Presenting the 2021–22 CDH Data Fellows

We are pleased to announce the 2021–22 recipients of the Center for Digital Humanities Data Fellowship. CDH Data Fellows become affiliates of the CDH during the 12-month course of the program, attending an orientation session and participating in quarterly formal data reviews with CDH staff and selected campus partners. Princeton faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students are eligible for the Fellowship. The CDH Data Fellowship is a new initiative that builds upon and replaces the former CDH Dataset Curation Grant program.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

The CDH has awarded Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Assistant Professor, Art and Archaeology, African American Studies) a Data Fellowship to continue work on her project, Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism (warning: graphic content). The online database includes images and objects relating to the issues of colonial medicine, artistic representation and race, as well as data visualization tools and other materials to assist users in engaging with these items. During the fellowship year, Arabindan-Kesson will consider strategies to develop new tags or categories that highlight what is absent from the images and objects—in particular, information involving the medical expertise and experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Arabindan-Kesson will use the dataset in her course, “Pathologies of Difference: Art, Race and Medicine in the British Empire.”

Brigid Doherty and Sara Green

Brigid Doherty (Associate Professor, German and Art and Archaeology) and Sara Green (Ph.D. candidate, Art and Archaeology) will spend their fellowship year building a corpus of texts drawn from artists’ statements, manifestos, and art-critical works written in Western Europe since the late 1940s. They will then index the corpus for “keywords”—for instance, “détournement,” “unconscious,” or “performativity”—that figure prominently in interdisciplinary intellectual discourses that have played an important role in the visual arts of this period. Through this work, Doherty and Green will engage with the relationship between art writing and larger intellectual contexts and think more broadly about how data can be used to illuminate this link. The project will focus on texts related to the historical and thematic frameworks of Doherty and Green’s upcoming course, “Reckoning with History, Responding to the Present: Art in Europe Since 1960,” which they will offer through the Collaborative Teaching Initiative in the Humanities.

Janet Kay

As a Data Fellow, Janet Kay (Lecturer, Art and Archaeology) plans to complete her database of graves and cemeteries in use between 350–550 CE in Britain—a period and region for which there are no contemporary written sources. The database is the core of Kay’s book-in-progress, which studies how burial practices in Britain in the long fifth century reflected people’s relationships to their own history. She will use this database in later iterations of her course ART361 “The Art and Archaeology of Plague.” During her tenure as a Fellow, Kay also plans to learn more about Open Access data management and publication.

Shay O’Brien

Shay O’Brien (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology) will examine the interaction between elites’ economic behavior and their social world by developing a dataset of prominent Dallas residents from 1890–1950. Because O’Brien has already assembled much of the quantitative data, including information from Census materials, she plans to use her time with the Center for Digital Humanities to systematically organize qualitative evidence, such as articles from The Dallas Morning News and archival material found in Texas libraries. In doing so, she will engage with important questions about how narrative materials can be transformed into data. The database will serve as the backbone of O’Brien’s dissertation and future work, and will eventually be made available to other scholars studying elites. This award is co-sponsored with the Data Driven Social Science Initiative. 

Gian Duri Rominger

Gian Duri Rominger (Ph.D. candidate, East Asian Studies) will use his fellowship award to continue his work on the link between sound and meaning in ancient Chinese texts. Currently, Rominger is compiling a dataset of puns, rhymes, alliterations, and other poetic structures in two texts, the Lüshi chunqiu and the Huainanzi, for which he will utilize DIRECT (Digital Intertextual Resonances in Early Chinese Texts), a project he is working on with CDH Digital Humanities Developer Nick Budak. Rominger anticipates that his dataset will play an important role in his dissertation. Moreover, he hopes that the dataset, once published, will contribute to future work on phonological reconstructions of Old Chinese, the oldest attested member of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and to the fields of intellectual and cultural history, as well as to historical linguistics more broadly.

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