Western Mining Humanities

Field Notes: Building the Ground Floor for the Western Mining Humanities

There's a particular kind of design problem that shows up when you're asked to build a website for a website that doesn't exist yet. That was the assignment this month: a landing page for Western Mining Humanities, a new research cluster taking root at the University of Wyoming. The full platform — a digital atlas of mines, boomtowns, and labor histories across the Powder River Basin and the old Union Pacific coal towns — launches this September. Until then, the site needed one thing to do its job well: tell people something is coming, and tell them what kind of something.

Why this matters, publicly

Mining history in Wyoming rarely gets told as a humanities question. It lives in geology departments, in energy policy, in economic development reports — rarely in the same room as labor history, immigration, art, and memory. Western Mining Humanities is built to put those rooms together: historians, archaeologists, a digital collections librarian, a drawing professor working in charcoal and coal dust, an energy-identities researcher, public humanities scholars. The premise is that you can't understand a coal seam, or a ghost town, or a labor strike, from inside a single discipline — and that this kind of work belongs in public view, not locked in academic journals. A landing page is a small thing, but it's the first place that premise becomes visible to anyone outside the university.

Starting from the ground, literally

The cluster's own proposal gave us the material to work with. Coal mining in Wyoming isn't an abstraction — it's the Rock Springs Massacre, the Hanna disasters, Chinese and Black and immigrant labor histories, ghost towns like Carbon and Dana, boom-and-bust economies that shaped how whole communities understand themselves. So the design took the proposal's own language of depth and layers literally: the page reads top to bottom as a core sample, moving through bands of surface, subsoil, and shale down into a coal seam — dark, warm-lit, holding the announcement itself. A depth ruler down the left edge doubles as a timeline, marking real dates from the region's mining history alongside the page's own present moment. Depth becomes time; the further you scroll, the further back you go.

Small choices, one signature

Most of the page stays quiet — an industrial condensed display face for headlines, a humanities serif for the read, monospace labels doing the work of field notes and survey marks. The one moment we let ourselves have fun with: the word "Humanities" in the hero title sits outlined rather than filled, an empty seam waiting to be cut. It won't stay empty forever — that's the point. Below the fold, a short "core sample" previews the threads the cluster's researchers are already pulling: labor and migration, boomtowns and ghost towns, art and extraction, mapping the coalfield, and energy futures — interdisciplinary by design, not by afterthought.

Partners: University of Wyoming: History, Public Humanities, American Studies, Geology, Visual Arts