What follows is a portfolio of my work within the field of Digital Humanities – a field that is difficult to define. My own views on the topic can be found here.
My Role in Digital Humanities
Because I was trained as a Computer Scientist (Sc.B. Brown University, 2012), I generally approach the field of Digital Humanities by asking “What can I program to aid this project?” One of the biggest assets that I can bring to the field is my confidence with programming, and I have employed C#, Python, and Javascript as part of my work. However, I also believe that it is important to make use of existing tools where possible. I have, for instance, used Voyant, iMovie, Drupal, and Unity in the past.
My work in the field so far has focused on two branches in particular: interactive 3D virtual worlds for research purposes and the integration of technology in the classroom for undergraduate education.
I have worked extensively with Chris Johanson at UCLA to refine and extend the capabilities of his model of the Roman Forum. Although I initially entered this project as a programmer, fixing bugs and exploring what the interactive world was capable of demonstrating, I have also made philological contributions, particularly by curating “citation” material to justify each aspect of the world’s appearance. Most recently, I have worked with approaches to visualization, both traditional and novel, to display information about the Roman funeral inside of and outside of the virtual world.
Although Digital Humanities involves the use of technology to aid research in the Humanities or teaching the skills needed to perform such research, it also includes using technology to improve pedagogy in the Humanities. I believe that it is very important to employ technology in the classroom. This should be done carefully – integrating technology for its own sake may be counterproductive. When done well, however, students benefit greatly. This is reflected both in my own teaching – I have led the creation of a yearlong hybrid (half-online) Introduction to Latin course by producing numerous digital resources for students and instructors – and in my work as a Research and Instructional Technology Consultant (RITC), where I assist Humanities instructors at UCLA with better integrating technology into their classes.
Moving forward, I am interested in delving into a third aspect of Digital Humanities, namely Computational Linguistics. In the long term, I hope to produce digital tools to examine in detail linguistic phenomena better than can be done by hand.
Digital Projects
Click on the selections below to see some of the Digital Humanities projects I have worked on.
