Digital Humanities
My training at Penn State included a comprehensive seminar in digital art history, after which I committed to advancing my agility with digital methods and emerging tools for analyzing art historical and spatial data. From 2017 to 2022 I worked as a Digital Art History Graduate Assistant with the Center for Virtual/Material Studies (CV/MS) of the Art History Department at Penn State. One of my responsibilities was to introduce and encourage digital literacy among my fellow graduate students by co-leading digital art history workshops. My assistantship overlapped with the deaccessioning of the Department of Art History slide library, and my duties included collaborating with our Visual Resources Centre librarians to manage the resource records. I received training in digital humanities methods and tools from a Penn State Digital Humanities Librarian and Associate Director of the CV/MS. I worked primarily with the content management system Omeka on several digital exhibition projects, including How to Make a Fake and Félix Buhot: Printmaker of Nineteenth-Century France. Additionally, from 2019 the CV/MS carried out a large-scale data collection project that compiled the PhD dissertations submitted to the College Arts Association since 1980. This dataset is published digitally as the Art History Dissertations and Abstracts from North American Institutions and supported research published in two articles written by Nancy Um in CAA Reviews that take a historical look at the field of art history. I was a co-author on the second article.
Roma a piedi
In 2017, I initiated a spatial analysis of Roman guidebooks using ArcGIS. This dataset was an important introduction to the principles of data collection and analysis. It furthermore illustrated the complexity of translating historical information into neat metadata.
Digital Descriptio Urbis
An ongoing collaboration with Dr. Frank Lacopo, Assistant Professor of History at Southeast Missouri State University, that digitizes the 1526 census of Rome called the Descriptio Urbis. The census describes the social makeup of the city at a decisive moment in its history. Building on a corpus of more than 9,000 households and nearly 54,000 inhabitants, this project expands on this sparse but suggestive source – originally limited to heads of households, household size, and rione – into a dataset enriched by occupational, religious, and geographic descriptors. These categories, though necessarily interpretive, enable new forms of quantitative and spatial analysis.