Elders’ stories are bringing digital models of lost communities to life

At 5-year mark, Ghost Neighborhoods project aims to pick up speed

Ohio State University

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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Some of the 3D digital models created by researchers to depict lost neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, tell a clear story by placing the “ghosts” of houses that were demolished for freeway construction atop the roadways now occupying that land.

But by talking to the people who lived in these communities, scientists are filling in historic gaps that technology can’t fill, adding trees, cars, people, photographs and life stories to the digitized infrastructure that was an initial focus of the work.

The research team from The Ohio State University has published an update on the Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus project in the International Journal of Digital Humanities, reporting on the technology workflow, including solutions to bottlenecks they’ve encountered, and acknowledging a slow start to community engagement that hums along nicely these days. The team aims to put both the digital work and story collection on a faster track.

Launched in early 2021, the project has digitally reconstructed three historically Black communities that were fragmented or demolished to make way for new freeways under the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Prompted by a Columbus Dispatch article describing the heartbreak of highways being built through neighborhoods, the researchers set out to recount the human impact of urban renewal decisions of the past, hoping that these historic insights could have a positive impact on any future development.

“Doing this in a community-engaged way is not trivial,” said senior study author Harvey Miller, professor of geography and director of Ohio State’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA). “What we’re trying to do is show how we went about making sure that these models not only have validity, but that they actually reflect what people remember, what these neighborhoods used to look like – and also add value to the community.”

While the project started as a purely scientific pursuit, the digital models and accompanying stories have found a future permanent home. The Poindexter Village African American Museum, set to open in 2028, will have a room dedicated to the Ghost Neighborhoods, said Shelbi Toone, project director for the museum, which will be the newest site within the Ohio History Connection system.

Poindexter Village, an early U.S. public housing project and the only one dedicated to African American residents, is one area recaptured in 3D models by CURA researchers. Only two of the 35 original apartment buildings still stand, and those structures, connected by an atrium to be built between them, will house the new museum.

The other communities modeled in the project are Hanford Village as it looked in 1961 and Mount Vernon Avenue in 1951. Much of Hanford Village, established in the early 1900s and expanded during World War II to house Black veterans, was razed for construction of I-70 in the 1960s. Mount Vernon Avenue was a busy commercial corridor in the mid-20th century before its connection to Downtown was severed by construction of I-71.

Miller and colleagues reported in 2023 on using machine learning to extract data from Sanborn fire insurance maps to create digital models. Since then, the researchers have focused on efforts to automate the generation of 3D models that are historically accurate, which has been a taller order.

Graduate student Tshui Mum (Summer) Ha has been working on ways to streamline and accelerate the 3D modeling process. This includes finding similar groups of buildings based on their shapes and semantic attributes – such as the number of stories, building use and construction materials – identifying their architectural elements, and developing templates for 3D modeling. 

“Many existing studies have been using just the exterior walls of the buildings for clustering. We realized that including semantic attributes of those building footprints is a huge improvement compared to just looking at the exterior walls. We also found that having interior lines of the buildings may hold additional value to further improve the clustering results, and this will be our next step,” Ha said.

“The better we can cluster these buildings, the better we can understand their distinctive architectural styles and the more accurately we can generate plausible 3D models at scale. We are benchmarking these methods that, hopefully, we would be able to identify the most effective approach to help us speed up the modeling process.”

The goal to speed things up is, in part, related to making community engagement as productive as possible.

To date, the team has been building historically accurate models and then asking for elder feedback in a variety of ways, often attending community meetings with stickers and storyboards that attendees use to add finishing touches that bring the models to life.

“For all three neighborhoods, we’re adding more realistic backgrounds like brick streets and grass so it’s not just a map,” Miller said. “What we’d like to do is generate a first approximation of a neighborhood using accelerated techniques, engage people in the process early on, and come back later with a more polished product. Not too far in the future, we expect to be able to take a laptop with 3D models, ask people, ‘What do you think about this building?’ and make adjustments on the spot.”

Toone, the museum project director, connected the CURA team with James Preston Poindexter Foundation historians and elders to record oral histories related to landmarks and neighborhoods in the models, which will also be featured in the museum.

“I thought this was something that people need to see and experience. It needs to be tangible to the public,” said Toone, also a co-author of the paper. “There’s a lot of narrative to tell when you pull back to 1940 and really talk about the thriving neighborhood that used to be there. And I think it gives people a true sense of preservation and understanding of what was here through the technology since so many of these buildings have turned over, been demolished or changed.”

Soon, the team plans to ask elders for suggestions for other lost-city themes – ideas for churches and the funk music scene have been floated so far – that should be similarly digitally re-created with accompanying stories.

“One important thing is that we’re trying to establish a platform for people in the community to tell their stories,” Miller said. “They’re not our stories – they’re theirs.”

This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Battelle Engineering, Technology and Human Affairs endowment at Ohio State.

Additional Ohio State co-authors include Ningchuan Xiao, Matthew Lewis, Mostahidul Alam, Oliver Gwynn, Michelle Hooper, Karyn Kerdolff, Gavin Levine, Yuantai Li, Mahnoush Mostafavisabet, Joshua Sadvari, Josie Stiver, Jordan Swaim-Fox, Shubh Thakkar, Ahmad Ilderim Tokey and Di Wang.

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Journal

International Journal of Digital Humanities

DOI

10.1007/s42803-026-00122-2 

Article Title

From historical maps to lived experiences: A community-engaged approach to 3D urban modeling of neighborhoods prior to urban highways and urban renewal

Article Publication Date

9-Mar-2026

 

From beats to people power: U-M Wallenberg Fellow amplifies protest music in the Philippines

University of Michigan

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How does music strengthen organizing and progressive movements in the Philippines? How does politically driven music shape public awareness of social issues—and how do artists craft and communicate those messages through their lyrics and intent?

 

Those are some of the questions that University of Michigan student Lukas Nepomuceno, winner of the 2026 Raoul Wallenberg Fellowship, wants to soon answer.

 

"Music can be quite an abstract theme, but there are also material conditions that shape its production and creation," he said. "Given the country's immense cultural diversity, there are so many voices and so much music that remain unheard in the Philippines. I recognize the technology gap there and want to pay close attention to those material realities. I hope to contribute to a society that truly provides its artists with the resources and support needed to bring that music to life."

 

Born and raised in San Diego, Nepomuceno is majoring in music and technology. He was always immersed in music, taking classical piano lessons at an early age. In high school, he learned jazz and began composing electronic songs. This motivated his application to U-M's Performing Arts Technology program.

 

"My journey at U-M has helped me grow so much," Nepomuceno said. "The community I have found here, especially in the Filipino American Student Association, has been one of the most important things to me in the past years, in terms of identity, organizing, education and culture."

 

Chasing the soundtrack of change

 

Although Filipino, Nepomuceno said he was not deeply connected to his heritage or to issues in the Philippines. During COVID, he enrolled in an online ethnic studies class. It was his first introduction to a culturally relevant education. 

 

"I began to learn how migrants, including Filipino migrants, have been historically commodified, exploited and controlled under U.S. policy and laws," he said. "I then noticed issues going on there and sought more political education throughout college. I found so much community in organizations full of passionate and curious youth like me. 

 

"I started to understand more deeply the root problems that created the conditions for our families to migrate here and therefore also how much must be fought for to genuinely address them."

 

Nepomuceno's trip to the Philippines last summer changed how he understands the country's past and present problems. He realized those issues are closely tied to identity struggles experienced by Filipino youth who grew up in the U.S.

 

"I realized a lot of my personal and professional goals necessitated going back to the Philippines to gain an even deeper understanding of its conditions, its culture and its people," he said. 

 

"This fellowship stood out to me as that opportunity to unite so many different aspects of my life: music, language, community, politics, history and so much more. Especially watching many emerging movements against corruption being led by the youth in the past year. It felt like a genuine way to follow the momentum, to both learn from and contribute to it." 

 

Where songs become strategy 

 

Nepomuceno will graduate from U-M's School of Music, Theatre and Dance this May and will return to the Philippines in August for about a year. 

 

Honoring Wallenberg, a noted U-M alumnus and World War II diplomat who helped save tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, the fellowship provides $25,000 for an independent learning or exploration project anywhere in the world during the year after graduation.

 

"Under a transnational moment of protests sparked by anti-corruption ideals and youth leadership, I will examine how progressive movements in the Philippines use music to empower communities," Nepomuceno said. "So, I will travel to several regions where modern, cultural and folk styles of the Philippines uniquely blend.

 

"There, I will strengthen my understanding of art's role in the movement by learning from past and current artists. Working alongside grassroots music-making collectives, I aim to co-build workshops and research that identify and rectify the material limitations to this participation."

 

Nepomuceno wants to make an album about his journey in the Philippines, sharing the stories of the people and artists he meets along the way.

 

"These could be from recording sessions covering existing protest songs along with new material from collaboration, as a case study and product of my own research," he said. "The album will be supplemented by clips from interviews and field recordings. Because my focus is on sharing the stories of each artist and collaborator with the broader Filipino diaspora, I will ensure they are properly credited in accordance with each collaborator's wishes."

Scribbles of discontent: Graffiti and banyulatin as works of literature

Ateneo de Manila University

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The law often dismisses graffiti as “destruction,” “anarchy,” or even as mere “dirt.” But new research from the Ateneo de Manila University’s Filipino Department reveals what laws may not: that graffiti can be seen as works of literature emerging from unequal access to space and speech. Indeed, vandalism and bathroom graffiti—banyulatin in Filipino—beg us to ask why someone felt compelled to write them in the first place.

When speech is pushed out of public life, it finds refuge in the margins: spray-paint scrawls sinking into walls and corners, words etched into bathroom stalls. Graffiti settles into spaces where the authority’s gaze is less sharp. Although public spaces are often imagined as open and neutral, in truth, they are sites of contestation: places where power decides whose voices may linger and whose must fade quietly into the cracks. 

Faculty researcher Harvey James G. Castillo listens closely to these voices. His work reveals that graffiti and banyulatin are far from mindless acts of vandalism; instead, they are honest attempts to be heard when power silences dissent. These suppressed forms of writing ask us to read beyond policy and see literature as an instrument where repression and expression meet.  

Drawing on Filipino literature, Castillo shows how graffiti is shaped by risk anchored in spatial struggle. Anger, humor, political critique, and despair surface in these markings because official forums often cannot accommodate them. Public walls, then, become grounds for voices excluded from dominant narratives of progress and civility. 

These spatial politics show how power governs not just what is said, but where it appears. As Castillo posits, some spaces become permissible only when the state controls the message it once condemned, even as other spaces become criminalized. In this front-and-back politics of space, names of the wealthy are displayed in plain view, while informal markings of the marginalized are pushed to the back and hidden parts of infrastructure. Literature often highlights bathrooms as semi-private spaces where authority loosens, and anonymity frees people to speak more openly. Here, banyulatin becomes conversations of collective tensions and anxieties.

Exposing how legal approaches to graffiti fall short, Castillo turns to Philippine literature as a site of liberation. While laws may seek to punish and paint over graffiti, literature restores context—situating these writings within specific historical moments, including dictatorship, class struggle, and social surveillance. In this light, graffiti is not simply an offense, but a kind of testimony. It transforms into voices that persist and echo long after walls have been repainted countless times.

When one reads these walls through the lens of literature, following the stories that fill their cracks and corners, one uncovers narratives of hope, defiance, and a refusal to be erased from the social fabric. In spaces where survival and resistance take root, these writings continue to matter: today, as questions of voice and belonging intensify, graffiti remains a vital intervention in public discourse. 

What was once dismissed as noise becomes something to be read, interpreted, and remembered. 

Harvey James G. Castillo published “Tinig-Karakter sa mga Pader: Graffiti, Bandalismo, at mga Banyulatin sa Piling Panitikang Filipino” in Humanities Diliman: A Journal on Philippine Humanities in December 2025. 

 

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Method of Research

Observational study

Article Title

Tinig-Karakter sa mga Pader: Graffiti, Bandalismo, at mga Banyulatin sa Piling Panitikang Filipino (Character-Voices on Walls: Graffiti, Vandalism, and Latrinalia in Select Philippine Literature)

 

Rethinking dementia: New book argues attention — not memory — may be the earliest warning sign

Swansea University

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A New Approach to Dementia: Examining Attention Impairment, authored by Professor Andrea Tales from the School of Health and Social Care alongside colleagues and former students, is one of the first books to place attention impairments — rather than memory dysfunction — at the centre of understanding the syndrome.

Drawing on a growing body of research, the authors highlight that changes in attention are common across different forms of dementia and can appear even earlier than memory problems. They argue that recognising these changes could support earlier identification, more accurate diagnosis, and improved care for those affected.

Professor Tales, Personal Chair in Neuropsychology and Dementia Research, said: “Working with current and former students has been a privilege and always an enjoyable experience. This book builds on our first volume, which explored sensory and perceptual changes and was co-produced with people living with dementia and their caregivers. I’m proud that our collaborative approach continues to grow, helping us shine a light on aspects of dementia that are too often overlooked.”

The book spans foundational theory, clinical practice, and lived experience. It examines how attention and executive function interact, how automatic and controlled processes shift in dementia, and why current diagnostic pathways — which rely heavily on memory testing — often miss early attentional symptoms.

The authors also explore the challenge of defining “attention” itself, drawing on classic ideas, everyday language, and modern cognitive science.

A chapter written from a carer’s perspective brings these concepts into everyday life, while another introduces attention restoration theory and the potential for natural environments to reduce attentional overload.

As well as its scientific contribution, the book is a distinctive example of academic collaboration. Conceived by Professor Tales, it brings together colleagues and former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who continue to work closely after completing their studies at Swansea.

The group has committed to producing a series of books designed to advance the field while also giving early-career researchers valuable experience in publishing beyond journal articles and communicating research to wider audiences. A third volume, focusing on technology and dementia, is already in development.

Co-author Dr Clive Thomas, Programme Manager for the Strategic Programme for Mental Health at NHS Wales Performance and Improvement, said: “Working with Professor Andrea Tales from my professional doctorate onwards has been invaluable. Her understanding of the tensions between clinical practice and academic enquiry helped me see why conventional, memory‑focused assessment services need to evolve.

“Our collaboration has continued over many years, driven by a shared belief in the need for system change and in exploring under‑examined aspects of dementia. I’m grateful to contribute to this book series and to ongoing work with Andrea and the Swansea University team.”

Published by Taylor & Francis, the book is available now.