Hello! My name is Tonushree and I’m a senior from Mumbai, India. I am majoring in Cognitive Science with a Digital Arts and Humanities minor. When I’m not studying/working, I love creating art, exploring various nooks and crannies of campus and Northfield with my friends, and getting coffee with someone different every week to keep me on my toes. I also enjoy acting in Carleton productions. Apart from being a Digital Humanities Associate, I am also a Costume Shop Assistant at the Theater and Dance department and an Office Assistant for the Psych and Cog-Sci department!
Here is a picture of me soaking up the sun during my study abroad, Studio Art in the South Pacific 🙂
I thrive in settings of interdisciplinarity, where a project, theory, or concept needs to be understood from several different lenses, be it philosophical, sociological, economical, linguistic, or digital to name a few. I’m excited by the fact that being a DHA gives me the opportunity to simultaneously dabble in multiple humanities classes and work on or observe the digitization of their projects. I would love to further my interests in art, storytelling and creative visualization by learning how to turn them into digital projects during my time as a DHA!
Hello! I’m Henry, a sophomore from Minneapolis, MN. Here at Carleton, I’m interested in computer science, cognitive science and economics/public policy. This is my first year as part of the DHA team, and I’m excited to start getting involved in some Digital Humanities projects. While I love the theoretical/technical side of computer science, using these techniques as tools to build interesting projects has always been more rewarding for me than just theory alone. I’m hoping in my role as a DHA, I will have the opportunity to apply my formal knowledge and experience in web design and app building to projects across Carleton’s humanities disciplines.
I’m interested in the process of distilling large amounts of information into digestible analysis. This year, I’m hoping to learn more about how to do this well with digital tools. I’m also interested in learning more about visual storytelling with maps and other interactive web-based experiences.
Outside of school, I love playing music and spending time outside. On campus, I’m a board member for KRLX (our student-run radio station), a software developer on DataSquad, I live in Carleton’s Outdoors House (Wade house), and I can often be found in the climbing gym, exploring the Arb (by ski or foot), or plotting overly complex pranks on my friends.
My name is Cynthia Leng and I am a junior Statistics major from Beijing, China. This is my first year working as a Digital Humanities Associate (DHA), and I am really excited about the interesting projects I will be working on.
I got interested in digital humanities when I started working with the Carleton Archives. My role in the Carleton in China project introduced me to digital tools and content management systems, and I am eager to learn more about them as a DHA.
In my free time, I sing with the Carleton Choir and a Chinese a cappella group. I also enjoy traveling, watching movies, and playing badminton with my friends.
My favorite part of Carleton is that there’s plenty of space to follow curiosity – no matter what discipline the topic falls into. I’m excited to work as a Digital Humanities Associate this year because I love helping other people bring their curiosity to life. Selfishly, I also get to see more cool projects.
As an example, last Spring I began working as a DHA, and I worked on the 3D model viewer for CARCAS, which is an archaeology department project to display high quality scans of bones. The best moment of that project was showing Sarah, the faculty member leading the project, that the mobile version of the site lets you virtually put the bones on real world surfaces around you using your phone camera. She was delighted! I’m so proud that I was part of what made that moment happen, and I’m looking forward to more moments like that this year.
Here I am, holding a goat skull! In reality, nothing was in my hands; this is a feature of the mobile version of the CARCAS model viewer that I worked on last spring. Photograph by Cynthia Leng.
A little bit more about me – I’m a senior, and I’m a math major and digital arts and humanities minor. I love all angles of math, from the beauty and symmetry of abstract math to the nitty gritty computational considerations of working with real data. I also keep coming back to maps across a variety of academic fields, from medieval maps to storytelling maps made in the present day.
I’m looking forward to a great year working as a DHA!
“You can know something about everything,” These were my thoughts when I was applying to Carleton. The idea of Liberal Arts really fascinated me. I am the kind of person who tries to know at least something about everything. I think Liberal Arts are really important and I am very happy that I was able to do a small part in promoting them.
This term I worked on making an Omeka Sample Site that serves two functions: 1) Provide a sample site to Carleton students and community and; 2) Provide some basic information about liberal arts. The site can be accessed here. This site was also added to reclaim’s EdTech resource list:
The website can be accessed by students who aim to work on their own Omeka projects in future. The main page of the website looks like this:
I think Liberal Arts are important and help the students in becoming critical thinkers and solve novel problems. With the increasing influence of technology, it is important we add these technological advancements in our humanistic, literary and scientific studies. I really enjoyed working on this project and I hope this is helpful for students as well.
My name is Gaby Lazo, and I am a senior Linguistics major. This term, I was lucky enough to serve as a Digital Humanities Assistant between roles as a Student Teaching Assistant, and what a gift it was! While Digital Humanities projects have been my preferred way to engage with humanities education throughout my time at Carleton, stepping into this role meant stepping all the way back into my freshman self’s shoes, as I worked to revitalize my skills in the DH tools first introduced to me in Hacking the Humanities. And as I reimmersed myself in this work, between writing my Senior comps and captaining the Ballroom Dance Team, I rediscovered my love and passion for DH!
This term, I got to work on three primary projects: classroom Omeka support, digital advertising and revision, and video captioning. Working primarily with MELA 230: Jewish Collective Memory, I supported the onboarding of several new “researchers” onto their course Omeka site. I created new instructions both for adding new users to the site as an admin, and for accessing and activating new accounts. In doing this, we learned that many of the other Omeka resources no longer reflected the newest version of the interface; thus, I also got to update these instructional materials. These tasks together really let me dive back into the different ways Omeka can serve well as a digital archive, and the powerful capability it possesses to support humanities visualization through timelines.
Between compsing and DHA work, Gould Library became my second home this term!
My other two projects related to our annual Day of DH event held each June by our department. Firstly, I supported prep for the upcoming 2023 event by creating new teaser posters for this year’s festivities. This allowed me to become familiar with our keynote speaker, Quinn Dombrowski, and their wonderful work both in making DH welcoming to women, via the Data Sitters Club, and incredible textiles! Further, since the event is returning to in-person this year after several virtual occurrences, I updated some of the materials that will be needed to navigate the Weitz on the big day! In addition to these things, I have gotten to apply my captioning skills to a new project (in a new software) as I added captions to each Lightning Round session video from last year’s event. This has helped hone my attention to detail, and has reminded me of the critical role of accessibility in our department and at our school.
As I return to my TA position, I cannot help but reflect on how grateful I am that Digital Humanities not only thrives at Carleton, but that I got to be a part of it. Our work is a constant learning experience, where we are supported to practice trial and error as we come together to support incredible projects. While my academic career at Carleton is slowly coming to an end, my immersion into the world of DH is just beginning!
My name is Thien M. Bui and I am a Junior CS / Mathematics major at the school. Due to some pronunciation complications, I often go by Kevin which is what most of you *probably* would’ve known me by. I worked as a DHA last year, doing basic Python scripts and WP template maintenance for various departments, and I hope to continually be of use as one of the few resident CS major in the program!
Outside of DHA, I hope to spend more time with the seniors in the townhouse area this year (ALL THE HOUSES HAVE THEIR OWN CULTURE). Because of Covid, I took a gap after freshman year so this will be the last chance I’ll get to kick it with the folks I came into Carleton with. Here’s a cool pic of the area!
Lawn area next to Owens (where I live ;D)
Lastly, since I couldn’t make it to the accessibility training, I’ll instead be talking about Sofia Noble and Algorithm of Oppression instead. Last year, we got lucky and somehow managed to invite her over for our Day of DH where she kind of went ham on how search engine algorithms are marginalizing certain groups (e.g. searching for “black girl” on Google used to return a lot of pornographic materials). She goes into a lot of details in her book on how the problems in a wide range of use cases, and also possible solutions to remedy them. That was a fascinating talk, and I would wholeheartedly recommend everybody interested in AI to give the book a read!
Hello, I am Abdullah. I am from Lahore, Pakistan. I am a rising sophomore this year. I spent my last year working as a DHA. The main work that I did was with Map Archival where I archived maps of different places and cataloged them, added their descriptions, and posted them on their respective websites. My last year’s experience was really productive, relaxing, and at the same time, positively challenging. The work made me try new things which I may not have tried otherwise.
This year, I am aiming to keep up that trend and also try more technical aspects of DHA which will help me develop my skills. I am hopeful that the experience will be up to my expectations and just as great if not more wonderful than the last year.
Coming to the photographs that I have taken on campus, I have such a big collection of them. I like walking around campus and taking photographs. I am sharing two of them here since I want to learn more about both of these things albeit in different respects.
A picture of Sunset near Lyman LakesA picture of the Carleton Seal
These are the two pictures that I have thought about lately.
This year (2021/22), my third and last year as a DHA, I have worked as a senior DHA to assist other student co-workers. Having more flexibility, I was also able to get myself exposed to various new tools—including FTP server, CVS import, pivot tables in Google Sheets, 3D model viewer, Storymap, Podcast editing, and Canva—and to take advantage of my skills and experiences in projects even beyond the DHA.
I was fortunate enough to get involved in several history projects using digital tools throughout this year. As I mentioned in my introduction post, I’ve always been interested in historical narrative-telling with ArcGIS StoryMap and ArcGIS Mapping. Using my skills and experience in digital humanities, I was able to take an initiative in brainstorming and creating digital presentations for two history projects respectively in HIST316 Presenting America’s Founding and HIST200 Historians for Hire. In the former class, my group built a story map Mapping the Congregants of Color at Old South Church telling a life story of one of the congregants of color at Old South Church in revolutionary era Boston. With GIS mapping tools, we attempted to interpret and visually present the understudied individual’s emotional experience of the time.
Mapping the Congregants of Color at Old South Church
Learning from Place: Honest Stories of the Land and People
In the latter project, my group also created a story map Learning from Place: Honest Stories of the Land and People aiming to raise the spatial, historical awareness of the land and the Indigenous people on the land where Carleton College now occupies. It was a great experience to build digital story maps from scratch and to push myself to think about the effective ways of storytelling while trying to make them thought-provoking and facilitative in the audience’s learning and reflection experience.
I feel grateful for my supervisors who gave me this wonderful opportunity and for my co-student workers who always inspired me throughout the year!
I am Abdullah Ansar from Lahore, Pakistan. I am a Freshman who is interested in nearly everything that has to do with Humanities and Social Sciences, ranging from Economics to Philosophy and everything in between. I love nature, reading, listening to Sufi Music, watching random philosophy videos on Youtube, and late-night walks (Say Hi if you ever find me walking around at 12).
My favorite DH project is Religions in Minnesota. This is the first DHA Project I read about. Being Interested in Religion, I see how this can be a great resource for communities to share their beliefs, ideas, and heritage. It can be hard for some communities to create presentable pages for external observers, due to various challenges they face with technology or language. This is why it becomes even more important to help them.
For Data Feminism, I really liked the observation of the writer about the relation of Data and Power. While it is thought that Data is objective, it can still be affected by the subject who is collecting, analyzing, and talking about it. Knowledge or Data is not completely objective under all conditions. This is a very interesting idea, one I agree with as well.
Apart from this, I also like to take pictures of Carleton Campus sometimes (because it is so beautiful). I am adding a picture I took yesterday in its raw form without any filter. I hope to become a better photographer. Thank you for reading this.
