All posts by Will Shaw

I'm the Digital Humanities Consultant at Duke University Libraries. In addition to teaching regular workshops on DH topics, I collaborate with researchers at all levels of study to plan, implement, and sustain digital scholarship projects.
Digital Scholarship

Open Scholarship in the Humanities: Nitin Luthra

The following is one of four profiles of researchers who have engaged in open scholarship at Duke. Please join us on October 5 for Open Scholarship in the Humanities — an in-person panel discussion with these current and former graduate students, who will explore their approaches to engaging in open humanistic scholarship. You can learn more about this ScholarWorks Center event in this blog post, and you can register at https://duke.libcal.com/event/11159787. The event qualifies for 200-level RCR credit. We hope to see you there!

Meet Nitin Luthra

Nitin Luthra (he/him) is a doctoral researcher at the Department of English, Duke University. Before coming to Duke, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi (India) for 7 years. His research interests include critical theory, ethics, public and political rhetorics, contemporary postcolonial and world literatures. Deeply influenced by democratic theory, his current work focuses on the representations of refugees and the manifestation of violence in recent literature on migration.  

About Nitin’s Research

Nitin writes, “As a scholar interested in migration and forced displacement, I explore the discourses of far-right groups against immigrant populations of color. In this project, I wanted to learn computational text analysis for larger body of texts and employ those tools to excavate patterns within novels appreciated by right-wing circles. After reading an article by Duke professor Corina Stan (“Invasion and Replacement Fantasies: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of Saints and the French Far Right,” Palgrave Handbook of European Migration, 2023), I was drawn to read French texts (in translation) like The Camp of Saints (1973) and Submission (2015). Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of Saints imagines an apocalyptic scenario where one million refugees from India ‘invade’ France followed by the rest of Europe. This half-century old racist novel gained international resurgence in the aftermath of the European refugee crisis when conservative leaders like Marine Le Pen praised it for being visionary. In the US, Steve Bannon, the chief strategist of Trump administration in its early days, described the influx of refugees in Europe in terms of this novel. In January 2016, he said: ‘It’s not a migration. It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of Saints’ (Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger, “This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World”). One aspect of this far-right response related to my research is its praise in terms of a defense of the cultural construct of ‘the West,’ a recent invention going back to the end of the 19th century, as ‘an immense effort to forget the anxieties surrounding the dissolution of European empire looking forward to the era of decolonization’ (Christopher Gogwilt, The Rhetorical Invention of the West p. 9).

“These French and Western European anxieties against Islam take us to French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s popular novel Submission, which imagines an imminent dystopian future where France elects a Muslim president and Europe is on its way to becoming integrated into Eurabia. Like the reverse-colonization scenario in The Camp of Saints, this novel speaks to the replacement anxieties of the far-right— theorized by Renaud Camus as ‘the Great Replacement theory’— who imagine the increase in non-white populations as threatening to the French or Western civilization. These racist and xenophobic apprehensions are not just limited to the sphere of letters in print and social media forums. The white nationalist Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, was fixated on this idea of the great replacement.” 

On the Use of Computational Text Analysis Methods to Study Fiction

“This cultural hostility became the catalyst to an exploratory text analysis project through visual coding in Orange. I begin with the SentiArt tool for sentiment analysis. Generally, sentiment analysis is used to analyze tweets and reviews. But SentiArt is designed for literary texts. It uses vector space models to compute the valence of individual words. This makes it able to understand the emotional content of the texts with much more accuracy and nuance than other sentiment analysis tools like Vader and Liu-Hu. I use data from this analysis to guide my close reading of these texts. 

“The next step of the process was topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The statistical model allows us to discover topics (collection of words that tend to occur together) in a corpus. These topics can then classify individual documents in the corpus based on their relevance to each topic. I passed the resulting data through the Orange Multidimensional Scaling widget, which projected multidimensional objects into a two-dimensional plane to help us see their closeness or distance. 

“While helpful, these techniques are based on a ‘bag of words‘ model which often simplifies the contextual meaning of literary texts. Thus, to add more semantic heft to my analysis, I also ran the data through the Semantic Viewer to identify the keywords in each corpus. While the viewer identified keywords using several methods like TF-IDF, Rake, etc., I found Google’s mBERT to be the most accurate algorithm that focused not just on the frequency of words but also on their literary and semantic force. The TF-IDF model finds the most relevant words in a particular document, but the mBERT (‘m’ stands for multilingual) machine learning model converts phrases/words into vectors, which allows it to be more context dependent than other traditional models. 

“In my analysis, I discovered that even though these novels follow the trope of invasion novels describing the takeover in painstaking and racist detail, ultimately they argue for the degeneration of the ‘West’ and the values it is thought to represent. The political takeover by those not considered to belong to this construct is only a consequence of this decadent slumber.

“The methods I followed were part of an exploratory analysis juxtaposing literary analysis with statistical tools. Combining computational techniques with literary techniques can allow for surprising insights within a text or corpus that may not be easily detectable. While I used the tools on two novels in this preliminary phase, the tools can be quite helpful when studying bigger corpora.”

Learn More

The tools Nitin uses for his research are part of the Orange Data Mining platform, a powerful software suite used for many types of data analysis and textual exploration. 

Come meet Nitin and learn about his work at the ScholarWorks Center’s Open Scholarship in the Humanities panel discussion on October 5 (12:00-1:00 PM, Bostock Library 127; lunch is provided). Please take a moment to register and learn more about the event. We’ll see you there!

Digital Scholarship, Interviews

Open Scholarship in the Humanities: Emilie Menzel

The following is one of four profiles of researchers who have engaged in open scholarship at Duke. Please join us on October 5 for Open Scholarship in the Humanities — an in-person panel discussion with these current and former graduate students, who will explore their approaches to engaging in open humanistic scholarship. You can learn more about this ScholarWorks Center event in this blog post, and you can register at https://duke.libcal.com/event/11159787. The event qualifies for 200-level RCR credit. We hope to see you there!

Headshot of Emilie Menzel.Meet Emilie Menzel

Emilie Menzel is the Collections Management and Strategies Librarian for Duke’s Goodson Law Library and the Research and Instruction Librarian for the literary organization Seventh Wave. Her work and research support critical librarianship, libraries as active sites of information creation, and librarians as conduits for collaboration. Additionally, Emilie is a poet and writer, author of the book-length lyric The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press, 2024). She lives at the wood-skirts of Durham and online at emiliemenzel.com.

About Emilie’s Work with Project Vox

Published by Duke University Libraries, Project Vox (https://projectvox.org) is an open educational resource that amplifies the voices of marginalized philosophers. Emilie reflects on her role with the project:

“Last year while finishing my Masters in Library Science from UNC, I worked as the Teaching Resources Analyst for the Duke digital scholarship group Project Vox. Project Vox highlights early modernist philosophers from historically marginalized backgrounds; one way in which they do so is through a curation of open access reading lists and syllabi. As the Teaching Resources Analyst, I led an assessment of Project Vox’s existing teaching resources, surveyed Philosophy instructors about their teaching resource needs, and then used this information to intentionally reorganize, redesign, and solicit further open access teaching resources. What began as a single, text-heavy, static list of links was reconsidered and expanded into three philosophy teaching resource tools organized particularly around Philosophy instructors’ information seeking habits. The resulting teaching resource tools allow Philosophy instructors to easily identify topic-relevant reading recommendations, find suggestions of philosophers to pair or juxtapose in a course session, and search syllabi by course structure.

“This project overlays closely with the principles of open scholarship. It supports open access information and encourages collaboration and connection between Philosophy instructors. Further, the teaching resource tools themselves–i.e. the discovery and access points for the resources–were designed through close collaboration with the end-users; decisions about resource topics, organization, and presentation of information were shaped by open conversation with the user community.”

On the Invisible Work of Digital Scholarship

“Philosophy instructors frequently face pushback around centering historically marginalized philosophers. As I identified in this project’s survey, many instructors are best able to integrate non-canonical philosophers into institutionally accepted syllabi by pairing non-canonical philosophers with discussions of canonical philosophers. Knowing this, it makes sense that it could be useful for Philosophy instructors to be able to search teaching resources for, in essence, ‘What non-canonical philosopher can I teach beside Descartes?’ I thus created a Philosopher Pairings tool: a way for instructors to search for non-canonical philosophers that pair well with the canonical philosophers they are already teaching. In making this tool, however, I began to consider how creating an organizational system around canonical philosophers could be antithetical to the mission of Project Vox: to center non-canonical philosophers. The organization of information, of course, shapes our perception of what is valuable in that information set. I had to reorganize the tool. Back to the drawing board, restructuring the tool, reconsidering the philosophers data type in the backend of the database. 

“Another significant element of this project, likely imperceptible to most in the end product, was the challenge to design a teaching tool interface that could be easily maintained, understood, and updated by the Project Vox team. As a university-based, student-supported research project, the Project Vox team regularly changes composition. Each year, new undergraduates and graduate students bring an exciting range of interests and skills to Project Vox. My redesign of the teaching resource tools had to consider this array of technology backgrounds to ensure that the teaching resource tools I developed could actually be maintained by new team members for years to come. This task required simplifying the back-end organization of the database, as well as clear, highly thorough documentation.”

Learn More

To see Emilie’s redesign of the Project Vox teaching resources, please visit https://projectvox.org/teaching/. More about Project Vox and its mission can be found at https://projectvox.org/about-the-project/. 

Come meet Emilie and learn about her work at the ScholarWorks Center’s Open Scholarship in the Humanities panel discussion on October 5 (12:00-1:00 PM, Bostock Library 127; lunch is provided). Please take a moment to register and learn more about the event. We’ll see you there!

Digital Scholarship, Humanities

Open Scholarship in the Humanities: Ann Chapman Price

The following is one of four profiles of researchers who have engaged in open scholarship at Duke. Please join us on October 5 for Open Scholarship in the Humanities — an in-person panel discussion with these current and former graduate students, who will explore their approaches to engaging in open humanistic scholarship. You can learn more about this ScholarWorks Center event in this blog post, and you can register at https://duke.libcal.com/event/11159787. The event qualifies for 200-level RCR credit. We hope to see you there!

Meet Ann Chapman Price

Photo of Ann Chapman Price.Ann Chapman Price is a historian of Christian spirituality, with a focus on medieval and early modern European theology and society. She is interested in the development of Christian mysticism throughout the tradition, the theology of medieval women’s religious texts, and the intersections of Christian spirituality with issues of race, sex, and gender. Ann’s research in the digital humanities primarily focuses on the study of texts and their representation and scholarly editing in the digital realm.

About Ann’s Digital Editing Work

Ann writes, “I was first inspired to learn the art of scholarly digital editing when I encountered the Exploring Medieval Mary Magdalene Project. In this project, eleven manuscript witnesses to the medieval Mary Magdalene conversion legend (including Latin and Vernacular manuscripts) were collected into a single digital corpus, transcribed, and made digitally available for comparison and research. I was impressed by the visualization tools that allow users to interact productively with the manuscripts and their transcriptions. While I was motivated by the Exploring Mary Magdalene Project to learn how to create similar scholarly digital editions, I was also encouraged in my efforts by Fragmentarium, a Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments. This database, which enables the digital collection and study of thousands of dispersed manuscript fragments, suggested to me the value of creating scholarly digital editions even of discrete fragments since these can be collected or connected digitally for analysis and exploration. 

“I created a scholarly digital edition of a Latin manuscript fragment in the holdings at David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. This fragment is a single leaf from a twelfth-century liturgical document (a breviary, which gives directions for the celebration of the various services on specific hours of specific days). The edition was enabled by the support of Duke University’s Program in Information Science and Studies, and images of Latin MS 005 have been made available for this project by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Excerpt of a page of Latin handwritten text from the twelfth century.
Twelfth-century breviary fragment, housed in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, that Ann Chapman Price has incorporated into a digital edition.

“My aims were two-fold. First, I wanted this digital edition to be a resource for the study of Latin paleography. Thus, my edition is a contribution to the publicly available materials for examining medieval Latin abbreviations, letter forms, and conventions for marking out sections of the text. This could be helpful for students beginning to learn Latin paleography. In creating a digital edition that could be examined in connection to others, I also imagined that my work could contribute to larger studies of paleography, such as variations across geographical regions or shifts between scripts over time. Secondly, I provided copious references for the liturgical elements of this breviary fragment, such as chants in the Cantus index, scriptural allusions, and comparable breviary fragments, with the hope that this digital edition could aid scholars of medieval liturgy in developing more robust understandings of liturgical culture and ritual.”

On the Invisible Work of Digital Scholarship

“One of the most important concepts that I needed to understand early on was the distinction in digital editing between, on one hand, the final product that is considered the ‘visualization’ of the edition and, on the other hand, the data that makes up the edition itself. In other words, we could think of the ‘edition’ as simply the XML document that holds the transcription and annotations (i.e., ‘tags’ or ‘markup’). This is distinct from the media that make the edition available to users, whether in the form of a website or PDF document. A separate language, XSLT, is needed to take an XML document and process it into a format that is ideal for presentation and use. Not knowing XSLT, I chose to create a visualization of my edition by using an open-source software called EVT (Edition Visualization Technology), which has been developed by numerous scholars under the coordination of Roberto Rosselli Del Turco. I also relied on other tools developed by digital humanists, such as the Image Markup Tool from the University of Victoria. 

“For this reason, what might be unexpected for users of my scholarly digital edition is simply the collaborative nature of the work that goes into such an edition. In addition to learning the ‘nuts and bolts’ of using an XML editor, aligning with TEI’s standards, and using Unicode characters to represent medieval Latin, a significant amount of the work that I invested in this edition was focused on researching other scholarly editions and related projects. Secondary research into the work of scholars engaged in similar pursuits yielded numerous helpful suggestions from tools to processes to practical solutions. I would say that this kind of research is a ‘must’ for those embarking on scholarly digital editing.”

Learn More

To explore Ann’s work, we invite you to visit the resources below.

The links below provide some context for Ann’s scholarship, including software, projects, and scholarly databases mentioned above.

Come meet Ann and learn about her work at the ScholarWorks Center’s Open Scholarship in the Humanities panel discussion on October 5 (12:00-1:00 PM, Bostock Library 127; lunch is provided). Please take a moment to register and learn more about the event. We’ll see you there!



Digital Scholarship, Events

Open Scholarship in the Humanities: Jobie Hill

The following is one of four profiles of researchers who have engaged in open scholarship at Duke. Please join us on October 5 for Open Scholarship in the Humanities — an in-person panel discussion with these current and former graduate students, who will explore their approaches to engaging in open humanistic scholarship. You can learn more about this ScholarWorks Center event in this blog post and you can register at https://duke.libcal.com/event/11159787. The event qualifies for 200-level RCR credit. We hope to see you there!

Meet Jobie Hill

Photograph of Jobie HillJobie Hill is a Ph.D. student in the Duke History department and the creator of the Saving Slave Houses project (online at https://www.savingslavehouses.org/). We asked her to describe her scholarly background, the development of her project, and some of the invisible work that goes into creating open scholarship. Jobie writes:

“I am a licensed Preservation Architect and Slave House Expert with over twenty years of professional experience. I have degrees in historic preservation, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and I’m currently working on a PhD in history. I am a Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP). I have conducted interdisciplinary research examining slave houses, the influence these dwellings had on the lives of their inhabitants, and the preservation of the history of enslaved people.

“My personal mission is to advance an evidence-based understanding and acknowledgement of the institution of slavery in America. A cornerstone of this effort is the belief that the histories of many non-white Americans have been told to them and not by them. To that end, I am dedicated to the interpretation and preservation of the living and working environments of enslaved people, integrated with their own oral histories and historical records related to the business of slavery.”

About Saving Slave Houses

“In 2012 I started the project Saving Slave Houses (SSH) with the primary goal of ensuring that slave houses, irreplaceable pieces of history, are not lost forever. The project was meant to change the way we think, talk, research, document, interpret, preserve, restore, teach about, and learn from slave houses. 

“An important component of SSH is the Slave House Database (SHD). The SHD is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, national study of slave houses in the U.S. Its inclusion of narratives from formerly enslaved people who lived in the houses fuses a voice about the human condition with the physical structure. The SHD is designed to be a resource for researchers, descendants, museums, organizations and the public to study and interpret the surviving evidence of slavery.

“Recently, I have been exploring collective storytelling at historic sites of slavery. How–and by whom–these stories are told matters. I have been fortunate to work with descendants of enslaved communities to explore the what and how of collective storytelling.”

In this video, Jobie Hill shares more about the Saving Slave Houses project.

On the Invisible Work of Open Scholarship

“I have always known the work I do is important, but I’m not a good marketing person. I mean that I am not one to spend a lot of time describing what I plan to do – I just do it. Knowing this about myself, very early on in my work I started making an effort to document what I was doing so people could see my process for themselves. I also participate in as many public outreach activities as possible. Because of these choices, I don’t think there is anything missing from the final product.”

Learn More

We invite you to explore the Saving Slave Houses website and learn about the important research and preservation work Jobie continues to do. To read media coverage, hear interviews, and see videos about her work, please visit Saving Slave Houses in the Media.

Come meet Jobie and learn about her work at the ScholarWorks Center‘s Open Scholarship in the Humanities panel discussion on October 5 (12:00-1:00 PM, Bostock Library 127; lunch is provided). Please take a moment to register and learn more about the event. We’ll see you there!

Digital Scholarship, Events, Technology

Introducing the Digital Humanities to Graduate Students

At a recent lunch discussion organized by the Versatile Humanists program, I had the opportunity to talk with Duke graduate students about getting started in the digital humanities.  The proposition sounds straightforward in some ways: if you want to get started, well, jump right in. But our conversation underscored the difficulties of approaching the digital humanities as a novice.  Where do you go for training or mentoring, for example? What does training entail? Do you need to code? Should you plan a digital humanities project of your own or join an established one? How do you know whether a project “counts” as digital humanities at all?  

Those are all good questions, and they’re sometimes difficult to answer directly because DH seems so diverse and amorphous.  To help address some of these issues, I thought it would be useful to recap some of the big questions from our lunch conversation–to reflect on the digital humanities with an eye toward helping graduate students understand their nature and, ultimately, how to jump right in.  (Those wanting to pose their own questions are invited to join an encore conversation Thursday, October 18, 12:00-1:00 PM, as Liz Milewicz and I launch the Digital Brown Bag series on topics, projects, and questions in digital scholarship.)    

What are the digital humanities?
The digital humanities involve using computational technology to explore, understand, preserve, and communicate about our cultural heritage.  Anybody can do it, and you don’t need to code, but coding can offer you a fast track to understanding some of the technical dimensions of our craft.  

At least, that’s my view.  The term “digital humanities” is a site of open debate, and the debate ranges from serious critique (“is this a field with a general research agenda?”) to quibbles (“can you really call yourself a digital humanist if you can’t code?”). If you’re at all interested in the digital humanities, you’ll eventually encounter this kind of writing, which seeks to define our label and work out its implications.  For example, Routledge has published a book, edited by some DH luminaries, called Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader.  At 330 pages, it encompasses a lot of defining, and it’s not even comprehensive.  

Your enthusiasm for this genre of rhetoric may wax and wane as you do DH.  It’s easy to feel jaded after a while, but we all know and feel the scholarly urge to define, in unambiguous terms, what we’re talking about when we talk about something.  One of the hallmarks of the digital humanities themselves, though, is a comfort with variable outcomes, with uncertainty, with unexpected detours and discoveries, with transdisciplinary experimentation.  With the novel and weird — with things that are difficult to define.

Maybe defining DH is less important than we reflexively think. As Lisa Spiro has pointed out, community and shared values are a lot more useful than abstract definitions.  I think it’s enough to say that you’ll find out what the term “digital humanities” means for you if you start working in the field.  You may even find the term inadequate and prefer, as one of my colleagues does, phrases like “Big Humanities” — a banner of both venturesome scholarship and inclusivity, one that may entail fewer shibboleths and more varieties of hacking.  

But how do I get started? Do I need to code?  Do I need training in specific technologies?
The digital humanities are many things to many people, but for me, their animating spirit isn’t technology per se; instead, it’s a mode of imaginative attention that engenders certain approaches to understanding objects of humanistic study. That mode of attention is technologically inflected, but it arises primarily from the instincts of the humanist. In other words: you generally want to lead with your research interests, not with an interest in technology that may or may not meet your needs.

At the same time, it’s not difficult to imagine how exploring technology–a digital exhibit platform, a topic modeling tool, GIS software–can influence your research agenda.  A basic condition of the digital humanities is that we often use tools of precision and formal expression to learn about cultural artifacts whose enduring value is rooted in ambiguity.  But I think the use of those tools and approaches has a sharpening effect on one’s scholarly vision. When you create or work with digitized materials, when you create models, when you try to be precise and unambiguous even though you know that ambiguity is a soil where meaning grows, you have to interrogate assumptions and first impressions.  It doesn’t do to trust vague notions when you are preparing a digital edition, mapping a novel, or understanding the results of your automated text analysis. What do we really mean by this location or that name? Are we sure that we know what we think we know about this place? What does it mean for a text analysis program to discern “topics” in a corpus?  And, at a more general level, what possibilities open up when we grapple with these questions in the context of digital scholarship?

This kind of reflection seems worthwhile for scholars, and it’s also a reason that digital scholarship often serves a pedagogical function analogous to that of old-school, kinda-formalist close reading. The act of naming or identifying things precisely also reveals imprecision and uncertainty or ambiguity in a text.  Realizing cultural artifacts — literature, architecture, paintings, music — as data isn’t just anatomizing them for convenience. It’s also helping us understand those artifacts in other ways.

Put another way: to make our cultural record computationally tractable in ways that illuminate and retain what’s distinctive and untranslatable about that record, we need the experience and the perspective of the humanist scholar. And because doing DH so often means interrogating and revising our assumptions about a cultural artifact, we also sharpen that humanistic experience and perspective in doing it.  

This is a roundabout way of addressing the questions above, and I don’t mean to sell short the perspective of technologists or the value of learning to code.  In fact, I think humanists should learn to code, for many of the reasons I express above, and I think that the best digital humanities projects are broadly collaborative ventures that draw inspiration from many people with diverse competencies and interests.

Learning from doing–and failing
For that reason (and others), it probably doesn’t make sense to undertake a large digital humanities project on your own in graduate school.  But there are two good ways to immerse yourselves in the digital humanities: joining a project and aimlessly playing around.

If you can join an existing project in some capacity, you will learn a lot about the diverse and complex elements of digital humanities work.  You’ll also learn more simply by absorbing what goes on around you than you will in a year of reading about the digital humanities.

The other way of learning — aimless playing around — should become habit, too.  The DH community is supportive and experimentally inclined; you’ll be right at home asking how things work, experimenting, and emulating what you like.  And more locally, consultants, training, and support services at Duke are available to catalyze your exploration.

Of course, much of what you try isn’t going to work.  Failure happens a lot in DH, so it’s a good environment to shed any phobias of failure (and to mitigate impostor syndrome; everybody in DH is learning on the fly).  The digital humanities invite you to think about failure differently: as a ticket back to the planning stage, only you’re much wiser this time, or as an open door to a new course of project development or dissemination.  There’s always something generative about failure and failed ideas in DH, and generally speaking, the DH community is open to talking about misfires and sharing lessons from work gone wrong.

Exploring further
For more on the digital humanities, including resources and organizations here at Duke, you may want to check out the following.  For convenience, this list includes inline links from the text above.

Local events, resources, and organizations

Introductory texts and learning resources