Peace Resource Center to Expand Reach with Digital Exhibits

$15,000 Ohio Humanities Council Grant Providing Technical Support The Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College seeks to expand the scope of its peace and social justice mission via online digital exhibits that will literally make incredible stories of the peace and antinuclear movements come alive on the Internet. The PRC received a $15,000 media grant from the Ohio Humanities Council for a Japanese professor to provide the technical support necessary to instruct its staff and students in creating a digital exhibit featuring Barbara Reynold’s World Peace Study Mission in 1964. Reynolds founded the PRC in 1975. “Digital humanities — this a new way for making our archives more accessible and relevant for expanded audiences beyond the physical Peace Resource Center,” said PRC director Dr. Tanya Maus. Maus met Dr. Hidenori Watanave, associate professor of systems design at Tokyo Metropolitan University, when he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University last year. Due to his interest in peace and the atomic bombings, Watanave requested to visit the Peace Resource Center last June, where he presented his digital design and digital archives. Watanave invited Maus to co-sponsor his Technologies of Peace conference at the United Nations and Harvard and, through this, their relationship evolved. Maus and two students attended the conference last fall. “After viewing the integration of digital mapping and humanities content presented by Dr. Watanave, we decided to pursue a collaboration in which he and his graduate students would provide technical support in designing a digital exhibit for the PRC,” Maus said. She added that, using the open source digital mapping platform known as Cesium js, the exhibit will feature “dazzling three-dimensional renderings, floating portraits, historical photographs, video stills, audio clips and much more in telling the story of the World Peace Study Mission — and, especially, those Ohioans who participated in it.” In 1964, Reynolds organized 27 survivors of the atomic bombing and 14 translators to travel with her to the United States, France, United Kingdom and USSR — then the world’s handful of nuclear powers. The delegation met with Pres. Harry Truman while in the U.S. “Barbara Reynolds possessed a deep desire to eliminate nuclear weapons,” Maus said, noting Reynolds was active in Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after the bombings in 1945. “She also brought this mission of folks to Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus and her hometown of Yellow Springs while they toured the United States. “Barbara’s compelling story of political and civic engagement can now be part of a very large educational outreach,” Maus added, noting she wishes to make the exhibit available in schools so those lessons about nuclear warfare shared by the bombing survivors will not be forgotten. “We greatly appreciate the Ohio Humanities Council’s support in making this digital exhibit possible.” Watanave and his team will come to the Peace Resource Center in July, according to Maus, who is planning a symposium in September 2018 for unveiling the exhibit. Other partners on this project include Antioch College and Wright State University.