As a research assistant to Professor Ryan Cordell, Joanne became the Community Outreach Leader for NULab’s Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive project and was awarded a fall 2014 CSSH Dean’s Office Undergraduate Research Grant to support her attendance at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, where she presented on best practices for public Digital Humanities projects. Joanne, who holds a degree in photojournalism from the Brooks Institute of Photography (California), has had co-ops at Marie Claire (New York) and the investment firm T. Rowe Price (Baltimore), as well as holding a position as a tutor in Northeastern’s Writing Center. She credits her experience at T. Rowe Price with opening her up to multimedia communications and storytelling possibilities outside of news venues, such as advertising and public relations.
In one of Joanne’s first graduate seminars, “Opening the Archive,” she took the opportunity to bring together interests in photography, writing, and community outreach, with two seminar projects: an archival study of publicity photographs for Shakespeare’s play The Tempest by Welsh photographer and surrealist artist Angus McBean (1904-1990), and a proposal for a Digital Humanities project that would collect narratives by former inmates in the Los Angeles County jail system. In fall 2015, Joanne headed to a co-op in Massachusetts Governor Baker’s Press Office, where she again combined writing, photography, and video. Joanne has been offered a position with T. Rowe Price upon graduation but is not sure yet what her path will be—working in a multimedia setting or continuing her studies toward a doctorate.