Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

Category: Alumni

Victoria Sage Receives Award from Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council

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Victoria SageVictoria Sage, technical writer in the Center for Technology & Training (CTT), is the recipient of the 2018 Carmine Palombo Individual Award from the Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council (TAMC). In addition to her duties as a technical writer at the CTT, Sage is editor of the Michigan Local Technical Assistance Program’s The Bridge newsletter.

In announcing the award, the TAMC notes “Vicki’s work in these roles has been a great service to the TAMC in that many of Vicki’s efforts advance the strategies of the TAMC Work Program through key training and educational initiatives for professionals at local transportation agencies. Vicki has also provided leadership and advocacy of asset management principles as well as communicating relevant programs of the TAMC and transportation agencies across Michigan in helping develop stories in The Bridge.”

One of the driving factors in Sage’s nomination for this award was her role in development of the TAMC Bridge Asset Management Workshop. Using innovative features of common desktop software, she transformed the TAMC training into a focused workshop to quickly and easily create a bridge asset management plan for students attending the training.

“Vicki had a vision to improve the creation of bridge asset management plans, and she developed an innovative way to use everyday tools to help the workshop attendees,” says TAMC Bridge Committee Chair Beckie Curtis. “This innovation has been a game changer in terms of what can be accomplished in the training workshops and making it even easier for people to have a document that they can then use to organize treatments in a way that is financially manageable.”

Transportation asset management is a process of managing public assets, such as roads and bridges, based on the long-range condition of the entire transportation system. TAMC, created in 2002 by the Michigan Legislature, promotes the concept that the transportation system is unified, rather than separated by jurisdictional ownership. Its mission is to recommend an asset management strategy to the State Transportation Commission and the Michigan Legislature for all of Michigan’s roads and bridges.

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Anna K. Swartz Participates as Invited Panelist

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Anna K. SwartzAnna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory & Culture, participated as an invited panelist at the 2018 Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics Spring Symposium: “Held Against My Will: Conversations About Involuntary Commitment and Forced Treatment” at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in Los Angeles, California on April 16.

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HU Alum Nathaniel Gbessagee Named President of Grand Bassa Community College

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Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has appointed Michigan Tech alumnus Nathaniel Gbessagee ’12 as president of Grand Bassa Community College, three miles north of Buchanan on Liberia’s Atlantic coast.

Gbessagee received his PhD in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Tech in 2012. His dissertation research focused on improving risk communication about malaria in Liberia.

After completing his doctorate, Gbessagee returned to Liberia, where he accepted a faculty position in the Department of Arts and Sciences at Tubman University. In 2016, Gbessagee was appointed a senior aide to the chairman of Liberia’s National Elections Commission. His responsibilities as president of Grand Bassa Community College will begin in August.

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Michigan Tech Alum in episodes of “This Is Us”

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Eric Michael JohnsonEric Michael Johnson, who graduated with a degree in Scientific and Technical Communication in 2012, was featured in an article in the Duluth News Tribune for earning a role as the drumming instructor in two episodes of the NBC drama “This Is Us” (Season 1, Episodes 13 and 14).

While at Michigan Tech, Johnson created a parody video of Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” for a digital media course. In the article, Johnson recalls his time filming the video:

“It celebrates the geek, nerd culture at Michigan Tech. It is a celebration of that because I absolutely identify as a big sci-fi geek,” he said. Being in front and behind the camera in creating the video, he said “it was right around then that I really started to fall in love with the idea of filmmaking.”

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Tech Faculty and Grad Students Hit the Road

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On the weekend before orientation, the Industrial Archaeology Program (SS) made a graduate-study tour to Milwaukee. Five Social Sciences faculty and five graduate students (SS and HU, both MS and PhD) investigated industrial production, adaptation to industrial decline and how urban patterns have been affected by industry, both historically and today.

The five-day trip, partly underwritten by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, included factory process tours, museum visits, and a day at Chipstone discovering explanatory and interpretive strategies for material culture, primarily using the history of the ceramics industry as the focus for the day.

Visits included the Kohler Company, which produces ceramic and cast iron bathroom fittings; Caterpillar Global Mining (formerly Bucyrus-Erie), which builds some of the largest earth-moving machinery on the planet; Harley-Davidson Powertrain Operations, where we saw engines and transmissions being assembled on a state-of-the-art assembly line; La Lune designer rustic furniture company, where small-batch artisanal woodworking is still practiced; and the Falk Foundry (Rexnord Industries) in Milwaukee, which has sadly been decommissioned in the last six months, but which offered a glimpse of active deindustrialization.

Museum visits included the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers (WI), the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, which has an extensive collection of artwork depicting industrial work, and the Iron Mountain (MI) Pumping Museum. The final stop of the whirlwind tour was the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Herrling Sawmill in Greenbush (WI), a reconstructed 1850s vertical sash sawmill. The historically accurate sawmill has been reconstructed on the basis of archaeology done by Michigan Tech’s Industrial Archaeology Program in the 1990s. Sadly, the day we visited the saw blade was misaligned and a main bolt had sheared, so it was not running, but it was wonderful to see the final result of our archaeology of 20 years ago.

(This article originally appeared in Tech Today)

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MTU Alumna Cheryl Ball Receives Grant From the Mellon Foundation

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WVU photo by Brian Persinger
WVU photo of Dr. Cheryl Ball by Brian Persinger

Twenty-first century research and scholarship is changing. At one time, researchers could only submit written manuscripts to academic journals. The journals would send copies of the text to experts in the field who would determine if the manuscripts were fit for publication (peer review). Nowadays, both the content of those manuscripts and the process for evaluating them is changing.

Cheryl Ball is a 2005 PhD alumna of MTU’s RTC graduate program, and she’s now  an associate professor of digital publishing studies in the Department of English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University.

Ball has been rethinking the process for publishing multimedia-rich scholarship. Along with Andrew Morrison, professor of interdisciplinary design and director of the Centre for Design Research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, Ball is co-principal investigator for a project that that will build a digital tool that will allow experts in a variety of disciplines to review, critique and edit these 21st-century manuscripts.

To support these innovations the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded West Virginia University a $1 million grant, the University’s first Mellon grant. The three-year Mellon Foundation grant will support the development of Cairn, an online, free and open-source system that will help editors of scholarly multimedia journals, books and data sets engage in building and reading multimedia-rich, peer-reviewed content.

You can learn more about the Ball’s work and the grant here.

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