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An illustration of computer icons and the year 2020 with an arrow pointing to 2021.

Looking back as we move on

By Kate Carpenter, Public Writing Graduate Fellow

We’ve made it to the first CDH newsletter of 2021, and I want to echo the hope of many that this new year will bring restoration and healing, overdue social change, and rapid vaccine rollouts.

Before we move ahead, though, I’m taking this moment to celebrate all that the CDH did accomplish in 2020, even as our staff and project management meetings moved to Zoom and we saw more of each others’ homes, pets, and family members than we ever expected. 

The CDH has been pleased to support so many students in a time when internships and funding sources have been hard to come by. We welcomed two new cohorts to our graduate fellows program this year, as well as our first-ever cohort of summer fellows. We also had a slate of excellent summer undergraduate interns and sponsored an internship in the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In the summer, the CDH awarded its annual thesis and dissertation prizes, and we have also welcomed new graduate students to our team through the University Administrative Fellows initiative. 

We have been thrilled to welcome our new post-doctoral fellows, Sierra Eckert, Kavita Kulkarni, and Camey VanSant. This spring, research software developer Kevin McElwee also joined the CDH and Princeton University Library teams and hit the ground running.

Through our dataset curation grants and seed grants, the CDH has continued to support digital humanities research at Princeton. In the midst of 2020’s chaos, our own work on projects has continued: the year saw us wrap up our collaboration with the Princeton Ethiopian Miracles of Mary Project (read an update on the project), commence the CDH-Princeton Geniza Project Research Partnership, and continue our work on the Princeton Prosody Archive (read the PPA's year in review). 

Two project launches were among the highlights of our year. In May, version 1.0 of the Shakespeare and Company Project was officially released. The Project, which draws from the papers of the bookshop and lending library’s founder Sylvia Beach, offers “a striking new portrait of the Lost Generation and life in interwar Paris” by showing what the lending library’s “famous members read (and read in common), and their connections to various communities of readers.” The Project has received international media attention. Visitors can explore the site themselves, as well as engage with essays about and visualizations of the Project’s data. Social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram keep users connected to the Project’s updates and highlight parts of the collection through features like the “reader of the week” on Instagram. The Project also partnered with the Princeton Public Library to host a book club that read notable works from the project.

In October, CDH staff members were also thrilled to launch Startwords, a new research publication that offers “a forum for experimental humanities scholarship.” The first issue featured two compelling essays, “Data Beyond Vision,” and “Their Data, Ourselves: Illness as Information,” demonstrating the range of subjects and approaches that the publication might offer. CDH digital humanities strategist Grant Wythoff, who serves as the Startwords editor, talked more about the team’s vision for the publication in a newsletter feature introducing the project

New projects are also on the horizon. In late July, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities announced that the New Languages for NLP: Building Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Humanities project, led by CDH Associate Director Natalia Ermolaev and Andrew Janco (Digital Scholarship Librarian, Haverford College), would receive support from its Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program. The funding will result in a workshop series hosted by the CDH starting in 2021.

Finally, in the wake of this summer’s social justice advocacy, especially in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, we have continued to evaluate how we can more effectively support antiracist work. Lead Developer Rebecca Sutton Koeser, as a member of an Association for Computers and the Humanities working group, helped to create new guidelines about using antiracist technical terminology. We have added a new resources page to our website, where we add information about antiracist and Indigenous DH work as we learn about it. Of course, this work, and our understanding of our role within it, will be an ongoing effort. As faculty director Meredith Martin said in our September newsletter, “We commit to using our unique position on campus, at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, and computer science, to push for change. We commit to marshalling our tools, methodologies, resources, and energy in the ongoing fight for social justice.” 

If these projects inspire you or if your goals for 2021 include learning more about digital humanities, consider scheduling a consultation with our staff. The CDH would be delighted to connect you with DH resources this year.

Upcoming Events


January 20, 2:30 to 5 p.m.: R Data Wrangling: tidyverse packages tidyr & dplyr. This workshop, presented as part of Princeton's Research Computing Winter 2021 Bootcamp, introduces two modern R packages, both written by Hadley Wickham and part of R’s “tidyverse,” that provide intuitive tools for handling common data management tasks. Learn more and register.

January 27, 2 p.m.: Grant Wythoff, CDH Digital Humanities Strategist, will host an information session on our new Humanities Data Teaching Fellows program for Princeton Ph.D. students. Fellows will work with the CDH to develop humanistic course modules for the popular undergraduate course “Introduction to Data Sciences” (SML 201), offered by the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. More information in our opportunities section below. Learn more and register.

January 28, 1:05 to 1:50 p.m.: Exploring Privacy Apps (InfoSec 101). Our Privacy Initiative is launching on January 28, International Data Privacy Day, with a collaboration with the Princeton Information Security Office. At the event, the Information Security Office will discuss several software applications developed with privacy in mind. Some applications explored include DuckDuckGo privacy services, Tor browser, Mailvelope encrypted email, and Signal messaging (encrypted instant messenger, voice, and video calling). Join us to learn about both the advantages and disadvantages of these services. Learn more and register.

Opportunities


Programming4Humanists at Texas A&M University is offering a spring 2021 course in Python for the Digital Humanities. According to the course description: "Over the past decade, Python has become the lingua franca for performing computational work in the sciences and the humanities. Compared to other procedural programming languages, Python’s learning-curve is low, and due to its popularity, an ever-increasing set of tools exists for using Python to produce, explore, analyze, and present data derived from cultural artifacts. This semester length course seeks to drastically lower the barrier-to-entry for humanities researchers interested in unlocking the power of Python." Register by January 20.

Apply to be a Humanities Data Teaching Fellow! In order to develop new humanities-focused curricula for data and computer science undergraduates, the Humanities Computing Curriculum Committee (HC3) seeks to hire three Princeton Ph.D. students as Humanities Data Teaching Fellows. These Fellows will be invited to bring their humanities subject expertise to a pathbreaking data sciences curriculum development initiative. There will be an information session on January 27 at 2 pm. The application deadline is February 12. This program is generously supported by a Magic Grant from the Princeton Humanities Council. Learn more and register for the info session.

Nominations are open for the 2020 Digital Humanities Awards! Nominate your favorite DH work from 2020 (including your own!) by January 31, 2021. Read more about the categories and submit your nominations.

Links We're Digging Lately


Melanie Walsh has shared an amazing project, her in-progress interactive textbook Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python. Read more about the project as well as how Walsh built the textbook with Jupyter Book.

"Digitization: Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should," by Tara Robertson (published in 2016), is an interesting exploration of the ethics of digitizing publications that were never meant to be read by a huge online audience. Hat tip to Twitter user @thejohnlegg for the link.

CDH Faculty Director Meredith Martin pointed us to DALL-E, a trained neural network that lets users "generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs." Check out the site for more—the examples are amazing.
The CDH Newsletter is edited by Camey VanSant, CDH Postdoctoral Fellow and Communications Lead. Email her with newsletter suggestions or feedback.
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