2024 Digital Humanities Research Showcase (2024)

12-12:30 pm-- Lunch, Welcome Remarks, and Presentation on "A Decade of CESTA Data"

12:30-3:30 pm-- DH Research Fellows' Showcase

12:30 - 1:50 PM :The Meaning and Measurement of Place

with presentations from:

Matt Randolph (PhD Candidate in History):"Bringing AI to Archibald Grimké's Archive:A Case Study of Artificial Intelligence for Histories of Race and Slavery"

This digital project builds upon two years of research collaborations connecting Stanford's History Department with historians and archivists at Howard University in Washington, D.C. We have reviewed, digitized, and transcribed a corpus of letters from Howard's archives relating to African American intellectual and diplomat Archibald Grimké and his family in Washington, D.C. (particularly his then teenage daughter Angelina) as well as Grimké’s correspondence with Dominican leaders and U.S. State Department officials. Through Google's AI software, Gemini, our team has produced transcriptions of handwritten documents that were photographed in the archives. I will present the opportunities and challenges we navigated in leveraging artificial intelligence tools for archival work and historical research methods.

Ellis Schriefer (PhD Candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures):"Narratives and Neighborhoods: Unpacking Media Representations of El Raval and Lavapiés with NLP"

In my talk, I will be discussing how I used NLP (specifically topic modeling and word frequency) to better understand how the mainstream Spanish media outlet, El País, has depicted two working-class, immigrant neighborhoods (El Raval in Barcelona and Lavapiés in Madrid) in articles from 1996-2024.

Kelly Boles (PhD Candidate in Education):"The Spatiality of Teacher Professional Learning Ecologies"

Geospatial variability is a crucial, yet often omitted, contextual aspect of teaching and learning. In this talk, I illustrate how spatial data science methods reveal important locale- and region-based inequities in STEM teachers' professional learning opportunities. Specifically, I present selected findings that show how teachers' learning opportunities vary in nature and quality across geographic space. I argue that both students and teachers are learners, whose learning opportunities are shaped by the shared communities and contexts in which they work, live, and attend school. Honoring these shared experiences suggests a new approach to the study of teacher quality and evaluation, particularly as applied to practitioners in underserved communities.

2:10 - 3:30 PM:Categories and Connections in Knowledge Systemswith presentations from:

Anuj Amin (PhD Candidate in Religious Studies):"Divine Prisons and Sacred Bindings: Late Ancient Aramaic Incantation Bowls"

During my presentation, which willbe recorded over Zoom, I will discuss a general background of my corpus, previous scholarshipon the material, how my methodologyis unique, the creation of my database, the analytics performed, and future directions.

Junyi Tao (MS Student in Symbolic Systems):"Three Layers of the Knowledge Landscape: A Case Study of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"

This project takes a deeper look into the widely influential Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) and reveals three layers of the philosophy landscape it presents. The first layer is the content of entries, each offering an overview of a philosophical topic or thinker. Beneath this lies a layer of citations that manifest the dialogues among scholars within the community. From this, we start to see more clearly how social power is intertwined with the narrative of intellectual history—for example, whose voices count? The last one is the layer of meta-content assigned by the SEP’s authors and editors, such as links between related entries, which shapes the architecture of this “knowledge system”. At the end of this talk, I would also like to share some methodological reflections.

Elaine Lai (PhD Candidate in Religious Studies): "Intertextual Heatmap of theSecret Tantra of the Sun: Blazing Luminous Matrix of Samantabhadrī"

TheTantra of the Sunwas the first Buddhist scripture in the tradition of the Great Perfection to feature an all-female cast. Traditional histories claim that this tantra is a major source text for a textual cycle/tradition that emerged in the 14th century called theHeart Essence of the Ḍākinī, where the feminine is likewise elevated. In this talk, I share how I built an intertextual heatmap from scratch to visualize how and where theTantra of the Sunis quoted and referenced throughout theHeart Essence of the Ḍākinī and its largest commentarial cycle. I share a tutorial of the final heatmap product where the user can toggle between citational matches and see for themselves how they move through either corpus of literature. I end with broader issues of methodology, including how I chose to handle problematic OCR renderings, and the inevitability of having to engage in close readings of textual materials alongside the use of different technologies.

4-6 pm-- Faculty Research Presentations

with presentations from:

Patricia Alessandrini (Music Department); Bridget Algee-Hewitt (Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity); Mark Algee-Hewitt (English Department); Nora Barakat (History Department); Patricia Blessing (Department of Art and Art History); Joel Cabrita (History Department); Giovanna Ceserani (Classics Department); Robin Chapdelaine (Center for African Studies); Nicole Coleman (Stanford Libraries); Zephyr Frank (History Department); Sarah Levine (School of Education); Lerone Martin (Departments of African and African American Studies, and Religious Studies); Helena Miton (School of Business); Grant Parker (Departments of Classics, and African and African American Studies); Felicia Smith (Stanford Libraries); Richard Roberts (History Department); Alice Staveley (English Department); Elaine Treharne (English Department); Ali Yaycioglu (History Department)

6-7 pm-- Undergraduate Researchers' Poster Fair and Reception

with 16 Undergraduate Researchers who worked on CESTA projects during 2024 Winter and Spring quarters!

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