An eighteen-month project to create digital resources using the Institute of American Indian Arts' Collection of Contemporary Native American Art, develop two new interdisciplinary digital humanities courses, and enable faculty members to use digital humanities resources to enhance their teaching.

"The IAIA Digital Curation Project" is an eighteen-month endeavor to create digital resources using the Institute of American Indian Arts' Collection of Contemporary Native American Art, to develop two new interdisciplinary digital humanities courses, and to enable faculty members to use digital humanities resources to enhance their teaching. The program explores digital technology for cultural heritage preservation through faculty symposia, curriculum development, and the production of new digital resources, engaging with the ways that these innovations can be used to sustain, to grow, and to share Native culture and wisdom. Building on the advanced technological capacity of the institution's New Media Arts program and its Museum Studies program, which uniquely specializes in tribal museum management and collections care, project directors J. Carlos Peinado (new media arts) and Jessie Ryker-Crawford (museum studies) lead IAIA faculty in examining the use of digital technologies in the research, preservation, interpretation, and representation of cultural heritage. Under their guidance, a team of "Student Technology Scholars" create high-definition 3D scans of pottery, sculpture, and other material culture objects from the IAIA Collection of Contemporary Native American Art (one of the largest collections of contemporary Native American art in the country) and create educational material contextualizing each scanned object, yielding an interactive online archive where scholars can view, manipulate, and learn about these Native American cultural objects. Two symposia bring IAIA faculty together with members of the project's advisory council to address digital humanities resources and issues for Native American-serving institutions and collections. These council members represent a wide range of collaborating institutions, including the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Dartmouth College Native American Studies Department and Hood Museum, Los Alamos Visual Analytics (LAVA), the University of New Mexico Art, Research, and Technology and Science (ARTS) Lab, and Fort Collins Museum. Two cross-disciplinary digital humanities courses, Software Applications for the Digital Humanities and Cultural Representation in the Digital Humanities, are also developed.