Dr. Sarah Connell and Dr. Ellen Cushman presented on two digital projects as part of the Computational Humanities Research Group Seminar Series based in King’s College London on Thursday, January 22, 2026. The online event was moderated by Dr. Barbara McGillivray and hosted scholars, students, and others curious about digital humanities.
Sarah Connell began the seminar with her presentation, “Digital Methods for Investigating the Impacts of Early Modern Women on Scientific Discourse.” Connell shared a collaborative initiative from the Women Writers Project in Boston and the PolyGraphs project in London. Connell focused on the writings of Margaret Cavendish, who wrote in multiple genres (including natural philosophy, science, drama, and biography) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Connell presented various computational analysis methods that were applied to Cavendish’s written corpus within the Women Writers Online collection, including network analysis, topic modeling, and principal component analysis. She shared some prototype interactive graphs of these results, noting that the WWP aims to make them publicly accessible soon. Connell especially focused on word embedding models trained on Cavendish’s corpus. Among the results these models can show are clusters of words that correspond to a specific theme–for example, weather, animals, human relationships, and fluid dynamics. She concluded by sharing a toolkit for the audience to apply similar computations to their own textual sources, by downloading the publicly available files on GitHub and running them on RStudio, or by experimenting with models without using any code via the Women Writers Vector Toolkit.
Ellen Cushman’s presentation followed, titled “Translating Ecologies of Thought: The Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP).” DAILP is a long-running digital archive project that provides a platform for indigenous language learning, translation, reading, and writing. Contributors are able to work with documents and related materials shared across partner institutions—for example, DAILP’s robust Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way collection features translations of Yale Beinecke letters detailing Cherokee life (among many other manuscripts and resources). Cushman (founder and project leader of DAILP) discussed the success of the initial Cherokee language pilot project, highlighting how the materials demonstrate the strengths of the community-based digital archive. She then displayed features of the third phase of the project, including key functions of the translation and reading interface. The unique word pane displays detailed morpheme and word-level annotations with accompanying audio, phonetics, and community commentary. Workflows and code can be found on the DAILP GitHub. The DAILP team includes translation specialists, librarians, archivists, linguists, students, and teachers from the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, as well as scholars from Northeastern University, Boston College, Wake Forest, Western Carolina University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville. To view Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way and learn more about DAILP, visit the main website, Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence.
The event concluded with a Q+A session and closing remarks from Dr. Barbara McGillivray. If you are interested in learning more about the digital humanities and computational social science, King’s College London is hosting two events in March as part of the Computational Humanities Research Group Seminar Series and the NULab has a robust calendar of events planned for this spring.
