Your Custom Text Here

 Rhodes Fellowship in the Computational Humanities

Graduate students at Duke have a variety of options for learning how to use specific digital and computational tools, but I believe that they need an intellectual framework to integrate these skills with their dissertation research and teaching opportunities. To that end, over the past two years, I have developed what was originally individualized graduate mentoring within Data+ and the Data Expeditions into a full-fledged training program in digital and computational methods. As a direct result of my efforts, iiD supporting a competitive graduate fellowship, the Rhodes Fellowship in the Computational Humanities, that will start in Fall 2020.

The fellowship gives an opportunity to English doctoral students at Duke University to receive training in the methodology and theory of computational and digital literary studies. Fellows will also gain an understanding of the quickly-developing critical questions and methodologies that drive scholarship in the digital humanities.

Through workshops and mentoring, the fellowship creates a collaborative environment where English PhD students can acquire the necessary skills to translate their teaching and research interests into a digital or computational project. The projects undertaken as part of the fellowship aim to advance and complement the students’ dissertation research and their teaching within the English department. Because of this, the students will be required to design and create projects that reflect their core areas of research. Fellows are encouraged, though not required, to work towards a conference presentation or a publication for their project. At the end of each year of the program, they will share their completed projects on a public-facing website as well as present their work in an public panel.

Data Expeditions

Through the generous support of the Rhodes information initiative at Duke, I have been able to create teaching opportunities for graduate students interested in digital pedagogy. A Data Expedition is a unit within an undergraduate course lead by a graduate student in order to introduce undergraduate students to exploratory data analysis.

Each year, I mentor one graduate student for a Data Expedition (Spring 2018; Spring 2019; Fall 2022). During the fall semester, the student meets with me on a regular basis to curate a dataset or a textual corpus for exploration. In our meetings, we discuss computational tools, framing readings and questions for the students, and assignment design. In the spring, the graduate student works with me for two weeks of the course to implement the expedition. Part of this work includes after class meetings to discuss how the expedition is unfolding with the students and, after completing, help with the expedition write-up if desired (as in this example from Spring 2019).

In addition, graduate students receive professional development funds once they complete their Data Expedition.

Data+ and Graduate Mentors

Data+ is a ten week summer research program based within the Rhodes information initiative at Duke. Undergraduate and masters students (from Duke and other universities) work in small (two or three students) teams, under the direction of a faculty member and a graduate student, and collaborate with other teams in a communal environment. The participating students are expected to work full time on their project and receive a stipend. They learn data analysis and visualization techniques, how research projects are designed and implemented, and how to work in a professional setting.

For graduate students, Data+ offers a rare opportunity to learn how to design, implement, and mentor an undergraduate research project. By working as mentors, they also learn how to teach computational approaches to the humanities. Through my involvement in Data+, I have recruited and mentored graduate students in the English department to become mentors for the teams working on humanities projects. Whenever possible, I invite these graduate students to participate in every step of the project, from first ideas in formulating research question through to the final touches on student presentations at the end of the summer program. Together, we discuss what kind of questions we may be interested in asking from our corpus, what kind of questions our students will be excited by, and how to bring the two together.

As part of this experience, graduate students learn how to help undergraduate students in their research projects. Part of the challenge for the graduate mentors is learning how to guide undergraduates to formulate good questions and to find effective ways to handle roadblocks. During the ten weeks of the program, we work together on strategies for team management as well as on how to help undergraduates access the resources they need to solve problems independently.

Beyond the completion of the project, I mentor interested graduate students on how to present the work they completed with a Data+ team at conferences and for the job market. I have also helped graduate students develop their own digital projects.

Graduate Pedagogy Workshops in the English Department

In their third year, English graduate students at Duke design and propose an elective, undergraduate course. Unless they apply (and are accepted) to teach a class through competitive, university-wide programs (such as the Thompson Writing Program), this is the only opportunity they have during their graduate career at Duke to teach a class. The stakes in designing an interesting class are high for our graduate students because courses that enroll fewer than eight students are cancelled by the registrar.

For the past two years, I have been meeting with all the third year English graduate students, both as a group and individually, to discuss course and syllabus design. I emphasize approaches to make courses approachable, interesting, and welcoming to non-humanities majors, in particular STEM and international students.

The goal is not to change the kind of critical work we do in an English classroom. Rather, I encourage creating a classroom space that fosters the development of students’ intellectual resources and skills across fields of inquiry. My own experience in moving from math and physics to English has convinced me that students become most engaged with literary questions when they approach them by incorporating the specific forms of intellectual curiosity and analytical ability developed in their broader studies.

For this reason, I encourage graduate students to create assignment (digital or otherwise) that build organically on the kind of reading they want their students to do.