Digital Humanities Fellows Panel & Luncheon

As the semester winds down, we’d like to invite you to join us for our year-end Digital Humanities Graduate Student Fellows panel. Lunch will follow the presentation. Please plan to come for the presentation and stay for the refreshments! Nora Benedict is a PhD candidate (defended in February!) in the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese. Her dissertation, “The Fashioning of Jorge Luis Borges: Magazines, Books, and Print Culture in Argentina (1930-1951),” focuses on the marked presence of books (and book production) in this Argentine writer’s life by examining the physical features of his works, which she reads through the lens of analytical bibliography and material studies.

As a Digital Humanities Fellow in the Scholars’ Lab, Nora has worked with Leaflet (JavaScript, GeoJSON), Jekyll (KML, CSV, YAML), and a few other out-of-the-box tools to develop a mapping and data visualization project that traces the role of publishers and printers in Jorge Luis Borges’s Argentina (1930-1951) and provides a digital archive of the records of the physical features of books from this moment and time in history. In light of the fact that there are virtually no extant publishers’ archives from the Argentine firms she has researched, she created her DH project as a way to give future scholars access to much of the raw data she created throughout the dissertation process and, hopefully, provide them with a resource to create projects of their own.

Shane Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Department of History. In support of his dissertation on the interconnected development of civilian encryption technology and digital privacy rights, Shane’s project analyzes Usenet conversations about cryptography and privacy between 1981 and 2000. Usenet was an early digital communications network, a key precursor to Web discussion forums and later online communities and social networks. In its heyday, it offered a genuinely vast sampling of public, potentially pseudonymous discussion organized neatly into hierarchies of “newsgroups” as diverse as alt.sex, rec.drugs, and alt.rock-n-roll. Over the course of his Digital Humanities Fellowship, Shane has written a set of software tools to scrape and process the raw data from select newsgroups, discover adjacent groups and key figures of influence, and map the flow of ideas and networks of interaction across domains and time.

Leif Fredrickson is a PhD candidate in history. His dissertation, titled the “The Age of Lead,” examines the relationship between metropolitan development and environmental inequality. He is the Ambrose Monell Fellow in Technology and Democracy, Miller Center of Public Affairs. He was previously a Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he worked on the interactive historical mapping project American Panorama.

As a fellow for the Scholar’s Lab, Leif has been developing a website, enviro-history.com, that will be host visualizations, writing and multi-media projects related to environmental history. He is using jekyll to the build the website, and has been working on several map visualizations for the website using ArcGIS and javascript map visualization libraries.

Questions?

Contact Scholars' Lab Assistant Director for Public Services Laura Miller.