Faculty Mentor/s: Edward Whitley, Professor of English
Students on the team this summer:
Heidebrink-Bruno – GRAD - English
Jessica Mun – 2021 – UG - Anthropology and Global Studies
Jesse Seaverns – 2021 – UG - Political Science
Jenny Lee – 2021 – UG - International Relations and Spanish
Maggie Tarmey – 2021 – UG - English and Management
Marshall Hendrian – 2023 – UG - UNDECIDED
Adam Taber – 2024 – UG - IDEAS
Project Description: The journal PMLA recently expressed “hope for an interdisciplinary encounter where digital humanities meets data science.” These two research fields have remained relatively separate, despite having similar goals, and now scholars at Lehigh are poised to realize this encounter. The field of Digital Humanities sees scholars in disciplines such as history and literature using technology to archive, analyze, and visualize the human cultural record. In Data Science, computer scientists and statisticians use natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to understand textual and numerical data. Over the past year, Digital Humanists at Lehigh have worked with scholars from Lehigh’s Data X Initiative to identify design as a productive meeting ground for interdisciplinary collaboration. As both theory and practice, design captures a range of activities relevant to both groups—constructing data sets, creating user interfaces, and visualizing information—while design thinking has emerged as a multi-disciplinary process for creative problem solving. The Data for Impact student team will (1) interview faculty and staff who work in digital humanities, data science, and design to assess existing opportunities and expertise at Lehigh; (2) inventory programs in data science and digital humanities at other universities and research centers; and (3) use digital tools like Tableau to capture and display the information gathered in steps (1) and (2).
Month/Year Project Began:JUNE 2020