I collaborate with Duke faculty and students, as well as colleagues at other institutions and local community members, on a variety of projects. My roles have ranged from co-lead to project manager to developer to consultant to resource advocate. In these projects, I aim to build trust and collegiality and to engage antiracist practices and a feminist ethics of care. These projects utilize methods ranging from 3d modeling, archival research, cultural studies, and data manipulation & visualzation, to digital storytelling, mapping, Python programming, text analysis, and web design. They have resulted in book chapters, community events, databases, exhibitions, journal articles, mobile tours, open educational resources, and websites. The following is a selection of current and recent projects.
Role(s): Co-PI
Collaborator(s): Robert Buerglener, Paul Jaskot, Philip Stern, Victoria Szabo, Edward Triplett, Wendy Vencel (NC State University), and numerous students
Description: A deep dive into the choices surrounding the building of Duke and its relationship to Durham in which we consider questions about the broader integration of the university and the city. This project has received support from Duke Bass Connections and builds upon prior Bass Connections projects, Building Duke and Digital Durham.
As a co-leader on this project, I mentor graduate and undergraduate students, including both project managers and research assistants. I co-lead the team's efforts to georeference a 1931 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Durham, housed in Rubenstein Library. I am also working with students to research and map those who lived on the land that became Duke University and Duke Forest and am contributing to an investigation of Duke's landscape history through mapping and 3D modeling. Throughout this project, I have tested software, trained students in a variety of digital tools, managed workflows, and conducted both technical and archival research.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Collaborator
Collaborator(s):
Description: A Duke Bass Connections project examining Blues women musicians and their representation among Rosetta Records' rereleases. We use historical, archival, cultural and social science methods, combining close reading and listening with quantitative data and text analysis, to identify patterns in the Rosetta Reitz archival materials. This analysis will lead to an improved understanding of the circumstances that led to the “unremembering” of the Black women who were central to the blues of the 1920s and 30s. We are also building a foundation for understanding why women and musicians of color continue to be disproportionately excluded from opportunities in the music business today and possible pathways for repairing these wrongs.
I have contributed project management and digital pedagogy expertise as well as skills in historical data structuring and analysis. In 2023-24, I guided the team through the creation of a project website and interactive timeline (TimelineJS).
Outcomes:
Role(s): Collaborator
Collaborator(s): Paul Jaskot, Cosimo Monteleone (Università di Padova), Mark J. V. Olson, and numerous students
Description: A study of the key urban planning and architectural initiatives meant to “Germanize” Krakow, establish military rule, and also rid the city of its Jewish population under Nazi occupation. The project considers an intersecting history of the built environment, comparing both the analog visual evidence of Nazi plans, drawings, and photographs with the digital exploration of the importance of victim spaces, above all the Jewish ghetto.
I have contributed to critical analyses of 3D visualizations and theoretical discussions concerning interoperability as a mode of digital research. I also mentored a student in the construction of the project website and continue to maintain the site.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Graduate Assistant & Graduate Research Assistant
Collaborator(s): Numerous UNC Libraries staff and students, especially Amanda Henley, Lorin Bruckner, Matt Jansen, Brianna Nuñez, James Dick, Grant Glass, and Rolando Rodriguez
Description: A collections as data and machine learning project aimed at identifying likely Jim Crow laws and other racially-based legislation signed into law in North Carolina between 1866/67-1967. Learn more.
As Graduate Assistant, I created an open educational resource (OER) that introduces students to the process of creating a dataset from historical documents. Through the OER, students learn how to use Python and PyTesseract to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on scanned images of text, structure the resulting computationally-readable text using Pandas, and create simple visualizations based on the structured data using Python and Voyant. I also researched and wrote an essay, Algorithms of Resistance," that explains the team's understanding of the phrase based on existing digital studies and digital humanities scholarship. At the end of my assistantship, I contributed to grant writing processes and created draft interactive visualizations that could be used by website visitors to explore the project's data.
As Graduate Research Fellow, I worked with the project's data to create a tangential dataset of laws related to mental health, disability, and addiction care. I analyzed the intersections between these laws and likely Jim Crow laws, and I identified possible gaps in the Jim Crow laws dataset. My dataset is now available via the Carolina Digital Repository, and I am currently completing an essay that documents my research process and findings.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Principal Investigator
Collaborator(s): Community Histories Workshop, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Description: This project was conducted as a Field Experience, a part of the information science curriculum at UNC. Over the course of Spring 2020, I conducted a study of information organization and record-keeping practices at Dorothea Dix Hospital (formerly the North Carolina Insane Asylum) between 1856-1911. This study focused on the hospital's admissions ledger to consider ways in which hospital power structures and their impacts on patients may be implicated in the format, use, and contents of admissions ledgers at both Dorothea Dix and comparable American institutions. I asked: What kinds of data are or are not collected? How? From whom? How is this information represented for different audiences (internal use vs. public reporting)? What kinds of implications might these practices have had for patients’ treatments and for early psychiatry? How can these records—existing, non-existing, incomplete, inconsistent, or biased—shine a light on the lives of psychiatric patients and the power structures operating around and on them? How can present-day scholars’ engagement with these records reveal or continue to obscure these stories?
Outcomes:
Role(s): Collaborator
Collaborator(s): Sara Galletti, Kristin Huffman, Valerie Gillispie and Amy McDonald (University Archives), and numerous students.
Description: This project, funded by Duke Bass Connections, analyzed the physical environment that the Duke community inhabits and explored the desires and visions that materialized in the making of the campus.
As a member of the team, I provided support to students conducting primary source research in the University Archives, establishing a workflow for collaborative data gathering and structuring using Airtable. I developed a complementary database in Airtable by mining the archival records of the Olmsted Archives, the entity that has preserved the records of the Olmsted Brother Landscape Architecture Firm, which was hired along with the Horace Trumbauer firm (Julian Abele's employer) to design the new Duke campuses. I provided technical instruction to students creating ArcGIS StoryMaps and other interactive visualizations to present their research. As part of this work, I contributed to and co-instructed several related courses.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Collaborator
Collaborator(s): Monica Lucas, Chaitra Powell (UNC-Chapel Hill), Dominique Luster (The Luster Company), Sarah Koonts (NC State Archives), Wanda Cox-Bailey, Brianna McGruder (UNC-Chapel Hill), Vanessa Jackson (Radical Optimist Collective), Lou Brown (Duke University), Tift Merritt
Description: A community of care exploring how to care for the people in photographs taken between 1918-24 at Goldsboro State Hospital (Cherry Hospital), North Carolina's former African American asylum. Our work is to raise awareness and advocate for loving outcomes; our hope is that a lasting, loving family and community circle come together around them. This project has received funding from North Carolina Humanities, the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
I co-led a 2019 Duke Story+ project ("The Other Side of Hungry River") with Tift Merritt that resulted in a physical and digital exhibition. I have played a key role in conversations around creating community and possibly sharing archival materials through digital platforms. These conversations have required careful ethical and legal consideration, have benefitted from collective engagement with ethics of care and theories of slowness, and are ongoing. As the Collective continues to develop its mission and possible digital humanities interventions, I have led a team of students in a transcription project that focuses on the journals of the doctor and amateur photographer responsible for the photographs. To conduct transcription, I have implemented an Omeka-S site with a MediaWiki integration.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Co-Editor
Collaborator(s): Beth Fischer (Williams College Museum of Art)
Description: A co-authored, co-edited, and peer-reviewed guide to the essential steps needed to plan a digital project, with an emphasis on visualization. Provides guidance on project planning, budgeting, team building, workflows, resources, documentation, sustainability, and computational principles through thematic project "types". Offers a gallery of examples from real-world research projects and in-class assignments.
In addition to co-conceiving the project, I researched and selected the open-source, MIT-founded Pubpub platform for our project, maintain content, edit project types, and manage the submission and review process for case studies, assignments, and other content.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Co-PI, web developer
Collaborator(s): Lee Sorensen (Duke University)
Description: A biographical database of historic art historians of western art. A free, scholarly resource for scholars, students, and publics. Continually updated by editor Lee Sorensen and student contributors.
Since 2017, I have developed the project website, beginning in Drupal and migrating to WordPress in 2023. I lead data standardization and analysis initiatives with the aim of making project data for multiple possible uses. I also mentor students who contribute to data standardization and research. Signficantly, we have implemented Getty Vocabularies and other standardized vocabularies for a number of fields, established a data dictionary, are adding images to profiles, and are developing a data field to make relationships among entries explicit. We have already conducted some pilot research examining the Dictionary's implicit relational networks.
Outcomes:
Role(s): Consultant, Omeka/CurateScape Developer
Collaborator(s): Elizabeth Baltes (Coastal Carolina University), Edward Triplett, Kristin Huffman, Sheila Dillon, and a team of undergraduate students.
Description: This project, a collaboration between undergraduate students and faculty at Duke University and Coastal Carolina University, aims to help statues speak, to help them tell their own stories. By combining historical research with mobile and web technologies, the team presented the “autobiographies” of the statues on Duke's campuses, exploring how they fit into the fabric of Duke's history and the long-standing practice of setting up honorific portrait statues.
I developed the Omeka/CurateScape site that we used as both a mobile tour and a web tour of the bronze statues on Duke's campuses. I customized the stories template to make space for multiple media, including audio, 3D models, and an image gallery (for example).
Outcomes:
Role(s): Consultant
Collaborator(s): Brian Norberg and the Duke project team.
Description: The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database is a geo-referenced database of historic images from the 15th through the mid-20th centuries that represents the medieval monuments and cities constructed by the rulers of the historic Kingdom of Sicily. The database is organized topographically by location. In 2023, the database moved to the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas.
I worked with the team on several public-facing innovations, including an interactive map, developed by Brian Norberg, that enabled site visitors to view locations documented in database items on a modern map of Italy. As a way of showing how creators of the historic images may have moved through the Kingdom, we included a roads layer (from the Ancient World Mapping Center) of Roman Roads that would have been primary modes of land transportation. I also worked with the team to plan various aspects of the web interface, including the site's navigation and developing user stories and possible search queries that informed the development of the advanced search form.
Outcomes: