Note: This program no longer exists. Graduate students interested in receiving training in digital methods should consider applying for our Graduate Extern Program and enrolling in the Cultural Analytics Certificate Program.

The Digital Scholars Program was a collaboration between the Center for the Humanities at Temple and the Scholars Studio of Temple Libraries. It trained graduate students at Temple to apply digital research methods to humanistic or artistic material for their own research or creative projects. Participants met weekly in the Fall for an introduction to digital research techniques. In Spring, students worked on their own projects and met every two weeks. At the end of the year, all participants presented their projects to the scholarly community.

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As a third year PhD student in the Department of Religion, participation in this year’s Digital Scholars program will serve as part of my dissertation work. The proposed project uses postwar chaplaincy materials (manuals, pamphlets, histories, etc.) to examine how normative definitions of religion are formed, and specifically how official definitions are formed and function in a society that supposedly maintains separation of Church and State. This project is meant to serve as a foundation for broader work that considers the institutionalization of the chaplaincy as a clinical role, and its implications for care delivery.

The topic of this digital scholarship project is to track the trade of devotional art, coins, and ideas that originated in Constantinople and spread through the Eastern Mediterranean on an interactive map. Comparing coins and art from different eras enables a view of the city’s economy throughout its life while studying the spread of ideas allows for the conducting of research into a non-intrinsic trade system. One can compare the spread of artistic and theological ideas that occurred on these trade routes by analyzing artwork of churches in both Constantinople and the periphery regions.

My project uses data and network analysis to map eight incidents of mass political mobilizations among African students in US international education programs between 1960 and 1975.

My digital project coincides with a chapter of my dissertation on how sculptors, like Donatello, in fifteenth century Florence created the impression of three-dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. I will examine a contemporary sculpture at the National Gallery of Art, DC, and create a digital 3D model to capture not only the spatial recession in the work, but also the sculpting textures themselves. This will help to visualize the artistic technique as well as demonstrate the early impact of sculpture in the history of optical perspective in Renaissance art.

This project examines the #metoo movement on Twitter, identifying and analyzing the tweets in the key moments of the movement using both an automated content analysis and critical discourse analysis.

My idea is to create an art project using physical computing, such as Arduino’s, to explore the idea of the uncanny valley. The “uncanny valley” is defined as a phenomenon that occurs when a humanoid object resembles a human being, causing an unsettling effect for the viewers. Our experimental process will determine the form that the Uncanny Valley phenomenon will take in our project. This project will be split into three parts: 1) starting the experiment, 2) forming it into a story, and 3) finally, creating an interactive display that will enable us to make modifications based on the audience’s feedback.

This project is a test-run for a larger comparative project that will include patient memoirs, diaries, and letters. It uses computational textual analysis on primary sources in the history of psychiatric medicine to explore the  rhetorics of care and dependency in different medical subcultures. Analyzing a corpus of nursing care manuals in contrast to a corpus of American Journal of Insanity volumes, all published between 1880 and 1950, this project asks: What kinds of differences are there in content and attitude between primarily male doctors and primarily female nurses? How do we account for those differences and how do they map across time?

U.S. history is punctuated by conflict over the social worth and legal equality of historically stigmatized and marginalized groups.  The way media outlets discuss stigmatized groups can promote – or undermine – public affect and support for them. In my dissertation, Why Bother Choosing Anyway? : LGBT Community Framing, and the Role of Etiological Narrative Exposure, I study the different narratives that media outlets have drawn on over time, regarding the LGBT community.  I study the ways LGBT issues are framed, and the aspects of the community that are focused on in mass communications.  I use content analysis of media publications over the last 40 years to help understand how narratives have arisen, interacted, and diminished: over time, across the country, and in response to historical events.

I am second year PhD student in the Media and Communication department. My research focus is on how medical misinformation disseminates throughout various media outlets. Specifically focusing on studies of viral events, social media network analysis, information diffusion, and information “network” gatekeeping. Currently exploring R and Python programming languages, as well as network analysis/data visualization software such as Gephi.

Data sonifiers seek aural applicability of their data, mapping research findings and other forms of data onto sonic parameters such as frequency, amplitude, rhythm, and timbre. A common thread among discussions in the field is the relevance of data sonification to music: at what point does the sonification become music, if it even should? I am sonifying the open-source data provided by SEPTA, Philadelphia’s public transit authority, to turn real-time data about train location and timeliness into sound users can use on their ride to find out the status of their train or to learn about the system in whole.

Fake news has become a hot topic of conversation, especially on social media, but are we all describing the same thing? Judging from the many news sources who have been labelled “fake news” – from the New York Times and CNN to Breitbart – it would appear the term has no clear, singular meaning. The goal of this project is to understand what those meanings are and how people use them. I am using digital techniques to scrape social networking sites, like Twitter and Reddit, identify influencers, and analyze and visualize the different meanings and uses of “fake news.”

Keisha studies the relationship between language and identity in Aruba and Curaçao and its effects on language policy and education.  More specifically, I research how people discuss and debate issues and ideologies surrounding Papiamentu, the official language in Aruba and Curaçao, on Facebook.  How are people discussing the creole language compared to the colonial languages present on the islands? I want to further analyze whether these ideological debates mirror the sentiments of the speakers and if they affect language policies in education.  I then use this data to research whether these ideologies are subsequently reinforced in a classroom setting.

Rachel Wildfeuer’s planned dissertation will analyze the influence of place in the United States using the concept of the American Dream. Rachel, a PhD student in the department of sociology, plans to explore the extent to which place matters for the American Dream (confidence in it and achievement of it) because of the people that live there, because of the context of the place, and because of changes over time. Her digital project will include textual analysis of the concept of the American Dream and mapping geocoded data to visualize the influence of place.

Despite progress toward racial justice and reconciliation in U.S. society, there is much more work to be done. No truer is this in areas where race intersects with the law, as in community-police relations, courtrooms, and congressional debates. Using text mining, topic modeling, network analysis, and other digital tools, I explore the different dimensions and definitions of racial justice and reconciliation in law-related contexts. I further study the strategic use of visual and textual media in racial justice and reconciliation efforts.

Kaelin Jewell is an art historian who specializes in the visual culture of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. She is interested in how digital tools, such as architectural visualizations and photogrammetry, can help to better understand past urban environments, many of which are no longer visible. In her dissertation, “Architectural Decorum and Aristocratic Power in Late Antiquity: The Gens Anicii,” Kaelin explores the architectural and artistic mechanics of power and display as employed by the aristocratic families of cities such as Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople during the 4th through the late-6th centuries CE. It is through new and exciting digital tools and the support of Temple’s Digital Scholarship Center, that Kaelin will be able to conceptualize and visualize the lost monuments, urban topographies, and complex family histories of late antiquity. Currently, Kaelin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at the Tyler School of Art and holds an M.A. in Art History, a B.F.A. in Photography and a B.A. in Archaeology (all from the University of Louisville). She has participated in on-site seminars in Istanbul and Cappadocia in addition to conducting research for her dissertation in Italy and Croatia, generously funded by the International Center for Medieval Art.

Joyce Rasing is a graduate student in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies, pursing a Professional Science Master’s in Geographic Information Systems. She also received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the College of Liberal Arts here at Temple in December 2014. Past projects include using ArcGIS for various mapping projects for the City of Philadelphia and non-profit organizations ranging from poverty and insurance coverage to education and targeted outreach while making use of census data and organization-based data. Other projects included organizational social media analyses via Google and Twitter APIs. She is interested in linking violent non-state actors (VNSAs, such as terrorist groups, insurgencies, or criminal organizations) to geography using social network analysis based on mode of attack and target type by location and how certain groups have changed over the course of time.