archive

Congratulations to Our Graduates!

Every second-year graduate student undertakes a semester-long digital humanities capstone project. These projects take a range of forms. They address important research questions through the application of a digital application, methodology, or tool. After a semester of mentorship by a faculty member and peer critique, each student defends her or his project before faculty, students, and friends.

This year’s capstone projects are as diverse as the program’s students, reflecting an impressive range of interests including,

Taylor Brown 

The Digital Variorum of Wordsworth's "Nutting"   

From manuscript, to print publication, to open source repository, "Nutting" has one of the richest textual, sociological, and personal histories of all of Wordsworth's poetry. Collected here for all audiences, The Digital Variorum of Wordsworth's "Nutting" seeks to remediate the divide between scholars, children, and those who simply find joy in reading wonderful poetry. 

Tina Figueroa

Chitown Food Aid

The Chitown Food Aid project is a digital tool for food vendors and nonprofits to connect as easily as possible. The goal is to enhance communication and enable nonprofits to utilize leftover food and produce to feed the food insecure population of Chicago.

Abdur Khan 

Rush Hour: How do Chicago's Neighborhoods Use Public Transit? 

This project analyzes the CTA's extensive open data about train and bus ridership over the years and compares it to changes in Chicago's unique neighborhoods. Different neighborhoods can have similar patterns of transit use, but what exactly do these patterns tell us about our city? 

Tyler Monaghan

SOTU-db: State of the Union Database

SOTU-db is a digital tool that allows users to search and perform sentiment analysis on the texts of over 200 US Presidential Annual addresses (State of the Unions). sotu-db.com

Rebecca Parker 

#PlainTxtPodcast: A DH social experi{ence|ment 

Digital Humanities remains unanimously re-definable— existing in the margins but also the intersections of technology and humanity. Drawing from DH-community conversations, the plain.txt podcast presents a poetic summation of the ever-shifting topics and debates digital humanists face. Join host Rebecca Parker, on the last Friday of every month, as she scrapes the #DH social-sphere and pairs the findings of the field with her spoken-word poetry in yet another attempt to discover what it means to master Digital Humanities. 

Maureen Smith  

The Big Brick House Project 

This project looks at the results of a collaboration with 18 first cousins who grew up in and out of the house their great grandfather built in a small town in southeastern Minnesota. While parts of the project focus on the house and the family that inhabited it, it goes beyond to look at the history of southeastern Minnesota: when the territory was first opened up for settlement, relations with native peoples, how and why the town succeeded while others failed, the effect of railroads, and other relevant factors.  

The CTSDH is very proud of the creativity, ingenuity, and thoughtfulness each of the graduates showed in their capstone projects.