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Digital Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow
The IPRH is delighted to welcome Professor Kirsten C. Uszkalo as the first Digital Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor – a position that carries a joint appointment with the Illinois Informatics Institute (ICubed) and the Department of History. Professor Uszkalo will spend the 2009-10 academic year in residence at the University of Illinois, engaged in research and writing, and will offer a course (title to come) in the Department of History during the spring semester 2010. For more information about the course, please contact Professor Uszkalo directly.
Prior to her arrival at the U of I, Professor Uszkalo held a one-year appointment in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, and she received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta in 2006. She is a specialist in 17th century literature, early modern cultural studies, and women’s writing. Her current work combines theories taken from cognitive science and neuroscience with tools and research practices borrowed from digital humanities to help elucidate issues of spiritual messiness in early modern England. She has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including a prestigious 2009 grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She is an active collaborator on numerous national and international digital humanities projects, and a regular participant in conferences, workshops, and colloquia related to digital humanities scholarship.
The project that Professor Uszkalo will undertake during her fellowship year is entitled Throwing Bones: A Semi-supervised Classification and GIS-based System for Early Modern Witchcraft Trial Documents.
Witches have begun to proliferate online and making one’s way to early modern witchcraft texts has never been easier. Many of the projects that are currently available help to demystify early modern English witchcraft tracts by allowing researchers to navigate through a plethora of documents, organizing them by author and title, and exploring their contents through date, author, ESTC number, keyword searches, and paratextual inclusions. How can we build upon these resources toward a system that takes advantage of the digitization of early English witchcraft tracts to help scholars effectively analyze the evolution of witches in early modern England and produce new research on their continued cultural resonance?
This project will create an interface for semi-supervised classification of witchcraft trial texts, in a system called “Throwing Bones.” Throwing Bones will allow users to select a number of texts, run a semantic clustering algorithm, then search for results in the clusters. The results will be shown visually, as representational objects on the screen. This kind of interaction will allow users to deal with the texts simultaneously on multiple levels (pick up, move around, shuffle, drop), and allow the texts to speak back, telling a kind of story that might otherwise remain obscure under the auspices of standard date, author, and keyword search terms.