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The Inaugural DH Fest was a Great Success
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This past January, the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities program and the History department hosted DH Fest, a showcase of ongoing DH projects from staff, faculty, and students. The event was a chance to see what our colleagues and students have been building, to spark conversations, and to strengthen our DH community. By all accounts, it delivered, with 17 projects featured and 40+ attendees. Check out the projects' slideshow for a look at the works and links to more information. |
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Members of the Catholic Almanac team at DH Fest, standing, from left: Christian Egan, Ashlyn Stewart, Yuchen Xiong, and Lucy DeMeo, kneeling, from left: Victoria Oliviero and Joanna Schroeder |
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FWWCP project team members, left to right: Ashlyn Stewart, Noël Ingram, Jess Pauszek, and Hannah Bell |
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After years of collaboration with the DSG, Assistant Professor of English Jess Pauszek launched her digital collection of papers from the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) with a celebration in the Digital Studio on February 18. Professor Pauszek, who studies working-class writers and writing, has worked closely with FWWCP members for over a decade to preserve their physical archive in London and make it available online. The site allows users to view thousands of publications, administrative documents, and more by working-class writers in the UK from 1976 to the present. |
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Booklets held in FWWCP Digital Collections |
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Since 2023, Ashlyn Stewart and Dave Thomas have been working with Professor Pauszek on migrating the project from an older platform into a CollectionBuilder instance built by Dave to host the archival material in a more streamlined, stable web environment. In tandem, they redesigned the site, refined the project workflows, and improved the metadata organization. Going forward, Professor Pauszek and her students will continue to add content, and the DSG will continue to provide technical assistance as needed.
To learn more about the FWWCP project, visit the website. We also recommend watching student impact videos to see what students have learned from working on the project. |
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Joanna Published in ACRL's ResearchDataQ
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We are pleased to announce that Joanna Schroeder’s editorial, “Discovering Digital Scholarship: Reflections of a Data Scientist Turned Librarian,” was published in ResearchDataQ, a publication by the Digital Scholarship section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. In it, Joanna draws on her background as a research data scientist and her unexpected discovery of common ground with digital scholarship and digital humanities, recognizing that the fields share not just technical but also critical approaches. |
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A Wonderful Digital Humanities Capstone Cohort
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Capstone students, left to right: Schuyler Gardner, Fernando Jimenez, S.J., Allia Keysor |
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Though only a cohort of three, the students in the spring DH graduate capstone course created work that spans a remarkable breadth of subject matter, time periods, and technical approaches. Theology PhD student Fernando Jimenez, S.J., built an online tool to parse Biblical Hebrew by drawing on etymologically related roots from other ancient Semitic languages, helping researchers refine their understanding of hapax legomena (words that appear only once) and the broader Biblical lexicon. English MA student Allia Keysor built a digital collection of Japanese poetry, featuring original texts alongside encoded translations, to reveal the creativity and bias inherent in the act of translation. Finally, History PhD student Schuyler Gardner painstakingly transcribed a 17th-century kitchen ledger, using dynamic data visualizations to explore seasonal consumption patterns and to compare the historical realities of British food with the culturally constructed norms of English and Irish diets. The students’ project presentations were fantastic, and given to a packed house!
To see previous capstone projects, visit the DH certificate website. (This year's projects will be added to it sometime this summer.) |
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A Whole Lot of Data Support Needs
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Joanna has had a seriously busy semester supporting a wide range of student data needs—a breadth that speaks to both her expertise and the library's expanding role in data-driven research. For the second year in a row, she worked with the Lynch School's Data Science Master's program, providing instruction on finding data for research in the General Linear Models course. Students pursued a variety of topics for their final assignment, each with distinct data access needs, drawing on sources such as municipal environmental spatial data from ArcGIS Hub, NCAA women's basketball performance data from ESPN, and music artist and song data from Spotify. Finding and accessing data is a critical skill for data scientists, and one that Joanna is glad to help them develop.
She also worked closely with a number of undergraduate honors thesis students across Economics, Public Health, and Environmental Science. Their projects varied considerably in scope and method, putting Joanna's wide-ranging data skills to good use. One student needed help writing Python scripts to process millions of childbirth data points, another was qualitatively coding documents in NVivo to identify environmental themes in company records, and a third was working with government datasets on labor and occupations to analyze AI's disruption of the accounting profession. Joanna was delighted with the outcomes and is already looking forward to the questions next year's thesis students will bring her. |
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Robert Morris Update: Dozens of New Books Recovered
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Assistant Professor of English Christy Pottroff has been leading a renewed investigation into the life and legacy of early BC booster and Boston civil rights attorney Robert Morris, building on a project Law Librarian Laurel Davis began a decade ago. Part of Professor Pottroff’s work has been reconstructing Morris's library, which his estate donated to BC after his death in 1882. |
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DSG student worker Calvin Wang holds three Morris books he recovered in BC's off-site storage. The Robert Morris inscription on the right appears in François Guizot's 1856 three-volume set, The History of Civilization: From the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution. |
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That reconstruction effort has taken on new momentum this semester. Building on earlier work by Professor Pottroff, Stephen Sturgeon, and Andrew Isidoro, Ashlyn has revived and spearheaded the systematic search for Morris’ books in the BC Libraries, growing it into a large, interdepartmental effort involving over a dozen staff and students, with the intention of eventually developing a public-facing digital project from the information gathered. She has coordinated with Joanna and Kathryn Doan, Senior Metadata & Systems Librarian, to build a list of potential books that students can use to search for and identify volumes Morris donated. She has also worked with our wonderful colleagues in Access Services to ensure that students can verify books from the Stacks and from Offsite storage. Students have already found 36 new Morris books this semester, bringing our total closer to 200.
Learn more about Professor Pottroff’s work on Morris in her recent C19 podcast. |
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Preserving 3D objects for the new Catholic Religious Archive
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3D models of objects found in BC's Catholic Religious Archives |
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Antonio, with the dedicated assistance of Natalie Hill, a PhD candidate in Theology and Education, has produced 3D scans of several dozen objects from the Catholic Religious Archive (CRA) in advance of the grand opening of its new space on the Brighton Campus. These objects, chosen for their interesting biographies and insights into the daily life of religious orders, range from a tabernacle once housed in the White House to coif-making machines used to produce the habits worn by nuns. They will be incorporated into finding aids and used to create a virtual component of the opening exhibit for the new CRA building. A selection of these models can be found here, with more to come when the collection is formally launched. |
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Mapping Mexico City Update: We're Building A Gazetteer
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This semester, Antonio and Joanna have been working with student assistants on Visiting Assistant Professor Andrei Guadarrama's Mexico City project to develop a gazetteer—a geographic dictionary built by entering coordinates derived from historical guidebooks and maps. The work began with a "research sprint" on the first day of class, for which Antonio designed a Google Sheet that allows students to enter the geographic coordinates of city blocks based on historic maps of early 20th-century Mexico City. The gazetteer will facilitate the next phase of the project, in which addresses from historical property listings will be automatically looked up and their values associated with the appropriate blocks to map neighborhood development over the first half of the 20th century. It can also serve future research projects as an invaluable geographical record. |
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Birds of Massachusetts Update: More Birds (and More Fun!)
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3D models of bird specimens lent by Harvard to the project |
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Having scanned all the birds in Boston College's teaching collection, the Birds of Massachusetts project acquired additional specimens in collaboration with the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, bringing it closer to its goal of building a database of all birds native to the state. The purchase of a laser scanner has enabled Antonio LoPiano and a team of undergraduate research assistants—Shining Sun, Avery Tilman, and Abigail Wasta—to produce higher-quality models of intricate avian morphology while also improving workflow efficiency. Meanwhile, Dave has been building a new open-source 3D viewer that will not only serve as the project website but also be made freely available to others around the world to host their own 3D models. We are grateful for ATIG and Libraries funding, which made this possible.
See the birds on Sketchfab, where they are temporarily being hosted. |
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Catholic Almanacs Update: Over Half a Million Data Points
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Our Catholic Almanacs project, led by Ashlyn, continues to grow as the dataset expands in size, density, and complexity. The team has now completed the extraction and structuring of 12 years of data (1864–70 and 1834–38), with five more years in active entry (1860–61 and 1838–40). As of March, the dataset includes 588,609 encoded values representing 9,785 unique institutions and 7,230 unique individuals across 424 spreadsheets. Much of this accomplishment is owed to our wonderful student contributors, four of whom are graduating this spring. Congratulations to Kate Goldfarb, Curran Schestag, Morgan Lamphier, and Brianna Skeen, whom we will greatly miss!
Major contributions have also come from data wrangling wiz Joanna, who has been indispensable in keeping the data pipeline under control through her impressive use of Google Apps Script, and English MA student Yuchen Xiong, who, with Dave's help, has drawn on her full-stack developer skills to build a database that allows users to explore both the micro and macro views of our rich dataset. |
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Jesuit Catalogs Database Update: Data Entry Has Begun
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The Jesuit Catalogs Database project, having recently launched its data-entry portal, has taken its next big step with teams from Austria and Rome now entering centuries' worth of economic and demographic data on Jesuits and their communities. Collected every three years over those centuries, the catalogs include information on every Jesuit: their duties, their evaluations, and the economic records of their communities. All of this information will eventually be available on a public-facing platform to support historical research. |
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Glossia Annotation and Reader Platform
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In collaboration with Classical Studies Associate Professor of the Practice Mark Thatcher, Dave has developed Glossia, an annotated online source reader platform. Know someone teaching a class who is frustrated with existing annotated readers—or who wants to put their own reading excerpts online with quickly accessible contextual information? Glossia was built with exactly that in mind. With it, you can create an online site where reading selections are enriched with author and source backgrounds, links to related passages, footnotes, and even maps, all easily searchable and taggable by subject. Don’t worry; very little technical knowledge is required to use it.
Please let us know if you would like to learn more or would like help setting up an instance for your course. |
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