Kami Ahrens, Jonathan Cheng, Christy Hyman, and Gabi Kirilloff have been named Digital Scholarship Incubator (DSI) Fellows. The summer fellowship program runs May 16-August 5.
"There were many great proposals this year, and it is invigorating to see the range of research questions and areas our students are working in," Liz Lorang, professor in UNL Libraries and director of the program, wrote in an email.
The DSI promotes student-led digital research and scholarship.
Kami Ahrens (M.A. student, Anthropology): Kami's work investigates gender roles and identity on the mid-nineteenth-century frontier. For her M.A. thesis, she is studying textile, ceramic, and other domestic goods from the Steamboat Bertrand collection at DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge. In her Incubator project, Kami will create photogrammetric 3D models of items in the collection and organize these into an interactive online exhibit for a public audience. She seeks to "develop methods for creating a better understanding between historicized themes and material objects" as well as to "facilitate the preservation of material culture and assist in creating processes to be used in future projects directed at sustaining cultural heritage."
Jonathan Cheng (Ph.D. student, English): Jonathan will pursue a "macroscale analysis of personification's textual trends" in nineteenth-century novels. Jonathan argues that personification is "one of the most textually distinct markers of when and how a non-human entity becomes historically significant" and that study of personification therefore has larger implications for not only literary studies but cultural history. He will develop code to identify and extract instances of personification, deploy the code on several corpora and analyze the results at the corpus level, develop an interpretation out of these results, and create a public-friendly interface for the users to explore personification in the corpora.
Christy Hyman (Ph.D. student, History): Christy's scholarship focuses on spatial investigations of the Great Dismal Swamp in northeastern North Carolina and examines and reimagines the experiences of the enslaved people who "navigated the landscapes of trauma." Christy's work will focus on both developing a geographical model of the area as well as bringing together information from disparate sources, such as local newspapers and narratives of formerly enslaved people, in order to "collect and analyze the landscape's spatial dimensions." Her work will contribute to the North Carolina Freedom Roads Underground Railroad trail development plan, and she presents on early stages of her work in June 2016 at New Bern, NC.
Gabi Kirilloff (Ph.D. student, English): Gabi's project will explore the imagined geographies of Cather's novels alongside the geographies of her correspondence. In particular, Gabi seeks to investigate the "relationship between experienced and depicted places." Gabi will extract spatial data from Cather's letters and novels using natural language processing techniques and then create a series of visualizations to aid in the analysis of Cather's geographies, both those she experienced and those she imagined. Beyond disciplinary questions, she also will study elements of user experience and interface design, particularly the ways that interface and user experience "can clarify or obscure our critical vision."
