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Research for Life

 
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Doctor Linda Spurlock holding a model of a human skull in her hand

Linda Spurlock, Ph.D., sharpens her pencils when the coroner calls.  An anthropologist and forensic artist, she is at home sketching crime victims’ faces from skull remains and reconstructing the pelvis of the 4.4 million-year-old Ardi skeleton.

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Robert Clements, Ph.D., is developing new imaging techniques that give a 3D or even 4D look deep inside the brain and body, giving new insights to researchers and clinicians. See the video and read the story.

When the county coroner calls, Linda Spurlock sharpens her drawing pencils. Spurlock, Ph.D., is a scientist and a forensic artist, at home in the world of reconstructing a 4.4 million-year-old pelvis from an early human ancestor and in illustrating what a modern-day crime victim’s face would have looked like, based on the evidence revealed in a decomposed skull.

As a biological anthropologist and a professional archaeologist, her work has in scientific journals such as Science. It might also appear on the website of the International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons (The DOE Network) or on a police flier.

“I love doing this. It takes your scientific training as well as artistic training,” said Spurlock, who joined Kent State in 2012 as an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Where science and art overlap, there’s a moment when you can educate people.”

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Facial reconstruction, her specialty, can narrow the search for a missing person or unidentified victim, since people are most likely to recognize a face. From skeletal remains, she can discern the sex, age and height of a person and hazard a guess at ethnicity. But the face yields identifying clues. The skull shows if the eyes were wide-set or narrow, the shape of the chin and the breadth of the mouth. The nasal spine – the bone under the nose – determines how much the nose projected, its slant and length. She keeps her sketches deliberately ambiguous, maybe offering two versions of hairstyles, which she could not know. The proportions are what make a face recognizable, she said.

“I’m hoping the proportions are good enough to jog someone’s memory.” 

Clues to Homicides 

Her sketches can remain on a website or in police files for years before a memory is jogged. In one case, her facial sketch of a teenage girl whose decomposed skeletal remains were found by a hunter in Portage County in November 1994 appeared in local newspapers. But it took seven years for a Pennsylvania detective to run across the sketch on a missing persons website. The sketch led a Pennsylvania district attorney’s office to conduct DNA tests on the remains, positively identifying a 14-year-old who was reported missing in July 1994. The identification started a homicide investigation.

Still unsolved is a cold case from Twinsburg of a body found in 1982. She illustrated the face in 2009, after doing a three-dimensional head reconstruction, but the person still has not been identified. Rarely does she learn the outcome of the cases she is involved in, Spurlock said.

Her three-dimensional reconstructions are done in clay. The nose is the easiest part to reconstruct, she said, even though it is missing from the skull. For other facial details, she cuts erasers and adds them to a prototype skull, filling out the form before adding clay.

She became interested in facial reconstruction in the 1980s during an archaeological field trip to Puerto Rico, where she drew the Lucayan Indians, possibly encountered by Columbus in 1492. In the 1990s, she attended workshops with two pioneers of craniofacial reconstruction, Betty Pat Gatliff and Kathy T. Taylor, who wrote the book, “Forensic Art and Illustration.” Spurlock began working on forensic facial reconstruction cases, and in 2000 she modeled the head of Marilyn Sheppard, which was used in trial when the estate of Dr. Sam Sheppard sued the state of Ohio for the time he spent in prison for the murder of his wife.

Reconstructing Ardi’s Pelvis 

Her reconstruction of a pelvis of the 4.4 million-year-old “Ardi” skeleton, or Ardipithecus ramidus, earned her co-authorship of a paper written by Kent State Distinguished Prof. C. Owen Lovejoy for a special edition of Science magazine on Oct. 2, 2009, describing the Ardi find and its significance. In 11 papers in that issue, Lovejoy and other scientists described the hominid remains, the earliest found to date, as the first human ancestor yet discovered who was capable of walking upright. The pelvis construction was one of the keys to showing that. 

Spurlock, who was trained in osteology by Lovejoy, then was director of human health at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where she worked with the thousands of bones in the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection. Observing and measuring the original Ardi fossil of one side of the pelvis and following its dimensions and contours and using CT scans, she was able to complete the reconstruction by mirroring a second side in her sculptural model. She recreated a missing sacrum. 

Her illustrations of the human, chimpanzee and early hominid pelvises during the birth process were used in Scientific American. 

Spurlock has taught anatomy at Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) and other colleges. Her interest in drawing dates back to her high school days, when she first took art classes. It has thrived alongside her interest in science. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology from Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York, and a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Kent State in 2001. 

She sees scientific and forensic illustration and fossil reconstruction as “my way of keeping in the art world.”

“You learn so much about what you’re asked to depict,” she said.

See more in the video below

3d Imaging collage

Robert J. Clements, Ph.D., wants to see inside your head.

And not just at the level a doctor can see inside your brain now with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

He is developing new imaging techniques that can look at what’s going on in the brain down to the level of a single cell. He can reconstruct in 3-D a model of exactly where a neurodegenerative disease such as multiple sclerosis (MS) is causing lesions and then track changes over time, a tool that will someday be useful for assessing how a disease is progressing and how it responds to treatment. 

The new technologies he works with make it possible to see complex internal organs or systems in three dimensions or even 4D – three dimensions over a time sequence. This can help researchers and clinicians to locate and visualize the area they are interested in and gain new insights.

The images also have proven to be provocative teaching tools. In two studies, Clements and Kent State education experts introduced the technology into local high schools so that science students could see how a heart beats and functions, for example, or visualize the structure of DNA. In classes where the imaging technology was used, test scores improved. Students were engaged and excited, Clements said. He is also investigating the use of touch or tactile feedback devices to help visually impaired students understand spatial concepts.

And, he is using electroencephalography (EEG) brain activity recordings to learn more about the mechanisms involved in 3D image viewing and memory formation.

His techniques combine MRI with laser-scanning confocal microscopy of tissue sections and software analysis techniques, greatly increasing resolution and pinpointing what is seen more broadly through magnetic resonance. A reconstruction can then be projected stereoscopically for a three-dimensional view.

With algorithms that Clements developed in collaboration with computer scientists, the multi-channel, high-resolution datasets are automatically analyzed to quantify and classify cells, among other things. By using clusters of computers, data can be delivered faster and can be more accurately reproduced. The 3-D images are not just visual aids but incorporate a wealth of information about disease state, body function and the effects of treatment. 

Improving MRIs

Some of the finely detailed, high-resolution microscopic imagery he has developed is more suited to research at the cellular level than for clinical use. But by modifying MRI protocols he also has been able to acquire greater contrast and definition than would be possible with conventional MRI imaging. This only requires a change in software routines and could be deployed in existing scanning systems, he said, possibly eliminating the need to achieve contrast with dyes, which can harm kidneys or provoke allergic reactions in patients.

An assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Clements collaborates widely. Last summer he was awarded a patent for 3D dataset techniques with James Blank, professor of biological sciences and interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He works with faculty in departments throughout Kent State, from biological sciences and computer sciences to chemistry, chemical physics, psychology, biochemistry and education. He also collaborates with scientists at the Cleveland Clinic on automated dataset analysis. Students in two computer science classes also have been involved.

Clements has even explored extending the 3D system to fashion, architecture and art applications, experimenting with it in Florence, Italy, at Kent State’s study-abroad site, to help visualize ancient artifacts and statues such as Michelangelo’s David.

See more in this video:

The ads have the familiar pitch of cigarette companies back when they could advertise freely – a suave, evening-suited man, seated and smoking, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful, admiring women in sequined cocktail dresses. A “slim, charged” woman in a bikini bottom. The assurance that smokers are free spirits, unafraid of good taste and good times.

But do e-cigarettes really rate high on the “cool” scale with college students?

Researcher Deric Kenne, Ph.D., who usually studies illicit substance abuse, last spring surveyed 35,300 Kent State University students on their attitudes toward and use of e-cigarettes. Kenne, assistant professor of public health in the Department of Health Policy and Management and a member of the Healthy Kent: Alcohol and Other Drugs Task Force, was interested in e-cigarettes not only because of their novelty, but because vaporizers have the potential to be used to abuse other substances, including illicit drugs.

E-cigarettes, largely unregulated now, can be used to vaporize and inhale liquid nicotine with various flavors, but they also can be filled with a host of other products, from THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, to Cialis. Sold over the internet, unbranded, cheaper varieties carry no assurance of quality or content control. “What are you smoking?” is a real, not ironic, concern.

But even as the popularity of e-cigs appears to be rising, little research has been done on how college students, the prime customers, view them.

Kenne’s survey, completed by more than 9,000 students, showed that those who have tried e-cigarettes did so primarily to experiment with the product more than to quit smoking or find a healthier alternative.

Nearly 28% had used an e-cigarette at least once, and more than 7% said they were very or somewhat likely to try them in the future. Current smokers of regular cigarettes were most likely to have tried e-cigarettes, followed by former smokers and those who had never smoked.

In a 2009 survey of college students, done elsewhere in the Midwest, only 4.9% had ever used e-cigs.

In Kenne’s survey, 22% said they would try a flavored e-cigarette if it were offered by one of their best friends, and 16.5% would try a non-flavored variety if a friend offered it. The flavors most favored by respondents were fruit, followed by menthol and tobacco.

Other findings indicated a fair degree of tolerance toward the use of e-cigarettes on campus (currently there are no regulations, other than rules that faculty or administrators may establish about not vaping in class or public spaces).

How They Rated E-Cigs

Do you believe it is OK for someone to use an e-cigarette:

Where regular tobacco smoking is banned:
Yes – 32.7%

In a restaurant, grocery or department store where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 31.8%

In a bar where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 46.4%

During class or in another public area of the university (e.g., library, student center) where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 22.1%

In a campus dorm room where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 41.6%

Asked if they had ever used an e-cig to vaporize anything other than nicotine, the most common “yes” response was THC or marijuana.

èƵ half of the students responding said they thought there are fewer toxins in e-cigarettes than in tobacco cigarettes. To date, the research on this has varied. Some places – the European Community and the city of Cleveland, among them – have banned e-cigarette use in public spaces out of concern about secondhand “vapors.”

More than half of the students – 55.3% – had no idea what the laws are in Ohio regarding e-cigarettes. Like cigarettes, e-cigarettes cannot be sold or used in Ohio by children under 18.

Most of the student survey responders said they heard about e-cigarettes through their friends. TV ads rated second (e-cigarettes ads are not prohibited on television as real cigarette ads are). For women, family members were the third most frequent source of information, and for men, the internet. By far the most popular brand identified on a list was blu, which advertises heavily and uses celebrity endorsements.

Kenne hopes to continue the survey over the next several years to assess changes in use over time. Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether e-cigarettes are useful in reducing the use of real cigarettes, or whether they are a “gateway” to future nicotine addiction.

The ads have the familiar pitch of cigarette companies back when they could advertise freely – a suave, evening-suited man, seated and smoking, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful, admiring women in sequined cocktail dresses. A “slim, charged” woman in a bikini bottom. The assurance that smokers are free spirits, unafraid of good taste and good times.

But do e-cigarettes really rate high on the “cool” scale with college students?

Researcher Deric Kenne, Ph.D., who usually studies illicit substance abuse, last spring surveyed 35,300 Kent State University students on their attitudes toward and use of e-cigarettes. Kenne, assistant professor of public health in the Department of Health Policy and Management and a member of the Healthy Kent: Alcohol and Other Drugs Task Force, was interested in e-cigarettes not only because of their novelty, but because vaporizers have the potential to be used to abuse other substances, including illicit drugs.

E-cigarettes, largely unregulated now, can be used to vaporize and inhale liquid nicotine with various flavors, but they also can be filled with a host of other products, from THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, to Cialis. Sold over the internet, unbranded, cheaper varieties carry no assurance of quality or content control. “What are you smoking?” is a real, not ironic, concern.

But even as the popularity of e-cigs appears to be rising, little research has been done on how college students, the prime customers, view them.

Kenne’s survey, completed by more than 9,000 students, showed that those who have tried e-cigarettes did so primarily to experiment with the product more than to quit smoking or find a healthier alternative.

Nearly 28% had used an e-cigarette at least once, and more than 7% said they were very or somewhat likely to try them in the future. Current smokers of regular cigarettes were most likely to have tried e-cigarettes, followed by former smokers and those who had never smoked.

In a 2009 survey of college students, done elsewhere in the Midwest, only 4.9% had ever used e-cigs.

In Kenne’s survey, 22% said they would try a flavored e-cigarette if it were offered by one of their best friends, and 16.5% would try a non-flavored variety if a friend offered it. The flavors most favored by respondents were fruit, followed by menthol and tobacco.

Other findings indicated a fair degree of tolerance toward the use of e-cigarettes on campus (currently there are no regulations, other than rules that faculty or administrators may establish about not vaping in class or public spaces).

How They Rated E-Cigs

Do you believe it is OK for someone to use an e-cigarette:

Where regular tobacco smoking is banned:
Yes – 32.7%

In a restaurant, grocery or department store where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 31.8%

In a bar where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 46.4%

During class or in another public area of the university (e.g., library, student center) where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 22.1%

In a campus dorm room where regular tobacco smoking is banned?
Yes – 41.6%

Asked if they had ever used an e-cig to vaporize anything other than nicotine, the most common “yes” response was THC or marijuana.

èƵ half of the students responding said they thought there are fewer toxins in e-cigarettes than in tobacco cigarettes. To date, the research on this has varied. Some places – the European Community and the city of Cleveland, among them – have banned e-cigarette use in public spaces out of concern about secondhand “vapors.”

More than half of the students – 55.3% – had no idea what the laws are in Ohio regarding e-cigarettes. Like cigarettes, e-cigarettes cannot be sold or used in Ohio by children under 18.

Most of the student survey responders said they heard about e-cigarettes through their friends. TV ads rated second (e-cigarettes ads are not prohibited on television as real cigarette ads are). For women, family members were the third most frequent source of information, and for men, the internet. By far the most popular brand identified on a list was blu, which advertises heavily and uses celebrity endorsements.

Kenne hopes to continue the survey over the next several years to assess changes in use over time. Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether e-cigarettes are useful in reducing the use of real cigarettes, or whether they are a “gateway” to future nicotine addiction.

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There was a time in England when it was more common to read and even speak in French, if you were to gain entry to the highest social class.

That English ultimately prevailed as the language of a country conquered in 1066 by the Normans is remarkable, said Susanna Fein, Ph.D., whose scholarly life has centered on the first great poet to write his most important work in English, Geoffrey Chaucer. She is the editor of The Chaucer Review and a former trustee of the New Chaucer Society.

Chaucer’s Pilgrims Penetrate the Psyche

Last summer Fein, professor of English, taught 16 master high school English teachers in a month-long National Endowment for the Humanities seminar designed to immerse them in Chaucer’s poetry and his world. The group traveled from Southwark in London to Canterbury Cathedral, a 60-mile journey tracing the pilgrimage to the site of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom that Chaucer immortalized in The Canterbury Tales. The goal was to offer the teachers new insights into tales that still resonate, more than 600 years after Chaucer wrote them.

Why did Chaucer, a creature of a court where French was common, write in English? It’s a big question, said Fein. He may have done it in imitation of Dante, whom he admired and who wrote The Divine Comedy in Italian rather than the more scholarly Latin. As Dante is known as “the father of the Italian language,” Chaucer is often called the “father of English poetry.”

The Modern in the Medieval

As any modern reader knows, the language of The Canterbury Tales bears little resemblance to contemporary English.  Yet, digging into its medieval vocabulary is well worth the effort and uncovers Chaucer’s very modern appeal, Fein said.

“He provides psychoanalysis before Freud gives us the term,” she said. “He bores into these characters.”

“There are so many layers and depths. He speaks to readers like Shakespeare does,” she said. “It’s remarkable that he creates a new persona for each story.”

As the 30 characters of Chaucer’s pilgrimage make their way from the Tabard Inn, a public house in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames in London, to Canterbury Cathedral, their tales unfold as a way to entertain themselves and compete for a free meal back at the inn when they return. The Knight, the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath and more strive to outdo each other in storytelling skill. Not all of the promised tales are told, however. Chaucer died in 1400 before finishing the work, and it may be his executors who compiled it, Fein said.

It was then copied by scribes. Adam Pinkhurst, a legal scribe, is known to have copied the two oldest of the 70-or-so existing manuscripts: the Hengwrt manuscript, now in Aberystwyth, Wales, and the beautifully illuminated Ellesmere manuscript, on view at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

The tales that are told cut deep into issues and dilemmas that we face today. “Is the Wife of Bath a feminist’s dream or a misogynist’s nightmare?” Fein asks. The Pardoner tells a dark tale about greed and drunkenness, plague and murder. “Is he a haunted character or a fraud?” she wonders. Some of the pilgrims are optimists, others cynics. Most are somewhere in between.

“Questions about ethics, belief and desire come up, character by character,” she added, with the tavern keeper-host chiming in as a sort of literary critic.

“And if I haven’t said it before, Chaucer is very funny.”

Tri-Lingual England

In addition to her work on Chaucer, Fein is a scholar of medieval manuscripts. She was invited last fall to teach a graduate class at the University of Notre Dame on a medieval manuscript known for its gathering of the early English poems known as the Harley Lyrics. This manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2253, is a collection of poetry and prose written in Middle English, French and Latin that predates Chaucer by 50 years.

Fein has edited the manuscript and expects the final volume of her three-volume edition and translation to be published in the spring. She has described the collection as full of “especially fine poems on topics such as religion, politics and love.” Like Chaucer, she noted, it is “sometimes devout, sometimes rebellious, and sometimes bawdy” and she called it one of the best anthologies of English poetry before the 16th century. Bringing the manuscript’s contents back to the surface will add to our understanding of Chaucer and medieval England, she said.

Besides medieval English, Fein works in French, Latin, Italian and German. Medieval England was tri-lingual, she noted: the Court spoke French, scholars used Latin, and the indigenous population spoke English. Some poets wrote in all three languages. Chaucer’s close friend John Gower is buried in Southwark Cathedral, and on his effigy tomb, his head rests on three books: one in Latin, one in French, and one in English.

But what scholars have often neglected until the past 15 years or so is Anglo-French, or “English French,” a Creole-type mixture that overlapped with Middle English. In editing Harley, Fein has found herself in the middle of a new field of scholarship, “the French of England.” Was it a dialect? A language of its own? How much of it was traceable to France? she wondered. “It’s a body of literature that people interested in medieval England need to read,” she said.

Fein became a medievalist after earning her B.A. in English literature from the University of Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard, where her adviser, Larry D. Benson, was in the midst of editing The Riverside Chaucer, which became the standard scholarly edition.

Editing and bringing to life medieval texts has engaged her ever since. She looks for gaps in texts, things that other editors hadn’t noticed.

Her students today are primed for medieval texts by their interest in Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, she said. The tales of Robin Hood also continue to have relevance, with their themes of economic justice and rich versus poor.

“You can play off those tastes,” she said.

But Chaucer remains, for her, at the center of her study, a masterful poet who is essentially modern in his analysis of his pilgrims and their psychological interplay.

“He’s seeing that the world is refracted by the way that people of all kinds see it.”

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Margaret P. Calkins, Ph.D., is an architectural researcher with a passion for creating buildings that are comfortable for people in all states of health.

She is particularly attuned to the needs of the elderly, whose eyesight or balance may be poor or who may live with dementia.

Thinking about the edges of stairs, chairs, and countertops and how they help the elderly see and be sure-footed is part of her job. Calkins, who has consulted for many healthcare institutions and elderly housing communities, is coordinator of the Healthcare Design program for Kent State’s College of Architecture & Environmental Design.

Margaret P. Calkins

Nearly 20 years after she earned her Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Wisconsin and began consulting for care communities, there is “a lot of work still to be done in senior living communities,” she said. “When you think about environmental issues for people who are not completely able-bodied or able-minded, there are layers of approaches you can take.”

Small Changes Make a Difference

Sometimes, subtle changes that don’t scream “handicapped person” can make a big difference, physically and psychologically, to elders, who may be sensitive about their diminishing capabilities in a culture where youth and vigor are valued.

Colorful, contemporary-looking grab bars, better ambient lighting and contrasting colors can make a huge difference in comfort, she has found.  “Getting people to understand the variety of things you can do that are so helpful but don’t make it look like you’re handicapped” is part of the process of design for this age group, said Calkins, who earned her undergraduate degree at Kenyon College in psychology.

At Kenyon a course in the psychology of aesthetics first piqued her interest in designing environments. She took courses at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and got advice from her oldest brother, who was an architect in Cambridge. She wanted to specialize in the impact of design on people rather than design buildings. He convinced her that she would have more credibility with an advanced degree in architecture rather than psychology.

“I wanted to do research to give architects better information on how to design buildings,” she said.

Basing Buildings on Research

After writing a thesis on building design guidelines for people with dementia and earning her master’s degree in 1986, she went to work for Heather Hill, a nursing home in Chardon, Ohio, where a prototype memory-care, assisted living building was being planned that would rely on research-based guidelines.

She learned that the NIA was looking to fund more studies with businesses, so while she earned her Ph.D., she also incorporated a business and began consulting for health care communities. She has had $6 million worth of grant funding, much of it from the National Institutes of Health, along the way. A nonprofit research arm of her company, the IDEAS Institute, has also been awarded foundation funding from the Alzheimer’s Association and others.

Calkins was one of the first to focus on environments for people living with dementia. “It was a wide open door and I ran through,” she said. 

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James Tyner

James Tyner has made many expeditions to Cambodia as part of his research on the violence that occurred in Cambodia’s “killing fields.” When he’s not teaching, Tyner, professor of geography, spends most of his professional time helping the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) piece together the locations and conditions that led to the deaths of approximately 2 million Cambodians.

For Tyner, geography may be more than a spot on the map. It’s about understanding the relationship between space and violence. Tyner has examined ties between violence and their associated landscapes for more than 20 years. In addition to his research on Cambodia, Tyner has published geographical works on topics ranging from black radicalism in the U.S. to the exploitation of migrant Filipino workers. Tyner traces his interest in geography to his parents, who were both geography teachers. When Tyner was a child growing up in California, his parents took him along on road trips across North America as his father prepared for fall classes. They took pictures of grain silos and cornfields rather than tourist attractions.

“The inspiration or experience that comes from that is not tourism but to experience places in their everydayness,” Tyner said. “We would travel around and begin to see relationships between the different objects in the landscapes.” 

Collaboration in Cambodia 

Tyner studied geography in college and received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1995. After receiving his doctorate, Tyner worked as an instructor and lecturer at several California universities before accepting a position at Kent State in 1997.

Over his 20-year career, Tyner has written 12 books and published 48 peer-reviewed articles in major geography and social-science journals. He also has made 76 scholarly presentations around the world. Tyner has received approximately $325,000 in external grants to conduct his research.

The major funding organizations include the United States Geological Society and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Tyner has had an NSF grant for his collaboration with DC-Cam, an independent Cambodian research institute. The goal of his work is to identify the location of various structures present during the period and determine how they were built, why they were built and what happened there. 

The structures are either directly or indirectly related to Khmer Rouge’s attempt to boost rice production through irrigation. The regime forced millions of people into the countryside to work on the irrigation systems, which included the construction of dikes, canals and dams. Khmer Rouge also built prisons to discipline workers and created mass graves. Some of these sites no longer exist.

As part of his research efforts, Tyner interviews Khmer Rouge survivors or residents who lived during the period. He also uses GPS technology to map the locations. His encounters with the local residents bring to life the horrors the people in that area experienced. 

Helping Students Understand Violence

One of Tyner’s primary goals as a professor is to raise his students’ awareness and understanding of violence in society. He’s taken two of his students to Cambodia to conduct field research. Perhaps even more rewarding are the opportunities his research has brought to the Cambodian people.

Tyner used part of the NSF funds to bring two Cambodian students to Kent State so they could study for their master’s degrees. The students, Savina Sirik and Sokvisal Kimsroy, enrolled in the geography program at Kent State. They were selected based on their knowledge of the Cambodian genocide. Both students lost family members during the Khmer Rouge era.

“They will be able to contribute through first-hand research to the documentation and empirical interpretation of the genocide,” Tyner said. 

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Burn this Letter - Delete This Tweet

Long before emails, text messages and tweets became preferred for personal communication, hand-written letters carried news, gossip and intimate details of life from one person to another. Letters, like their electronic counterparts, were sometimes indiscreet. They conveyed anger, exasperation, humor, observations about life and love, and family history. Unlike their 140-character successors, they could range for pages, but like them, they might be sent – and delivered by the postal service – more than once a day.

Long missives written in a cursive hand with little or no punctuation form a 170-letter collection from the mother of poet Walt Whitman to her son. Edited, annotated and prepared for the 21st century’s digital formats by Wesley Raabe, Ph.D., associate professor of English, they are now available to scholars and the public on a website, “walter dear,” that is part of the electronic Walt Whitman Archive.

The letters of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman offer insight on the great American poet and the woman whose perspective influenced his work. “’Leaves of Grass’ is the flower of her temperament active in me,” Whitman wrote of his best-known work.

Critics didn’t always see it that way. Before the 1980s, the standard view was that Whitman’s mother was domineering and a complainer, Raabe said. But her complaints were founded in her circumstances. A widow, she lived in Brooklyn and then in Camden, N.J., rotating among the households of Whitman’s brothers. One of them, George Washington Whitman, held tight purse strings. Walt, who lived in Washington, D.C., was her “old standby,” as she described him, easing her life by sending her $10 postal money orders to buy coal for heat, or a new dress. 

Expressive Letters 

She, in turn, wrote to him about who had died, what was happening in the neighborhood and news about others in the family. She quoted what she read about Walt in the newspapers and reported her view of the politics of the day – she was glad that President Andrew Johnson was impeached and that Ulysses Grant was elected president, for instance. 

Louisa read a lot of newspapers – The New York Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, Greeley’s Herald, the Sun, the Chicago Illustrated News, and the London Graphic, among them. She read almanacs and fiction, such as George Sand’s novels. She was illiterate in a stylistic sense – a “formal” sense, as Walt described it. She often used phonetic spelling. An occasional closed parenthesis ended her sentences, if they were stopped at all, and she eschewed capitalization. But how could an illiterate woman write with such depth and perception? As Raabe argues, the “power and expressiveness” of her letters override any stylistic concerns. 

“Her letters offer insight into Walt’s life, but they are more important for their insights into Louisa’s own life as a subject worthy of our attention today,” he wrote. 

Louisa never intended for the letters to be made public. “burn this letter,” she wrote (without capitalization) at the close of three of them. But Walt saved them and they are preserved in traditional, print archives. Most are at Duke University’s Trent Collection of Whitmaniana and others are at the University of Texas, Yale, the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Raabe dated the letters and gave them detailed scholarly annotations and context. He provided a biography of Louisa’s life and a review of how she influenced her son’s poetry. The collection - “walter dear” - is only available online, not in a print format. 

Raabe also created a Twitter site – “MotherWhitman,” (@MotherWhitman / Twitter) where he excerpts and comments on the letters. It links to transcriptions, annotations and digital images of the original letters in the Walt Whitman Archive. 

Digitizing the Letters

“I didn’t think of it as a big project at the time – I underestimated the number of letters and how long they would take to edit,” he said. While serving as a fellow in the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, he was asked by Ken Price, editor of its Whitman Archive, if he would be interested in editing the letters. When Raabe came to Kent State in 2008 as an assistant professor of English, he took on the project of digitizing Louisa’s letters, which was funded by a grant from the National Archives. The editorial work was completed in 2013 and published last March.

He was assisted at Kent State by graduate student Felicia L. Wetzig and by Cathy Tisch of the Institute for Bibliography and Editing. 

Editing, often associated with textual scholarship, is part of the broader range of the digital humanities. This relatively new field also includes preserving and providing access to texts and provides a means to analyze patterns, conduct statistical analysis and search citation frequency, Raabe said.

This spring, Raabe is teaching a new class that he designed, “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” that will involve collaborating with the Special Collections and Archives department of the University Libraries to digitize and publish letters by Thornton Wilder. 

Digitization offers widespread access to letters that once were sealed and sent to individual recipients. Like Louisa’s injunction to “burn this letter,” an author’s personal preferences may be overridden in the quest for knowledge.

As Louisa wrote in 1869, “strange things happen in these days dont they Walt so its best not to make any calcalation” 

Margaret P. Calkins, Ph.D., is an architectural researcher with a passion for creating buildings that are comfortable for people in all states of health.

She is particularly attuned to the needs of the elderly, whose eyesight or balance may be poor or who may live with dementia.

Thinking about the edges of stairs, chairs, and countertops and how they help the elderly see and be sure-footed is part of her job. Calkins, who has consulted for many healthcare institutions and elderly housing communities, is coordinator of the Healthcare Design program for Kent State’s College of Architecture & Environmental Design.

Margaret P. Calkins

Nearly 20 years after she earned her Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Wisconsin and began consulting for care communities, there is “a lot of work still to be done in senior living communities,” she said. “When you think about environmental issues for people who are not completely able-bodied or able-minded, there are layers of approaches you can take.”

Small Changes Make a Difference

Sometimes, subtle changes that don’t scream “handicapped person” can make a big difference, physically and psychologically, to elders, who may be sensitive about their diminishing capabilities in a culture where youth and vigor are valued.

Colorful, contemporary-looking grab bars, better ambient lighting and contrasting colors can make a huge difference in comfort, she has found.  “Getting people to understand the variety of things you can do that are so helpful but don’t make it look like you’re handicapped” is part of the process of design for this age group, said Calkins, who earned her undergraduate degree at Kenyon College in psychology.

At Kenyon a course in the psychology of aesthetics first piqued her interest in designing environments. She took courses at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and got advice from her oldest brother, who was an architect in Cambridge. She wanted to specialize in the impact of design on people rather than design buildings. He convinced her that she would have more credibility with an advanced degree in architecture rather than psychology.

“I wanted to do research to give architects better information on how to design buildings,” she said.

Basing Buildings on Research

After writing a thesis on building design guidelines for people with dementia and earning her master’s degree in 1986, she went to work for Heather Hill, a nursing home in Chardon, Ohio, where a prototype memory-care, assisted living building was being planned that would rely on research-based guidelines.

She learned that the NIA was looking to fund more studies with businesses, so while she earned her Ph.D., she also incorporated a business and began consulting for health care communities. She has had $6 million worth of grant funding, much of it from the National Institutes of Health, along the way. A nonprofit research arm of her company, the IDEAS Institute, has also been awarded foundation funding from the Alzheimer’s Association and others.

Calkins was one of the first to focus on environments for people living with dementia. “It was a wide open door and I ran through,” she said. 

There was a time in England when it was more common to read and even speak in French, if you were to gain entry to the highest social class.

That English ultimately prevailed as the language of a country conquered in 1066 by the Normans is remarkable, said Susanna Fein, Ph.D., whose scholarly life has centered on the first great poet to write his most important work in English, Geoffrey Chaucer. She is the editor of The Chaucer Review and a former trustee of the New Chaucer Society.

Chaucer’s Pilgrims Penetrate the Psyche

Last summer Fein, professor of English, taught 16 master high school English teachers in a month-long National Endowment for the Humanities seminar designed to immerse them in Chaucer’s poetry and his world. The group traveled from Southwark in London to Canterbury Cathedral, a 60-mile journey tracing the pilgrimage to the site of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom that Chaucer immortalized in The Canterbury Tales. The goal was to offer the teachers new insights into tales that still resonate, more than 600 years after Chaucer wrote them.

Why did Chaucer, a creature of a court where French was common, write in English? It’s a big question, said Fein. He may have done it in imitation of Dante, whom he admired and who wrote The Divine Comedy in Italian rather than the more scholarly Latin. As Dante is known as “the father of the Italian language,” Chaucer is often called the “father of English poetry.”

The Modern in the Medieval

As any modern reader knows, the language of The Canterbury Tales bears little resemblance to contemporary English.  Yet, digging into its medieval vocabulary is well worth the effort and uncovers Chaucer’s very modern appeal, Fein said.

“He provides psychoanalysis before Freud gives us the term,” she said. “He bores into these characters.”

“There are so many layers and depths. He speaks to readers like Shakespeare does,” she said. “It’s remarkable that he creates a new persona for each story.”

As the 30 characters of Chaucer’s pilgrimage make their way from the Tabard Inn, a public house in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames in London, to Canterbury Cathedral, their tales unfold as a way to entertain themselves and compete for a free meal back at the inn when they return. The Knight, the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath and more strive to outdo each other in storytelling skill. Not all of the promised tales are told, however. Chaucer died in 1400 before finishing the work, and it may be his executors who compiled it, Fein said.

It was then copied by scribes. Adam Pinkhurst, a legal scribe, is known to have copied the two oldest of the 70-or-so existing manuscripts: the Hengwrt manuscript, now in Aberystwyth, Wales, and the beautifully illuminated Ellesmere manuscript, on view at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

The tales that are told cut deep into issues and dilemmas that we face today. “Is the Wife of Bath a feminist’s dream or a misogynist’s nightmare?” Fein asks. The Pardoner tells a dark tale about greed and drunkenness, plague and murder. “Is he a haunted character or a fraud?” she wonders. Some of the pilgrims are optimists, others cynics. Most are somewhere in between.

“Questions about ethics, belief and desire come up, character by character,” she added, with the tavern keeper-host chiming in as a sort of literary critic.

“And if I haven’t said it before, Chaucer is very funny.”

Tri-Lingual England

In addition to her work on Chaucer, Fein is a scholar of medieval manuscripts. She was invited last fall to teach a graduate class at the University of Notre Dame on a medieval manuscript known for its gathering of the early English poems known as the Harley Lyrics. This manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2253, is a collection of poetry and prose written in Middle English, French and Latin that predates Chaucer by 50 years.

Fein has edited the manuscript and expects the final volume of her three-volume edition and translation to be published in the spring. She has described the collection as full of “especially fine poems on topics such as religion, politics and love.” Like Chaucer, she noted, it is “sometimes devout, sometimes rebellious, and sometimes bawdy” and she called it one of the best anthologies of English poetry before the 16th century. Bringing the manuscript’s contents back to the surface will add to our understanding of Chaucer and medieval England, she said.

Besides medieval English, Fein works in French, Latin, Italian and German. Medieval England was tri-lingual, she noted: the Court spoke French, scholars used Latin, and the indigenous population spoke English. Some poets wrote in all three languages. Chaucer’s close friend John Gower is buried in Southwark Cathedral, and on his effigy tomb, his head rests on three books: one in Latin, one in French, and one in English.

But what scholars have often neglected until the past 15 years or so is Anglo-French, or “English French,” a Creole-type mixture that overlapped with Middle English. In editing Harley, Fein has found herself in the middle of a new field of scholarship, “the French of England.” Was it a dialect? A language of its own? How much of it was traceable to France? she wondered. “It’s a body of literature that people interested in medieval England need to read,” she said.

Fein became a medievalist after earning her B.A. in English literature from the University of Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard, where her adviser, Larry D. Benson, was in the midst of editing The Riverside Chaucer, which became the standard scholarly edition.

Editing and bringing to life medieval texts has engaged her ever since. She looks for gaps in texts, things that other editors hadn’t noticed.

Her students today are primed for medieval texts by their interest in Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, she said. The tales of Robin Hood also continue to have relevance, with their themes of economic justice and rich versus poor.

“You can play off those tastes,” she said.

But Chaucer remains, for her, at the center of her study, a masterful poet who is essentially modern in his analysis of his pilgrims and their psychological interplay.

“He’s seeing that the world is refracted by the way that people of all kinds see it.”

James Tyner has made many expeditions to Cambodia as part of his research on the violence that occurred in Cambodia’s “killing fields.” When he’s not teaching, Tyner, professor of geography, spends most of his professional time helping the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) piece together the locations and conditions that led to the deaths of approximately 2 million Cambodians.

For Tyner, geography may be more than a spot on the map. It’s about understanding the relationship between space and violence. Tyner has examined ties between violence and their associated landscapes for more than 20 years. In addition to his research on Cambodia, Tyner has published geographical works on topics ranging from black radicalism in the U.S. to the exploitation of migrant Filipino workers. Tyner traces his interest in geography to his parents, who were both geography teachers. When Tyner was a child growing up in California, his parents took him along on road trips across North America as his father prepared for fall classes. They took pictures of grain silos and cornfields rather than tourist attractions.

“The inspiration or experience that comes from that is not tourism but to experience places in their everydayness,” Tyner said. “We would travel around and begin to see relationships between the different objects in the landscapes.” 

Collaboration in Cambodia 

Tyner studied geography in college and received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1995. After receiving his doctorate, Tyner worked as an instructor and lecturer at several California universities before accepting a position at Kent State in 1997.

Over his 20-year career, Tyner has written 12 books and published 48 peer-reviewed articles in major geography and social-science journals. He also has made 76 scholarly presentations around the world. Tyner has received approximately $325,000 in external grants to conduct his research.

The major funding organizations include the United States Geological Society and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Tyner has had an NSF grant for his collaboration with DC-Cam, an independent Cambodian research institute. The goal of his work is to identify the location of various structures present during the period and determine how they were built, why they were built and what happened there. 

The structures are either directly or indirectly related to Khmer Rouge’s attempt to boost rice production through irrigation. The regime forced millions of people into the countryside to work on the irrigation systems, which included the construction of dikes, canals and dams. Khmer Rouge also built prisons to discipline workers and created mass graves. Some of these sites no longer exist.

As part of his research efforts, Tyner interviews Khmer Rouge survivors or residents who lived during the period. He also uses GPS technology to map the locations. His encounters with the local residents bring to life the horrors the people in that area experienced. 

Helping Students Understand Violence

One of Tyner’s primary goals as a professor is to raise his students’ awareness and understanding of violence in society. He’s taken two of his students to Cambodia to conduct field research. Perhaps even more rewarding are the opportunities his research has brought to the Cambodian people.

Tyner used part of the NSF funds to bring two Cambodian students to Kent State so they could study for their master’s degrees. The students, Savina Sirik and Sokvisal Kimsroy, enrolled in the geography program at Kent State. They were selected based on their knowledge of the Cambodian genocide. Both students lost family members during the Khmer Rouge era.

“They will be able to contribute through first-hand research to the documentation and empirical interpretation of the genocide,” Tyner said. 

Long before emails, text messages and tweets became preferred for personal communication, hand-written letters carried news, gossip and intimate details of life from one person to another. Letters, like their electronic counterparts, were sometimes indiscreet. They conveyed anger, exasperation, humor, observations about life and love, and family history. Unlike their 140-character successors, they could range for pages, but like them, they might be sent – and delivered by the postal service – more than once a day.

Long missives written in a cursive hand with little or no punctuation form a 170-letter collection from the mother of poet Walt Whitman to her son. Edited, annotated and prepared for the 21st century’s digital formats by Wesley Raabe, Ph.D., associate professor of English, they are now available to scholars and the public on a website, “walter dear,” that is part of the electronic Walt Whitman Archive.

The letters of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman offer insight on the great American poet and the woman whose perspective influenced his work. “’Leaves of Grass’ is the flower of her temperament active in me,” Whitman wrote of his best-known work.

Critics didn’t always see it that way. Before the 1980s, the standard view was that Whitman’s mother was domineering and a complainer, Raabe said. But her complaints were founded in her circumstances. A widow, she lived in Brooklyn and then in Camden, N.J., rotating among the households of Whitman’s brothers. One of them, George Washington Whitman, held tight purse strings. Walt, who lived in Washington, D.C., was her “old standby,” as she described him, easing her life by sending her $10 postal money orders to buy coal for heat, or a new dress. 

Expressive Letters 

She, in turn, wrote to him about who had died, what was happening in the neighborhood and news about others in the family. She quoted what she read about Walt in the newspapers and reported her view of the politics of the day – she was glad that President Andrew Johnson was impeached and that Ulysses Grant was elected president, for instance. 

Louisa read a lot of newspapers – The New York Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, Greeley’s Herald, the Sun, the Chicago Illustrated News, and the London Graphic, among them. She read almanacs and fiction, such as George Sand’s novels. She was illiterate in a stylistic sense – a “formal” sense, as Walt described it. She often used phonetic spelling. An occasional closed parenthesis ended her sentences, if they were stopped at all, and she eschewed capitalization. But how could an illiterate woman write with such depth and perception? As Raabe argues, the “power and expressiveness” of her letters override any stylistic concerns. 

“Her letters offer insight into Walt’s life, but they are more important for their insights into Louisa’s own life as a subject worthy of our attention today,” he wrote. 

Louisa never intended for the letters to be made public. “burn this letter,” she wrote (without capitalization) at the close of three of them. But Walt saved them and they are preserved in traditional, print archives. Most are at Duke University’s Trent Collection of Whitmaniana and others are at the University of Texas, Yale, the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Raabe dated the letters and gave them detailed scholarly annotations and context. He provided a biography of Louisa’s life and a review of how she influenced her son’s poetry. The collection - “walter dear” - is only available online, not in a print format. 

Raabe also created a Twitter site – “MotherWhitman,” (@MotherWhitman / Twitter) where he excerpts and comments on the letters. It links to transcriptions, annotations and digital images of the original letters in the Walt Whitman Archive. 

Digitizing the Letters

“I didn’t think of it as a big project at the time – I underestimated the number of letters and how long they would take to edit,” he said. While serving as a fellow in the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, he was asked by Ken Price, editor of its Whitman Archive, if he would be interested in editing the letters. When Raabe came to Kent State in 2008 as an assistant professor of English, he took on the project of digitizing Louisa’s letters, which was funded by a grant from the National Archives. The editorial work was completed in 2013 and published last March.

He was assisted at Kent State by graduate student Felicia L. Wetzig and by Cathy Tisch of the Institute for Bibliography and Editing. 

Editing, often associated with textual scholarship, is part of the broader range of the digital humanities. This relatively new field also includes preserving and providing access to texts and provides a means to analyze patterns, conduct statistical analysis and search citation frequency, Raabe said.

This spring, Raabe is teaching a new class that he designed, “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” that will involve collaborating with the Special Collections and Archives department of the University Libraries to digitize and publish letters by Thornton Wilder. 

Digitization offers widespread access to letters that once were sealed and sent to individual recipients. Like Louisa’s injunction to “burn this letter,” an author’s personal preferences may be overridden in the quest for knowledge.

As Louisa wrote in 1869, “strange things happen in these days dont they Walt so its best not to make any calcalation” 

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