Wesleyan University Library and Information Technology Services are pleased to have launched the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program in the spring of 2019, offered by Technical and Digital Services and Academic Technology. The Fellows Program offers a small cohort of students the unique opportunity to work with experts from the Digital Lab and Academic Technology to develop the skills they’ll need to utilize digital technologies in future research and thesis projects. The fellows will gain perspectives and expertise with digital approaches and tools for use in their scholarship, in their professional careers, and in everyday life.
About the Fellows
For the third cohort, we welcomed the first class of four students. Shoko Narasaki '22 is from Tokyo, Japan, and is majoring in Science in Society Program with concentrations in Biology and Sociology. She is interested in digital STS and in imagining a more humanistic relationship with data. Shiva Ramkumar '22 is from Singapore, and is majoring in Music with minors in South Asian Studies and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. They are interested in the role of digital scholarship in ethnographic and historical research in music, as well as multimedia archival. Florina Sutanto '24 is from Bogor, Indonesia and is planning to major in Economics and English, with a minor in Data Analysis. Her interests lie in the intersection between STEM and the humanities, the intricacies of language in relation to our perception of the world, and tracking the effects of globalization and colonialism on language and culture. Ransho Ueno '23 comes from Tokyo, Japan, and majoring in Science in Society Program and Government with a minor in Data Analysis. She is passionate about decreasing health disparities across the world through the lenses of public policies, and her research interests include social determinants of health along with how technology would improve one’s access to healthcare.
Chelsea Dixon '22, Benjamin Filio '22, and Lexie Silverman '23 joined as the second cohort of fellows in January 2020. Chelsea Dixon comes from Manchester, Jamaica and plans to major in Government and Computer Science. She is interested in education policy across the world, the ways the history of particular countries influence their educational systems as well as how technology can be used to improve education. Benjamin Filio III’22 is from West Covina, California and is majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior and Science in Society with a minor in College of East Asian Studies. He is interested in seeing how research and discourse around the neurosciences has been shaped throughout history, and also how research in the neurosciences can be conducted and enhanced by integrating digital humanities within the methodologies. Lexie Silverman '23 is from Ventura, California and is planning to study Economics and Integrated Design and Engineering, with a concentration in computer science. Her academic interests focus on applied cognitive science, such as behavioral economics and human computer interaction. Unfortunately, the second year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows program was interrupted by Covid-19.
The first cohort of fellows consists of Philippe Bungabong '22, Rama Co '21, and Sofia Sperber '22. Together, they are developing two projects, one led by Co and the other by Sperber, with Bungabong serving as the technical lead on both. Co's project, entitled “Politics by Other Magazines: The General-Interest Periodical in the Early Philippine Commonwealth”, examines the issues of Philippine Magazine, an English-language, general-interest periodical from the early Philippine Commonwealth (1934-1936), which served as the premier outlet for the publication of Filipino political and literary works during the Philippines’ period of transitional independence from American rule. The project aims to compare the political and non-political content within Philippine Magazine in order to identify potential cross-pollination between these modes of discourse. Sperber's project, entitled “Chinatown Opera Houses at the Turn of the Century,” looks at the rise and decline of Chinese theaters in the United States at the turn of the last century, and catalogue archival photographs, playbills, advertisements and sound recordings of the largely forgotten art. This project aims to provide a centralized digital archive for Chinese opera and its role in Chinese immigrants’ lives, especially with regards to building community and culture around the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Optical character recognition, topic modeling, text mining, and GIS story-mapping are the primary techniques of data analysis in these projects.