Seed of an Idea
Anna Preus, Assistant Professor of English, and Melanie Walsh, Assistant Professor in the Information School, first met in graduate school at Washington University in Saint Louis, when they were participants in the Humanities Digital Workshop. The workshop offered the unique opportunity to explore the intersection of data science and humanities. When their paths crossed again at the University of Washington, this formative experience inspired them to co-lead the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute (HDSSI), to provide a similar interdisciplinary experience for future researchers.
HDSSI is now in its second year of operation. An initiative sponsored by the Minor in Data Science and hosted by the Humanities Data Lab and the eScience Institute, its goal is to highlight the ways data science can be a resource in the humanities. The Data Science Minor is a complimentary 25 credits an undergraduate student may take to demonstrate familiarity in data literacy. The minor and the initiative of HDSSI work in tandem to support students who can navigate data and make contributions in data adjacent fields.
The program was structured around 4 project teams with each team consisting of four undergraduate fellows, one graduate research advisor, and one faculty investigator (PI). Over the first five weeks of the summer quarter, these four project teams worked on faculty-led research projects.
Application Cycle
In February interested graduate and undergraduate students applied to participate in HDSSI. They represented a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds from Geography to Comparative Literature. HDSSI staff paired the selected students to one of four project groups. Undergraduate students received a fellowship award and independent study credits that may be counted toward the Data Science Minor. Graduate students earned an RA appointment and were supported by faculty/staff mentorship over the term.
HDSSI kicked off with a training session facilitated by eScience Technical Education Specialist, Naomi Alterman, to establish a baseline of shared technical knowledge. The program continued to offer students time to network while balancing time collaborating with faculty on the research projects highlighted below.
Research Projects
Parsing the English Catalogue of Books
PI: Anna Preus, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Students undertaking this project digitized the English Catalogue of Books from 1900 to 1928 and then created an open access dataset of the publishing catalogue with searchable parameters such as format, size, price, or publisher. Students employed code to digitalize the catalogue and then modified the code to query the database.
Anna’s students giving an end-of-term presentation summarizing their project.
Rising Senior, Geography and Data Science undergraduate student, Meha Singal, pictured on the left
Recent UW graduate with a degree in Comparative Literature and minor in Data Science, Angela Statler, pictured far right
The Social Media Afterlives of American Authors
PI: Melanie Walsh, Assistant Professor, UW Information School
This team used clustering algorithms and large language models to analyze large data sets of social media to build a database of references to notable American authors, which included James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, and David Foster Wallace. The end-goal was to investigate the context and the extent to which literary material is recirculated in society today. The team particularly focused on mapping social media users’ citation of prominent authors to present social movements, such as Black Lives Matter.
Courtesy of Professor Walsh, an example of the resulting quantitative and qualitative analysis of James Baldwin Tweets. Graph depicts their frequency over the last decade.
International Courts, Advocacy Groups and Human Rights Protection
PI: Rachel Cichowski, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science
Professor Cichowski’s students straddled the relationship between law and data science. The team coded new data for the European Court of Human Rights Database (ECHRdb) and using R, Python and GIS analyzed key court judgment descriptors such as a country’s violation rate or an organization’s participation in the litigation. The findings support transparency and legal accountability. Interested readers may visit the European Court of Human Rights Database website to learn more about the project or analyze the data.
The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library
PI: LaShawnDa Pittman, Associate Professor, Department of American Ethnic Studies
Dr. Pittman’s project centered on archival work that seeks to challenge the stereotypical depiction of Black grandmothers and forces us to wrestle with gentrification in vulnerable African American communities through the lens and experiences of Black grandmothers and their families. The team conducted research, including content analysis of historic Black newspapers and utilization of historic census data to create compelling data visualizations demonstrating displacement in Seattle’s Central District. They worked on the archives websites and contributed to website content with the aim to present a more authentic portrayal of Black grandmothers and their lives. This team grappled with a complexity of questions from how to counteract negative search engine optimization to how to create web sustainability.
Students’ Reflections and Future Plans
Reflecting on how HDSSI enriched her academic experience, Meha shared “Participating in HDSSI was an amazing opportunity for me to apply my data science skills to an actual tangible research project, especially one that is so different from my usual academic sphere. I learned how data science is prevalent in so many fields and can be utilized for humanities and English research.”
Fellow project member, Angela Statler, added one thing that surprised her about HDSSI was “my own level of engagement with the subject of Anna’s research and the project itself, and my interest grew with time as the team delved even deeper and started our analyses.”
Informatics rising senior, Kaylee Cho, was part of Professor Walsh’s project team, tracking the prevalence of references to notable authors across social media. HDSSI empowered Kaylee to develop“…new data science skills such as utilizing the latest clustering models, exploring new data visualization techniques, considering how to apply data skills to analyze user bios, and understanding why these things matter from the start of the project.”
For Fal participating in HDSSI was educational and personal, “This topic is near and dear to my heart as my grandmother, Mebrat Kifle, was the focus of an earlier project I had done for a class about the importance of grandparents in Black immigrant families. I loved the close-knit environment in which my team worked together on creating new ideas for the Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library. Professor Pittman was open to all of our ideas and I’m excited to see where this project goes in the future.”
Interested faculty members and students may visit the Digital Humanities Lab website to discover more information about 2024 projects and stay up-to-date on news and events through their newsletter.
Students will present their HDSSI projects at UW’s Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Spring of 2025. We invite you to come and join us!
Article contributed by Chloe Mills, eScience Institute Communications Student Assistant