Digital Humanities Fellows

Martha Blanco

Spanish and Portuguese

Martha Blanco's project develops from their doctoral research on early modern Iberian poetry and commentary traditions, focusing on Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s extensive commentaries on Camões’s Rimas várias (1685). This work is one of the most complex interpretive projects of the Iberian Baroque, combining poetic analysis, historical references, and dense practices of quotation and comparison. It builds a wide literary network that connects Spanish and Portuguese traditions with classical antiquity and Italian poetic theory, especially Renaissance poetic treatises and broader traditions of poetic thought.

Rather than only explaining the poems, the commentary works as a form of critical writing that organizes intertextual relations across languages, genres, and periods. Because of this complexity, it is well suited to digital humanities approaches to scholarly editing, especially for structuring a large textual corpus, tracing intertextual references, and making editorial decisions in a systematic way. It also allows for stylometric analysis of Camões’s poetry and Spanish lyric traditions, particularly sonnets, to identify recurring rhetorical patterns, stylistic tendencies, and formal structures across the Iberian literary tradition.

Eun Ah Cho

East Asian Language and Cultures

Eun Ah Cho is developing Faces in Circulation, an interactive digital interface that asks how the public faces of North Korean refugees become recognizable—and why some do not. The project accompanies her book manuscript, Post-Border Poetics: North Korean Refugees and the Politics of Face, and centers on four English-language autobiographies whose authors followed strikingly different paths through publishing infrastructures, media platforms, and institutional pipelines. The interface offers two ways of encountering the same corpus. A face-centered view presents photographs, cover images, and trajectories of testimony across TED stages, YouTube channels, and lecture circuits. A paratext and infrastructure view removes the authorial image and foregrounds ghostwriters, publishers, copyright structures, review vocabulary, and translation pathways. Toggling between the two reveals that the asymmetry of refugee visibility lies not in the lives themselves but in the infrastructure that surrounds them. Cho’s project draws on Korean studies, refugee studies, and critical digital humanities. The interface is designed to grow as new refugee narratives continue to circulate.

Samantha M. Cooper

Jewish Studies

Samantha M. Cooper is developing a public-facing digital exhibit called The Jewish Opera Industry Database (JOI; pronounced “joy”) that shares the stories of the many Jewish people who sustained the New York opera industry during the sixty-year period between the first Metropolitan Opera House’s establishment and its sale to the public. The JOI Database will accompany Cooper’s first book, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry, 1880-1940, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. While preparing her book, Cooper meticulously documented the names, birth and death dates, and professions of numerous Jewish individuals involved in the opera industry, from philanthropists and scenic designers to electricians and opera impresarios. She kept lists of those who worked for the Met, the names of Jewish opera box subscribers and audience members, and events for the Jewish community that took place there. She also collected the business names and street addresses of Jewish-owned restaurants that fed hungry opera patrons, Jewish artist managers who secured opportunities for opera singers, and Jewish-led opera companies that competed with the Met. Cooper looks forward to exploring how digital humanities storytelling tools like ArcGIS Maps, ArcGIS StoryMaps and Collection Builder can help to bring the existence, careers, and activities of these Jewish opera lovers to life in a searchable and engaging way.

Phil Cunningham

KU Libraries

The project “Digital Mapping the Kansas Collection: Using Geographic Tagging and Collections as Data as a Tool for Collection Development,” transforms archival finding aids from the Kansas Collection into a structured dataset suitable for Digital Humanities (DH) analysis. By parsing descriptive archival metadata into standardized fields of geographic and content description, the primary intent is to generate a heat-map of the geographic coverage of approximately 2,200 archival collections held by the Spencer Research Library as part of the Kansas Collection. The resulting dataset will support analysis using DH tools to identify collection development strengths, weaknesses, and historical collecting trends. The project advances archival collection development through the application of spatial humanities methodologies and “collections as data” practices. In addition to generating heat maps and other visualizations, the dataset will provide a foundation for textual analysis as a future project. The project aims to demonstrate how DH tools can support archival collection development assessment and provide a scalable case study for archival and library professionals.

Abigal Fields

French, Francophone & Italian Studies

What does it mean to really know the land? Maps, surveys and data can tell us where property lines fall, what is grown where and how much, but they cannot tell us what a particular field has meant to the people who have worked it, written about it, or called it home. Field Notes: Douglas County takes seriously the idea that land is not just a physical entity, but a series of layered stories, told by and heard by different people, to different ends. To piece together these stories, Fields looks to archival documents (many from the Kansas Collection at the Spencer Research Library), literary and artistic works and oral histories recorded with local farmers and community members. She brings these materials together in an interactive digital map that connects documents, histories and memories to the specific places they describe. Users will be able to move between a nineteenth-century land survey and a contemporary farmer's account of the same field, or between a work of local literature and the landscape that inspired it. In this way, Field Notes treats land not as a backdrop to human stories but as a fluid and agentic actor within them—shaped by, and shaping, the accounts we give of it.

Alicia Houser

History

Houser's project takes people on a virtual tour of Moshi, Tanzania. Best known as the base town for Mount Kilimanjaro, their work focuses the contributions of women to shaping urban space in Moshi. Women in this region have a reputation for defying gender norms and creating their own lives, without depending on a man. Women form a major part of Moshi's human infrastructure as they fill sidewalks, stalls, and store frames engaging in business that supports their families and wider communities. Her website will include maps of the city that feature my main research sites from her year of fieldwork completed in 2025. Each site will have its own page featuring a contextualized explanation of that space’s contribution to the city’s overall function, anonymized interview excerpts with women, photographs, and related archival documents. Content will be in English and Swahili, the language which she used with her participants, and which she speaks as a second language. Houser hopes users take the tour and enjoy a visit to a small urban center in Africa from the comfort of their couch!