The Centers for Digital Scholarship (CDS), the Digital Scholarship Group (DSG), and the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science hosted our annual fall digital scholarship celebration on Wednesday, October 22. The event began in 350 Snell Library with hybrid lightning talks, followed by an in-person fair in the Centers for Digital Scholarship. Opening remarks and introductions were delivered by Dr. Julia Flanders, Dr. Sarah Connell, Dr. Ellen Cushman, and Colleen Nugent McLean.
Hybrid Lightning Talks
Four brief presentations about ongoing digital projects were given, two of them by online presenters and the other two by in-person presenters.
Isaac Fellman from the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) presented about the DTA’s work at Northeastern’s Oakland campus. There, he has been working with student researchers and local community organizations to collect records related to transgender history. Claire Lavarreda from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities presented on her digital humanities and public history project as part of her fellowship with the Digital Teaching Integration Initiative (DITI). Titled “Against Looting: Educational Resources on the Theft of Native American Cultural Heritage,” her project will result in an educational website about the continued looting and theft of Native American cultural property and heritage.
Joel Lee and Candace Hazlett from the DSG presented on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. As part of the Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern Law School, this archive includes data and records about anti-Black killings in the mid-twentieth-century American South. Meg Heckman from the School of Journalism and Media Innovation presented on her project, which tested generative AI’s accuracy in analyzing the archives of Edwina “Eddy” Davis, a journalist working for the Atlanta Journal in the mid-twentieth century.
Following the lightning talks, the audience asked questions, which varied from the reliability and utility of AI to the impacts of the current government shutdown on archival research. A mark of success for this hybrid portion was the multi-directionality of the questions: questions were asked by online participants to online speakers, as well as online to in-person, in-person to online, and in-person to in-person. All in all, both virtual and in-person presenters and audience members participated in lively discussion about the diverse digital projects.
In-Person Fair at CDS
After the hybrid lightning talks, the event shifted to a fully in-person fair, utilizing the space in the CDS. Booths were hosted by many CDS projects, including the Digital Scholarship Group, NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, Women Writers Project, Boston Research Center, Digitization Lab, Critical Making Lab, Center for Transformative Media, Reckonings Project, Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence, Early Black Boston Digital Almanac, Early Caribbean Digital Archive, and Digital Transgender Archive.
Attendees of the fair walked around the booths, learning more about these organizations and their projects, meeting their research associates, and participating in activities with project team members. For example, at the NULab/DITI booth, participants filled out a survey to create a word cloud and discussed the different digital tools they would like to learn. The critical making booth was particularly popular, where participants used looms made by Professor Jessica Linker via 3D printing to learn basic weaving skills, while discussing how carpet weaving could be an analogy for the Digital Humanities. At DAILP’s booth, participants used crayons to color pages with words in Cherokee.
Overall, the welcome fostered connections between various scholars in digital humanities and computational social science at Northeastern University, for both in-person and online participants. Students, faculty, staff, and scholars came together to learn of each other’s latest works, showcase the different projects, organizations, and resources associated with the CDS, and build community.
