We are delighted to announce the appointment of our Methods Fellows for the academic year 2021/22. Each Fellow will share their expertise in methods or practices relevant to DH research, will design and deliver a series of workshop sessions, and will be active in the growing CDH community.
Method Fellows
Thomas Cowhitt, a Mixed Methods Social Network Analysis (MMSNA) researcher in Education Leadership and Organisational Change, has a research interest in how Research practice Partnerships (RPPs) and Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) allow for greater participation in policymaking by different stakeholders. Thomas will teach several different topics related to Social Network Analysis. The primary components of SNA are relational data collection, network visualisation, and modelling.
Isabelle Higgins, a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department, explores how structural oppression is (re)produced in digital spaces, focusing empirically on digitally mediated practices related to transracial and transnational adoption in the USA. Isabelle plans to run a course titled: Digital Humanities: Exploring critical, intersectional and decolonial methods. Designed to be cross-disciplinary, this online seminar series will invite engagement from scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines that make up digital humanities.
Spencer Johnston is a College Teaching Associate and Director of Studies for Philosophy at Sidney Sussex College. His work is interdisciplinary – between formal logic and the history of philosophy – and involves developing modern formal reconstructions of interesting historical systems of logic from the medieval period. Spencer will develop teaching on topics related to computational linguistics, formal logic, and theoretical issues in computer science.
Carleigh Morgan, a Trinity College Research Scholar, Fulbright Scholar (2013-14) and PhD candidate in Film and Screen Studies, explores the historical convergences between computer science, new media, and film to investigate how the labour of animation, automation, and the material practices of film production come together at key historical moments. Carleigh aims to bring scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds together to explore transparency’s multidimensional logic.
Susan Qu is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies whose research interests lie in human-environment relationships. She has several years of research and practice experience in urban planning/design, resilient/sustainable cities and health studies. Susan is planning a thematic workshop on Good Data Visualisation and Graph Creation in Python.
Gabriel Recchia, based at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, focuses on how to communicate information in ways that support comprehension and decision-making. Before joining the Winton Centre, Gabriel was employed by the Cambridge Concept Lab, developing computational tools analysing statistical relationships between terms and concepts in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, which also included data analysis and visualisation. Gabriel is looking forward to teaching a short course in fundamental principles of data visualisation.
Itamar Shatz is a PhD student at Cambridge’s linguistics department, where he also teaches a graduate course on quantitative methods for analysing language data. Itamar’s research examines the development and use of large-scale language datasets to investigate language learning and communication. Itamar will teach statistics in an intuitive and practical way that is accessible even for those with little or no quantitative background, and aims to give students the confidence to engage with and use statistical methods. This is particularly important given the growing role that these methods play in many fields of research, which is in large part attributable to recent developments in digital methods for creating and analysing large and complex datasets.
Siddharth Soni, is the Isaac Newton Trust Research Fellow at CDH, and his research is positioned largely within comparative literature and comparative cultural studies. He is currently writing a monograph on the anti-colonial Indian short story alongside working on the DH project World Short Story Index. His DH research and teaching covers critical archive studies, literature as an archive, medium theory, and indigenous and postcolonial digital humanities. He is the convenor of the ‘Digital Afterlives’ research network at CDH. Siddharth will give a comprehensive introduction and hands-on training for digital archival photography of a very high standard using a range of easily accessible and portable equipment.
Arild Stenberg, a Researcher from the Faculty of Music has a research interest in music notation and music reading. Arild is currently experimenting with music notation that can be modified in novel, yet simple to implement, ways that make it easier to read at first sight (without preparation or rehearsal). Arild will design and deliver a series of practical workshops in which participants will be able to re-think the graphic design of a musical score, and will work with a novel set of principles to modify the spacing, layout, and position of its notes and signs for intelligibility purposes and/or artistic purposes.
Data School Methods Fellows
Meng Liu is a CSC-funded PhD student in Second Language Education at the Faculty of Education. Her substantive research interest lies at the intersection of Applied Linguistics and Educational Psychology. Meng will design and deliver a module at our data school later this year on Text-mining with R and doing bibliometric analysis with R.
Tobias Lunde is a PhD student in Economic History and is a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and Fitzwilliam College. Tobias is particularly interested in developing approaches to teaching digital cartography and how to communicate research ideas and conclusions effectively using maps. Tobias will design and deliver a module at our planned data schools later this year.
RSE Methods Fellow
Mahmoud Abdelrazek is the database developer at Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project and a data champion at the University of Cambridge Research Data Management. Mahmoud’s work experience covers data analytics in the fields of social media, traffic, urban development, health, asset management and computer vision amongst others. Mahmoud is looking to provide two categories of teaching, ‘Databases’ will discuss basic database concepts followed by an introduction to database management systems (DBMS) and database design. ‘Development Environments’ will start with an introduction to the command-line interface (CLI) and the tools commonly used with it.
All workshops (once finalised) will be listed on our website, you can also sign up to our Mailing List for announcements.
