Two of Faris's visualizations of data from the nursing ledgers, showing the specialities of nursing students and the place of origin of some immigrant students.

This fall, the DSG continued its work with the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities program, collaborating once again with instructor Angie Pacone, Assistant Professor of History, on the introduction to DH course. This foundational class introduces students—most of them new to DH—to core concepts and methodologies. We were delighted with the students’ engagement and excited to see their final projects, which range considerably in methodology and subject matter. One student is constructing a 3D model of Soviet-era housing to explore how spatial development, shaped by national policy, influenced residents’ lived experiences, while another is conducting a textual analysis of the rhetoric and sentiment surrounding trans people in conservative media. Text encoding has been especially popular this year, with two students creating XML/TEI-encoded digital editions: one juxtaposes sections from two translations of The Odyssey with Madeline Miller’s Circe, while the other draws on chapters of Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood serialized in The Colored American Magazine. (Read More)

Joanna provided a wide range of data instruction this semester, teaching twenty-nine sessions in total. The sessions took many forms, some deliberately conducted without computers to foster engagement and reduce barriers for students less familiar with the concepts being introduced.

In Professor Emily Prud'hommeaux’s Data Science Capstone, she had students work in project teams to assemble a coherent file-management scheme from a pile of assorted files and folders; in Professor Kristin Lunz Trujillo’s Media and Politics course, she had students examine visualizations created from the same dataset to see how choices in data visualization can shift interpretation; and in Professor Angie Pacone’s Introduction to the Digital Humanities graduate class, she had students work in pairs with “messy data” from Catholic almanacs to learn how unstructured information can be transformed into a coherent data model.

An example of the messy Catholic almanacs data that Joanna had students structure.

Our students continue to encode the names, locations, and leaders of the institutions listed in a series of Catholic almanacs for our ongoing Almanacs project. Graduate student Justin Brown-Ramsey and undergraduate Kate Goldfarb are proofing the encoding of institutions from the start of the almanacs run (1833-38), while undergraduates Bhakti Patel, Kaitlyn Bell, Louisa Bagot, Curran Schestag, Lucy DeMeo, and Leo King are working on 1864 to 1870. The students have only a handful of dioceses left–in just 1864, '65, and '66–before both of those chunks are complete and the teams can continue their race to the middle. 

Most importantly, the database for searching all of this information now has a stable development version that students use and test daily. Yuchen Xiong has built this database over the last nine months under the tutelage of Dave, and its production version will be ready to soft launch by March 2026.

This ongoing 3D modeling and database project reached a major milestone last year with the successful scanning, uploading, and annotation of the full BC ornithological collection—over three dozen birds. The ultimate goal is ambitious: to build a database encompassing every bird species endemic to Massachusetts. To support this undertaking, the project was recently awarded an ATIG grant, enabling Professor Jeff DaCosta and Antonio to plan the next phase during the semester. In partnership with the Libraries, the project purchased a metrology-grade laser scanner capable of capturing the finest details of avian morphology. Next semester, undergraduate research assistants will begin scanning an expanded set of specimens as the team launches a collaboration with Harvard University to digitize their ornithological collection.

With Dave's custom app written and servers all set up, the Jesuit Catalogs Database project is preparing for its launch and initial data entry phase by international research teams. The first group to conduct data entry, affiliated with the University of Vienna, will shortly begin work on the economic records of thousands of Jesuit communities spanning centuries. The project’s first year will focus on expanding the data entry workflow and seeing more teams of researchers start using the platform to enter data. Eventually, the site will expand the number of visualization and data analysis tools available to users.