On October 22nd, the Centers for Digital Scholarship, the Digital Scholarship Group, and the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science hosted the annual Fall Digital Scholarship Celebration. This was a hybrid event that allowed people from all of the Northeastern campuses, and beyond, to attend. There were seven lighting talks from students, faculty, and staff. Every group or person was given five minutes to discuss their project. I was excited to see such a wide array of fascinating projects. Each one showcased how there are so many different ways of crafting a digital or computational project, highlighting the diverse work happening at Northeastern.
Blake Huggins opened the event with his work for the Writing Program Assessment Committee Digital Archive Project. The committee has studied writing pedagogy and assessment since 2010. One of the challenges was how records are spread across SharePoint, Google Drives, personal laptops, and hard copies. The team wants to build something sustainable and accessible to allow writing program faculty and the public to view these materials. Huggins discussed how the committee’s recent work has been largely driven by non-tenure track faculty. The team has also emphasized the importance of how they approach developing project metadata and controlled vocabularies, showcasing how these become an important rhetorical choice.
Katherine Simmonds and Lauri Fennell presented the Rural Health Interdisciplinary Collaborative Archive Project. The collaborative, founded in 2022, is a hub for Northeastern faculty, researchers, staff, and students who are interested in rural health and wellness. Over the past four years, student and faculty work has been collected, and the collaborative has developed a process for pulling their materials together: inventory, categorize, upload, tag. The goal is to hold everything in one space, open to the public, so future work can be built from that.
Kris Manjapra and Caitlin Pollock presented the Cambridge Black Oral History Portal, where they work with community archivists from the Cambridge Black History Project. They had planned to work with ten oral histories but ultimately ended up with three. The community archivists had concerns about online surveillance and data collection, and the team moved only as fast as trust allowed with their participants. They developed a protocol for mapping spatial patterns across the digital collection of oral histories which was built using CollectionBuilder, an open-source framework for creating static exhibit and collection sites.
Martha Johnson talked about virtual reality and the tensions that can arise between the message and the technology itself. This was significant because VR technology is something the research team is using to help them gather data around attitudes toward China and its foreign policies. This fall, her team is collecting data on whether a VR tourist video shapes students’ attitudes on foreign policy. They’re running experiments on the Boston and Oakland campuses, with about 125 participants. Student researchers were set up in public spaces to reach more people, and she emphasized the importance of their work in getting people involved in the study. This research will continue over the next year.
Mohit Singhal presented on digital narratives of therapy abuse. Between 40 and 60 percent of therapy patients do not reach full recovery, and many turn to online platforms, such as Reddit, for support. No prior work had studied this issue from the social media side. His team built a computational framework and used the Arctic Shift API to collect 10,000 posts and 166,000 comments from 2020 to 2025. They worked with therapists to build a codebook to analyze these social media posts.
Poppy Lambert presented Wandering Girls, a database of 19th-century Boston child welfare institutions. She wanted to keep the sources’ historical integrity and focus less on each document as an object and more on how the records connect. Lambert discussed some of her choices in designing this database. For instance, every child gets a unique identifier. She created a separate “Heard From” table which catalogs every later update about a child and links it back to the original record.
Shireen Zaineb closed the panel with the digital preservation plan she is developing for the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP), a community-led digital archive for collaborative Indigenous language learning. The plan starts from shared definitions, including Indigenous data sovereignty and Indigenous data governance. The goal is to make the work usable and transferable for other tribal communities who want to build their own DAILP sites.
The panel ended with a Q&A which helped to delve further into different parts of the research projects and allowed for the speakers to have even more time to discuss their work. The event closed with a reception in the Centers for Digital Scholarship, where attendees were encouraged to tour the space, and make zines. I am so excited to see how these projects continue!
Featured image shows celebration participants collaborating on zines in the Centers for Digital Scholarship.
