Visiting Scholars

In partnership with the DSG, the NULab offers a vibrant intellectual community with a wide array of expertise and active projects in the domains of digital scholarship, digital humanities, and public humanities. Scholars are unpaid but receive a campus network/email account, regular mentorship and consultation, and space to work, and they are welcome to participate fully in DSG and NULab meetings and working environments. They are expected to contribute actively to the NULab and DSG community, to make an informal presentation on their work at some point during their visit, and to submit a blog post describing outcomes from their project.

Current Visiting Scholar(s)

Nicola Paladin is assistant professor in North American literature at “G. D’Annunzio University” at Chieti-Pescara. He holds a PhD in “Textual Sciences” at “Sapienza” University of Rome with a dissertation on the relationship between the literature of the American Revolution and the 19th-century narratives on the Independence War. He was a visiting scholar at IFUSS (International Forum for US Studies), at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His main research interests include 19th-century American literature, war literature, comics studies. He is currently working on a digital database (LTit – Letteratura tradotta in Italia), focused on mapping the circulation of US literature in the Italian literary field, with a specific interest in literary anthologies of US literature in translation.

LTit – Letteratura tradotta in Italia is a project dedicated to the circulation of foreign literature in Italy. Particularly, LTit is a digital database whose ambition is to gather data on Italian translations published during the 20th century, connecting original texts with their different translations and editions. Data on texts are complemented by information about significant cultural mediators of foreign language literatures (translators, authors, literary critics), and publishers, to enable the reconstruction of relevant relations within the literary society and the “world of letters.”

LTit suggests considering translated literature as a relevant part of Italian literature and it inquires the role of those figures who had interest in importing a given author or a given text and the reasons behind those choices. By systematically focusing on the people (publishers, translators, mediators), and on the structures (publishing houses, book collections, reviews and journals) that determined the impact of translated literature in the Italian culture, LTit enables to understand their position within the national literary field, and the processes through which texts were selected and translated (for market logic, literary affinities, personal relations), and promoted (for example, by including them within certain editorial lines, or by publishing them along with certain other authors). LTit is a relevant instrument to reconstruct the context which brought a given text to exist in Italian language, giving it certain promotional features and a certain position in the repertoire of national literature.

LTit wishes to map the entire scenario of foreign literature translated in Italian, both as a frame and as a system divided in distinct literatures. Given the impossibility to establish sharp borders among different national literatures, language is adopted as a criterion rather than privileging a geopolitical distinction, thus relying on categories in order to define national literatures. Consequently, within the general cluster of foreign literature translated into Italian, specific linguistic sections have been defined, such as German language literature (including Austrian literature, DDR literature, ect.), English language literature (including US literature, British literature, Irish literature, etc.), Scandinavian literatures (including Danish, Norwegian and Swedish literatures), and Russian literature. LTit is an ongoing project and its ambition is to encompass other linguistic areas with relative literatures.

Elena Fernandez: I am a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral researcher based at the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, and the Principal Investigator of GLOTECH. Holding a research profile that lies at the intersection between Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, and Media and Communication Studies, my research interests focus on assembling new platforms of knowledge that aim to connect qualitative and quantitative approaches across Social Sciences and Humanities domains.
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I completed a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley (2019), a M.A. in Spanish Studies at the University of Virginia (2013), and a B.A. in English Philology at the University of Salamanca (2011).
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From 2019-2021, I was a Eurotech Post-Doctoral Fellow. Hosted by the Technical University of Munich, Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data, and co-hosted by the Eindhoven University of Technology, Data Mining Chair, I was the Principal Investigator of PRESSTECH.

Time, Technology, and Globalization: I am the Principal Investigator of ​Time, Technology, and Globalization. A study of the role of technology in processes of modernization and globalization using the Press, Big Data, and Computational Research Methodologies (GLOTECH) Time, Technology, and Globalization. A study of the role of technology in processes of modernization and globalization using the Press, Big Data, and Computational Research Methodologies (GLOTECH), will explore the role of technology as a factor of time standardizations in Western, industrialized societies, as well as a booster of cultural homogenization, and as a consequence, an agent of modernization and globalization. The object of analysis will be a multilingual dataset of newspapers. The selected time frame will be 1840-2019, and the methodology will include different computational research methods (Quantitative Narrative Analysis, Semantic Networks, NER, Topic Modelling, Word Embeddings, Sentiment Analysis). GLOTECH is a highly innovative research project that will push the state of the art in Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences. It will as well propose computational methodologies that other researchers interested about information behaviour historically can adapt to their own research agendas, therefore being of high value for the research community. 

To apply, please send a proposal with the following information:

• your name, affiliation, and contact information
• a description of the project you plan to pursue during your time with the NULab and DSG
• an explanation of why you want to pursue this work at the NULab, DSG, and Northeastern (specific people or projects that are relevant to your work, specific resources, etc.)
• the proposed dates of your stay

Apply here:

nulab@northeastern.edu

Previous visiting scholars have worked on projects including:

• Building and using digital archives as windows into conceptualizing the relationship of the digital archive to literary history (Katherine Bode, Fall 2014)
• Examining digital formats and their effects on the formation of the book canon (Anna Spatz, Spring 2015)
• Mapping the cartographies of Romantic literature (Asko Nivala, Fall 2019)
• Tracing the impacts of volcanic eruptions and related climate effects on painted art (Melissa Schlecht, Fall 2019)
• Improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women and writing before 1900 (Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, ongoing)