Portfolio

Data Sensorium

Data Sensorium is a project that aims to create sensory experiences of data, translating and transmediating across visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory registers. If we begin with data that we can see, what does it sound, feel, smell, or taste like? How does our experience of how data feels change if we add additional senses? Or if we experience it in the absence of one of these senses? How can we make these data experiences available online to share sensory experiences across distance?

In pursuit of answers to these questions, Data Sensorium interfaces with artistic and creative practice, critical data studies, data visualization and visceralization, disability studies, aesthetic theory, and community engagement to interrogate our collective and individual experience of data through the senses.

We are currently working on our first exhibit, “The Sense of Campus,” which takes soundscapes collected on the Dartmouth campus and reimagine and reinterpret the sonic data for other senses. Visitors to the exhibit will be able to experience the soundscapes in concert with or in the absence of other sensory experiences of the data. For example, how does touching sound while listening to it create a new, focused experience of places we routinely, unthinkingly inhabit? How does smell augment the experience? When we remove one of these senses, how does our perception of the data change? We’re also exploring how 3D scanning and immersive storytelling can make at least some sensory aspects of data available for others who’d like to engage with a sensory experience of campus.

Status as of 2024

• We’ve collected hours of soundscapes from indoor and outdoor public spaces on campus, with the assistance of Dartmouth students Mehmet Can Yilmaz, Vidhi Piparia, Sofia Ishpahani, and Jesuferanmi Ayanlade.
• Along with students, we are experimenting with using the sounds to create instruments, ambient soundtracks and lo-fi beats, and are mapping the sounds to speculatively imagine a different kind of university from these sounds.
• With translator, curator, and ceramics artist Veronika Yadukha, we are exploring how to translate sounds from particular locations into tactile experiences, such as this pot that encodes sound data through textures:

Anti-Racist Community Engagement

Text Mining the University

This project facilitates data-driven approaches to race and equity in higher education in the U.S. today. For our proof-of-concept, we are exploring how universities responded to the U.S. Supreme Court Decision banning affirmative action in college admissions.

Status as of 2024

• I’ve crowdsourced a corpus of more than 300 university emails containing statements about the decision.
• I’ve been working with Dartmouth students Matthew Currie and Helen Deng to identify appropriate methods to analyze the corpus, using the Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK).
• We’re in the process of analyzing the results from our NLTK adventures.

The Digital Black Atlantic

How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production.

The Digital Black Atlantic spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies.

The volume is also freely available as an open-access digital edition.

Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium

Keywords for Caribbean Studies

Keywords for Caribbean Studies aims to build a collection of words that serve as rich sites for research and pedagogy in Caribbean studies. Modeled on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, the Keywords for Caribbean Studies collection is intended to be the beginning of a project that will grow with future Caribbean Digital events each year. It is our hope that the project will not so much concretize and “fix” ideas of what is important in Caribbean studies but, rather, open avenues for questioning the central nodes of scholarly inquiry and teaching about the Caribbean across disciplines.

South Asian Digital Humanities

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise.

Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques.

South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a “homelanding” for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production.

Reviews in Digital Humanities

Reviews in Digital Humanities is a peer-reviewed journal that facilitates scholarly evaluation of digital humanities work and its outputs. This may include, but is not limited to: digital archives, multimedia or multimodal scholarship, digital exhibits, visualizations, digital games, digital tools, and digital projects. Importantly, it is expected that the outputs selected for review in this journal will blend humanistic and technological inquiry. The goal of Reviews in Digital Humanities is to foster critical discourse about digital scholarship in a format useful to other scholars.

The journal responds to the challenge of the growth of the number and scale of digital projects outpacing review opportunities in existing journals. As such, it intervenes by bridging a gap in the evaluation of digital projects by arranging for peer review of digital scholarship. Upon a project’s “acceptance,” as determined by peer reviewers, Reviews in Digital Humanities will publish 500-word overviews written by project directors along with the reviews submitted by members of the digital humanities communities. Accompanying the journal is a registry of digital scholarship, composed of projects submitted for review. Projects will be listed in the registry regardless of their status in the review process, unless otherwise requested by project directors.

The editors have designed a review process and editorial board structure that we believe can build the capacity of our scholarly communities to peer review digital scholarship. This is particularly crucial to support ongoing digital scholarship and community-building in critical ethnic, African diaspora, indigenous, Latinx, and postcolonial studies, among others.

New England Equity and Engagement Consortium

Intersectionality in Digital Humanities

The volume intervenes in emerging scholarly conversations about the value of intersectional feminist thought for digital humanities by examining the add-and-stir model of diversity often misguidedly deployed in digital humanities, the hidden histories of intersectionality within digital scholarship, and the growing community of scholars putting intersectionality at the forefront of digital research methods in the humanities. We further shed light on difficult conversations about equity and justice in digital humanities practices by considering the challenges faced by scholars because of their identities and the foci of their scholarship, as well as the structural barriers within digital humanities professional communities. What the volume offers is not a final statement on intersectionality in digital humanities but a contribution to the beginning of a critical scholarly conversation.

As digital humanities has expanded in scope and content, questions of how to negotiate the overlapping influences of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and other dimensions that shape data, archives, and methodologies have come to the fore. Taking up these concerns, our volume explores their effects on the methodological, political, and ethical practices of digital humanities. Essays examine intersectionality from a range of positions: the influence of overlapping identities on scholars within the digital humanities community; how the fields in which they work are subject to competing tensions created by intersecting power structures within digital humanities and academia; and the methodological possibilities and scholarly potential for intersectionality as a framing theory in digital humanities scholarship.