Digital Humanities

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I’m a dabbler at heart, and working in a digital humanities center provides ample space to explore tools, technologies, methods, and disciplines. In any given week, I might be working on data visualization, digital pedagogy, or web development. And although I’m a medieval Irish historian by training, I often find myself visiting other fields like African American poetry, 19th century women’s literature, or linguistics. That breadth is a necessity for working in a center like IRIS, which supports digital research and pedagogy across the humanities and social sciences. But I also find that it informs my own work in exciting ways, giving me access to intellectual discourses and models that would otherwise seem peripheral.

The artifacts below speak to some of the themes that guide my work in digital humanities. They include projects I’ve worked on, resources I’ve created, and sites I’ve developed.

Ongoing Projects

In my own research, I do a lot of visualization of spatial and social networks in medieval Ireland. You can find some of my mapping work on Sites of Negotiation, a landing page for my projects that touch on spatial history. In particular, I’ve been working extensively this summer on Submission Strategies: The Irish Submissions to Richard II, 1395, a project that visualizes transnational social networks in fourteenth-century Ireland. You can read more about those projects over on my Medieval History page.

IRIS Center Projects

There’s always a lot going on in IRIS, and I’m actively working on many projects. I’m especially excited about these three, because they focus on students as collaborators. They’re designed to allow students to ask their own questions, do meaningful research, and work alongside faculty.

Digital Humanities Peer Review

I spend a lot of time thinking about digital humanities peer review, both in my role at the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers and as a practicing digital humanist. We talk a lot about peer review as a means of making DH legible as scholarship to administrators and hiring committees. But I also think it’s a crucial mechanism for helping our projects participate in scholarly discourses in our fields. To that end, I’ve put together some working documents on peer review with an eye toward my own field of medieval Irish history, and I’ve also developed a peer review model for the Recovery Hub that builds on the Reviews in DH model.

DH How-Tos

A big part of my role as I see it is to reduce the barriers to entry into digital humanities. It can be daunting to think about picking the right platform from the huge ecosystem of tools and technologies out there, let alone learning how to use it. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. So I try to produce clear, simple guides to platforms that are free and easy to use, with the goal of supporting new DH practitioners from the start of their project to the finish.

In the last year or so, I’ve begun using Observable for a lot of my own visualizations, and I love how interactive it is – not just interactive visualizations, but interactive workbooks, where I can teach the process of creating the visualization. Here’s a quick tutorial I put together for visualizing the network data from the AvantRelationships plugin for Omeka Classic.

As part of my work co-directing “Expanding Access to the Digital Humanities in St. Louis,” an NEH-funded project through the St. Louis Area Digital Humanities Network, I’ve been creating some resources for teaching with DH tools. My goal in general is to reduce barriers to entry into DH pedagogy by reducing jargon, curating existing classroom materials, and providing beginner-friendly guides to free and easy to use tools.

Along similar lines, I put together a quick and dirty guide to DIY sustainability for digital humanities projects. Feel free to contribute to this one too!

A lot of those how-tos also take the shape of our IRIS Center Morning Bytes workshops, where I try to balance big-picture concerns with hands-on walk-throughs.