s recent technologies such as large language models, natural language processing, machine vision, and GenAI continue to shape research, education, and cultural production, humanistic research is changing rapidly. Our goal with this event is to address these critical and timely issues with leading thinkers in their respective fields.

We hope that this will be the first of many events to dive deeper into collaborative computational humanities methods with our research community.

Panels:
Multilingual Digital Humanities:

Andrew Janco and Quinn Dombrowski have both, individually and together, made significant contributions to the expanding field of multilingual digital humanities. They were part of the educational initiative “New Languages for NLP: Building Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Humanities,” funded by a National Endowment for Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant. This grant enabled scholars to create high-quality linguistic data and train models for under-resourced, domain-specific, and on eleven historical languages: Ottoman Turkish, Tigrinya, Kanbun, Efik, 19th c. Russian, Classical Arabic, Old Chinese, Yoruba, Quechua, Yiddish and Kanada. In this panel, they will talk about what they’ve accomplished, the challenges they’ve faced, and future directions for multilingual digital humanities.

Humanities and Data Work:

Meredith Martin and Zoe LeBlanc will delve into their forthcoming book, Data Work in the Humanities (Princeton University Press). This work is a result of their long-running collaboration and features over 25 interviews with other humanists who work with data. This panel will explore how our technologically mediated environment has reshaped traditional academic models, emphasizing the need to move beyond the notion of the autonomous scholar. Instead, they argue for recognizing the interconnectedness of critical sources and the necessity of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and collectivity within the humanities research ecosystem. They will address the challenges of establishing common data workflows in a field where research practices and assumptions about scholarship and data are not widely discussed.

Panelists’ bios:

Andrew Janco is the digital scholarship specialist at Princeton University.   He has experience using natural language processing and computer vision to analyze large historical document collections and has a passion for inquiry-driven and community-engaged digital projects. Andy is the co-director of “New Languages for NLP: Building Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Humanities,” an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. He is also the lead developer working on a digital archive and research application with the Groupo de Apoyo Mutuo, Guatemala’s oldest human rights organization. Andy received his PhD in Russian history from the University of Chicago and a master’s in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Quinn Dombrowski (non-binary, any pronouns are fine) is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2018, Quinn’s many DH adventures included supporting the high-performance computing cluster at UC Berkeley, running the DiRT tool directory with support from the Mellon Foundation, writing books on Drupal for Humanists and University of Chicago library graffiti, and working on the program staff of Project Bamboo, a failed digital humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative. Since coming to Stanford, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the Data-Sitters Club, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club.” Quinn is currently co-VP of the Association for Computers and the Humanities along with Roopika Risam, and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English. Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Meredith Martin is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, where she has also been a professor in the English department since 2006. Her book The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture 1860-1930 won the MLA First Book Prize and the Brooks-Warren Prize for Literary Criticism and was co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize. Her second book, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the Future of Historical Prosody, was just published by Princeton University Press, as is Data Work in the Humanities, with Professor Zoe LeBlanc. With Mary Naydan, she oversees the Princeton Prosody Archive, a full-text searchable database of a variety of textual materials about the study of poetry and pronunciation in English from the 16th-century to the current copyright year. Martin received her BA from Smith College and her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Zoe LeBlanc joined the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in August 2021. Before coming to Illinois, she served as a postdoctoral associate and Weld Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. LeBlanc previously worked as a digital humanities developer at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia (UVA), where she was responsible for building web applications for mapping and data visualization in the humanities. At UVA and Princeton, she has taught a wide range of topics, including the history of digital humanities and the foundations of humanities data analysis. LeBlanc currently serves on the editorial board of the Programming Historian and the executive committee of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.