The fourth class of Digital Humanities Summer Scholars has been selected, and the students are ready to start exploring both their research topics and DH tools and methods. Research & Instruction Librarian Angela Perkins will lead the scholars, who will begin meeting on May 15. The eight scholars were selected through a competitive process and will complete a six-week internship during which they will engage with Digital Humanities in order to build a research project of their own design.
This year’s DH Summer Scholars:
Uchechi Anomnachi, Class of 2019, Biology major, will expand on previous research on cultural interaction between Japan and African Americans, using African American appreciation of anime as a springboard, through an interactive timeline or map.
Ben Gordon, Class of 2019, Data Science and Music major, is conducting deeper research into data culled for his ArcGIS independent study on the Metropolitan Transit Authority New York City Subway.
Elene Jalagonia, Class of 2020, Economics major, is focused on visualizing political, cultural, and societal tools (including cultural artifacts like newspapers) that might have provoked ethnic conflict, stoking the Abkhazian and Ossetian secessionist movements in the country of Southern Caucasus Georgia.
Trang Le, Class of 2021, English major, is interested in the appearance of the food of Hanoi in Vietnamese literature and how it reflects the people of Hanoi, which she plans to present as an interactive cultural map.
Norman Lee, Class of 2019, Philosophy and English major, intends to use digital tools like IssueDiscovery, SentiStrength, and Jigsaw to identify and define the “zeitgeist” for countries with the highest social media usage through analysis of the associated demographic data.
Shelby Murrell, Class of 2019, Art and English major, will perform text analysis of the 15th century treatise on witchcraft, The Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”) using text mining or topic modeling tools like MALLET, in addition to analysis of its accompanying illustrations.
Tracey Robinson, Class of 2019, Film and Media Studies major, aims to examine the painful atmosphere of violence and drugs in the low-income communities of Philadelphia, and how music has provided a positive voice and creative outlet for young adults based there, in preparation for a future documentary.
Angela Shi (Yu Shi), Class of 2021, Computer Science and Comparative Literature major, will research relationships between different religions throughout history through travel narratives to Jerusalem up until the 21st century, using deep learning and data mining algorithms applied to these texts.