Welcome to Plant Humanities Lab

The Plant Humanities Lab is an innovative digital space that supports the interdisciplinary study of plants from the various perspectives of the arts, sciences, and humanities, to explore their extraordinary significance to human culture.

Humans rely on plants for our most fundamental individual and social needs: from food, medicine, and construction to our encounters with them in art and literature. Although we think of plants as rooted in place, their global travels over the millennia offer fascinating pathways into the past and illuminate some of the most burning issues of today, including legacies of colonial violence and displacement. Climate change, habitat loss, and accelerated species extinctions add to the urgency of researching plant–human interactions and acknowledging the importance of plants in our environment.

So Many Stories to Tell

The Plant Humanities Lab presents fascinating stories of plants from far-flung places around the world. Consider the cassava: poisonous when eaten raw, it was rendered harmless by indigenous methods of processing this plant into food, so that today it is a diet staple of more than 600 million people. You can use an interactive map to follow cassava’s travels from the Americas, where it was already being cultivated in 8000 BCE, to its global distribution today. Beautiful images—from a remarkable ceramic by a Moche artist living in present-day Peru to a colored print by the eighteenth-century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian—allow us to reconstruct this story. The stories presented here, all of which have been peer reviewed, showcase the global mobility of plants in the context of their economic, aesthetic, medicinal, culinary, political, and cultural significance. Follow these guided interactive tours or explore the many resources we offer as starting points for your own explorations.

A Tool for Storytellers

The Plant Humanities Lab is the flagship implementation of Juncture, a new, open-source tool developed by JSTOR Labs that helps researchers and students make complex arguments and tell compelling stories. With Juncture, students and scholars can create subject-specific multidisciplinary and multimedia websites consisting of visual narratives featuring interactive map and image components; IIIF images with zooming, panning, and annotation; an image-comparison widget; network visualization; and a Global Plants specimen viewer. The tool is flexible and scalable to meet the needs of diverse users, including students engaged in project-based learning and using the results of the Plant Humanities Lab discovery component to “seed” their own visual essays. For beginners, essays will be relatively simple, but as digital skills improve, users can incorporate interactive maps, high-resolution, annotated images, and more. Since the technologies used for these features are standard and open source, any skills developed using Juncture will be transferable to other efforts.

The Plant Humanities Lab and Juncture are works in progress. We will continue to refine both, and we welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement. Juncture is open source; if you are a developer or part of a team creating a new interdisciplinary resource featuring interactive storytelling, please consider making use of and contributing to the project.

Project Background

In September 2018, Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR Labs received grants from the Mellon Foundation to develop a digital platform and scholarly programming to advance the field of plant humanities.

Bringing together humanists and digital technology experts, the Plant Humanities Lab was developed collaboratively by Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR Labs as a component of the Plant Humanities Initiative.

The plant narratives presented here emerge from the interests of an interdisciplinary team whose members span various career stages, from doctoral and post-doctoral researchers and undergraduates to graduate summer participants of the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative. As we add more stories, data, and additional features, we will continue to strive for a broad range of perspectives, historical periods, and geographies.

About Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks is a research institute, museum, and historic garden of Harvard University. Founded in 1940 and located in Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks supports advanced research in Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies through fellowships, publications, and scholarly events. Dumbarton Oaks also welcomes the public to the museum, garden, concerts, and a rich program of lectures and conferences. The Plant Humanities Initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, draws on the riches of the rare book collection that is particularly strong in garden history, landscape architecture, botanical illustration, and plant history. In addition to the Plant Humanities Lab developed in collaboration with JSTOR Labs, the Plant Humanities Initiative encompasses post-doctoral and academic-year fellowships, a summer program with a digital skill-building component, publications, study days, an exhibition of botanical art, and a conference in 2022.

About JSTOR Labs

JSTOR Labs partners with the scholarly community to develop and incubate experimental tools that expand access to knowledge. JSTOR Labs employs an agile, iterative, and user-focused approach that is inspired by the “design thinking” and “lean startup” communities. The team has employed these methods to develop tools like Text Analyzer, which helps users to auto-text-mine pieces of writing (whether a published article or a user’s draft paper) and discover relevant scholarly writings, and The JSTOR Understanding Series, which maps and connects each line or passage from often-taught primary texts to all the scholarly articles quoting that line. Working with JSTOR Global Plants, the team also developed Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition, which was one of the inspirations for the Plant Humanities Initiative.