Announcing: 2023/24 Methods Fellows

Cambridge Digital Humanities is pleased to announce the appointment of our Methods Fellows for the academic year 2023/24. Each Fellow will share their expertise in methods or practices relevant to DH research, design and deliver workshop sessions, work on DH projects, and be active in the growing CDH community.

Methods Fellows 2023/24

Shellie Audsley is a PhD student at the Faculty of English working on Romantic genre-mixing and referentiality in the long nineteenth century. Shellie examines lyric-narrative synthesis and patterns of inserted ‘conceptual fragments’ across types of hybrid prose and verse narratives to address issues of selfhood and broader critical debates about novel supremacy, lyric subsumption, and genre (re)formation. Complemented by computational methods of text analysis, this research into the semiotics of genre perception seeks to understand—on a large scale—processes of associative sense-making and the unstable ideas of the generic (‘commonplace’) and otherwise.

As one of the Communications Fellows for the Keats-Shelley Association of America, Shellie has been responsible for designing a digital public engagement project/publication (the K-SAA Public Commonplace Book of Romantic Readers) that uses crowd-sourced inputs to create interactive ‘star charts’ (network graphs) for mapping global readerly networks as well as Romanticism’s lasting connections therein. Shellie will teach a Methods Workshop introducing the ancient yet evolving practices of commonplace-bookkeeping and the ‘modernised’ digital tools and methods for extracting, indexing, sustaining and networking knowledge fragments for idea generation.

Dr Alexia Cardona joins us as an RSE Methods Fellow and is a Training Lead in the fields of Data Science, Data Management and Bioinformatics. She has set up and now leads the Data Science and Data Management Training Programme at the University of Cambridge as part of the Bioinformatics Training Programme.  She is the Course Organiser for the NST Part II BBS Bioinformatics course at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer in the NST Part IB Mathematical and Computational Biology. Her role involves the management of different aspects of training including design, development, coordination, and teaching of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. She is a leader in ELIXIR, an international intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe, where – together with other leaders and partners – she drives the establishment of high-quality training. She is a Principal Investigator on the EC funded project for the development of learning paths and a co-Investigator in the development of training and capacity building in Data Management across Europe.

Claire Carroll is interested in the aesthetics of interactive fiction (IF) and how they might connect to broader digital behaviours. More specifically, she’s exploring how the normalised usages of the second person voice and the present tense in IF create slippage for players’ immersion as they are simultaneously readers and characters, thus balancing and bouncing between extra/diegetic modes of engagement. Her research methodologies include actor-network theory, disability studies, critical code studies, ad new media theory.

Last year, Claire co-hosted the Cambridge Theatre Hackathon, a fast-paced workshop and performance exploring the contours of digital interactive theatre around the theme of memory allocation. This year, she is co-convening the Cultural Politics of Code, a critical code studies reading group.

Claire is the recipient of the Judith E Wilson Studentship and is a 2023-2024 Methods Fellow affiliated with Pembroke College. Claire holds a B.A. from Yale University in English and Computer Science and has completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews. Claire plans to lead a workshop on writing Digital Interactive Fiction.

Eleanor Dare is currently the co-convenor for Arts, Creativity and Education at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. They are also a Senior Teaching Associate for Educational Technologies, Arts and Creativity, lecturing and supervising on the Arts, Creativity and Education MPhil pathway, and the Knowledge, Power and Politics MPhil pathway, as well as the MEd in Transforming Practice. Eleanor is also module lead for AI and Education, a Personal and Professional Development course at Cambridge. With Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice, Eleanor is the co-founder of the storytelling studio and consultancy, X||rdinary Stories, working with industry and academia to research and develop experiential projects involving emerging technologies. They are an active developer of Games, AI and VR content, a computer programmer with an MSc and PhD in Arts and Computational Technology. Eleanor was formerly Reader in Digital Media and Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art. Eleanor has extensive experience with investigation of AI, interaction design and digital education. Eleanor has taken part in numerous exhibitions and has published dozens of papers addressing computation,AI, Education, Games and digital interaction. These include chapters in MIT’s Leonardo, ACM Interactions, Routledge, Sage and Intellect Books. Eleanor will deliver a workshop addressing the development and use of virtual and extended reality spaces for research, pedagogy and collaboration.

Junaid Abdul Jabbar is a Geoinformatics Engineer with a Bachelor’s degree (2015) from the National University of Sciences & Technology, Pakistan and Master’s degree (2019) from the Institute of Space Technology, Pakistan. Since his graduation he has been a part of both industry and academia. Starting a professional career in 2015, Junaid has worked on spatial datasets from different application areas including urban planning, vehicle tracking, rescue services, archaeology, heritage, and more. For his first professional assignment, he worked on the spatial planning of two cities in the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. Later, joining Pakistan’s first digital mapping and location-based services platform as the data lead, he worked to materialise a data development and management system using an open-source database, capable of handling the largest spatial dataset of Pakistan. Junaid is currently working as the Database Manager for the Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project, where he is working on the design and deployment of Arches open-source database, developing field data collection system using ODK and coding data ETL pipelines. Junaid will teach end-to-end ODK form development, deployment, setting up on mobile device, and analysing collected data.

Amira Moeding is a student at Cambridge University in the history of Political Thought and Intellectual History. Amira’s PhD project focuses on the Intellectual History of ‘Big Data,’ how ‘Big Data’ as an approach to building artificial intelligence became thinkable, how data became foremost an economic resource, and how political imaginaries emerged from the possibilities associated with ‘data-driven’ technologies. Amira came to Cambridge to study the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History developing her interests in histories and philosophy of law and race. Before coming to Cambridge, Amira studied philosophy and cultural studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, focusing on early critical theory and post-colonial critiques of private property. At Humboldt Universität, she also developed an interest in the philosophy of science (scientific models and representation) and mathematics (conceptions of proof). Amira’s workshop will look at how historical enquiry can help us understand the current hype around AI.

Emily Quin is a PhD Candidate in the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology supervised by Dr Matthew Bland and Professor Barak Ariel. She specialises in policing: organisational behaviour, decision-making, and ethics. Emily is a former employee of the College of Policing where she worked in research and ‘Authorised Professional Practice’ within Forensics, Organised Crime, and Criminal Investigation.

She holds a BA (Hons) in Social Sciences; a PGCE; and an MA in Philosophy with a dissertation in Criminological Ethics, for which she received a Distinction. Emily’s research is entitled ‘The Copper’s Nose’ Project and is funded by the ESRC. Emily is looking forward to teaching methods for detailed assessment of the suitability of online platforms for the collection of research data. Considering not only general ethical issues, privacy, encryption, terms and conditions, but also inclusivity for neurodivergent and vulnerable participants.

Lidea Shahidi is a postdoctoral research associate based at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.  She studied for her PhD in the Applied Machine Learning Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Duke University, where she developed speech enhancement strategies to mitigate the impact of reverberation on speech intelligibility outcomes for cochlear implant recipients. Prior to her PhD, she studied cell and molecular biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology.

Lidea’s current research investigates novel cochlear implant speech coding strategies, with the aim of improving clinical outcomes for cochlear implant recipients. This work involves computational analyses and behavioural experiments to measure speech perception and psychoacoustic phenomena, with the aim of understanding the mechanisms by which coding strategies may improve the transmission of speech information to the auditory nerve. Outside of cochlear implant research, her research interests include auditory scene analysis, speech enhancement, and speech processing. She has taught several lectures and workshops on programming, command line tools, psychoacoustics, and signal processing, and she looks forward to contributing to the Best Practices in Coding for Humanities Research series as an RSE Methods Fellow.