Digital Portfolio

Simply defined, the digital humanities are the intersection of the humanities with digital technologies. In the Introduction to A Companion to Digital Humanities Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth describe the nexus between the digital and the humanities exemplified in the field as the use of “information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing an understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology” (np). This interpretation of the digital humanities highlights how the digital and the humanistic strengthen one another.

Early in my graduate career I became interested in the Digital Humanities and my research, teaching, and project work demonstrate my commitment to using digital technologies to enrich scholarship. I am currently in my fourth year as a Research and Instruction Technology Consultant (RITC) at the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities (CDH). As a RITC, I support humanities faculty in the use of technology for instruction and contribute to digital research projects and grant applications undertaken in cooperation with CDH. I have designed and managed digital research and pedagogy projects for faculty in Musicology, Art History, Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese, Germanic Languages, and English, among others. Through the coursework completed for the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate and collaborative project work at CDH, I have engaged with a large corpus of tools central to the digital humanities that range from social network analysis, digital mapping, topic modeling, the use of content management systems to accomplish different pedagogical goals, to 3D modeling and visualizations of virtual worlds. You can read a description of the projects and my role within by clicking through the digital portfolio above.

My research is also grounded in the theories, concepts, and methods of the digital humanities. One important contribution of my doctoral project is a digital thick map of mass grave locations on the Iberian Peninsula. I have built a digital map called “Virtual Cartographies” that combines information acquired from the Spanish Ministry of Justice—which identifies over 2,600 mass graves located throughout Spain, northern Africa, and the Balearic and Canary Islands—with a collection of digital materials directly linked to specific gravesites. In my dissertation, I reflect on the ritualistic aspects of mourning practices relating to the current disinterment and reburial of mass graves from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). I include an analysis of “traditional texts,” such as novels and documentaries, but also consider a variety of digital cultural materials, such as blogs, Internet sites, YouTube short films, radio programs, and social media content from Facebook and Twitter groups. Studying the intersection of novels and documentaries with digital cultural materials demonstrates how the rituals of reburial assist in the healing of collective trauma. “Virtual Cartographies” is a thick map that combines a variety of digital cultural materials, such as testimonies, novels, videos including feature length documentaries and YouTube short films, narratives from weblogs, archeological reports, newspaper articles, radio programs, and social network sites, to give depth to spaces of mourning and share the various ritualistic practices. By embedding materials that show the exhumation, inhumation, and commemoration processes, “Virtual Cartographies” highlights the ritualistic practices occurring around the Peninsula and ties those directly to the location of specific mass graves sites.