Kelly, Sydney Brown, and Brian James, assisted students in designing and developing these student-generated digital research projects.
Students have also written public blog posts documenting their interests, struggles, reflections and discoveries during the process of their research. We hope you will enjoy the wonderful StoryMaps that our students have created. For more information about this course, please see the course syllabus. The majority of the students in this class are also going to China during the 2017 January term. The website has been further enriched by their first-hand experience on the Silk Road – see the Abroad Experiences page for more.
For more information about Guilford’s Silk Road Project, please contact Eric Mortensen.
Teams
Over the course of the semester, the students worked in four teams, each led by a TA. Click on any name to read that student’s blog posts in reverse chronological order, or click on the team name to view that team’s main page.
Team Heart
“Traditions of Performance Across the Silk Road & Through the Ages”
Team Earth
“Travelers Along the Silk Road”
- Silkworm: Brian James
- Austin Huddle
- Jake Fetzer
- Sam Bernhardt
Team Sky
“Who’s that Girl? The Morphology of Body Aesthetics in Uyghur Communities”
Team Tongue
“Food Customs of Kashgar”