DH Center Blog
Nashville Sites
Sep. 24, 2021—By Kayleigh Whitman, Department of History and Mellon Graduate Student Fellow For the past two and a half years I have worked closely with the public history nonprofit Nashville Sites, which creates historical walking tours of the city and makes them available for free on their website, nashvillesites.org. My work with the project began in...
Digital Ethnography, Where Art Thou?
Apr. 16, 2021—By Ashley Kim, Mellon Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of Sociology As an ethnographer, I started my current project the way all brilliant researchers do: inspired by an intriguing research question that popped into my head right as I hit the pillow at night… or in the shower? One of the two. I was...
The Benefits of Research Collaboration
Apr. 7, 2021—The Benefits of Research Collaboration By Holly McCammon, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Sociology and Professor of Sociology, Mellon Faculty Fellow I can imagine your frustration as you realize that the user-friendly and, yes, simplified software you’ve been using is no longer meeting your research needs. Previously, it had been so helpful, as the software guided...
GPT No Habla Español-Part 2- Cide GPTmete Benengeli: In search of a missing manuscript
Feb. 15, 2021—By Caroline B. Colquhoun and Sahai Couso Díaz, Mellon Graduate Student Fellows for the Digital Humanities 2020-2021, CMAP, Department of Spanish & Portuguese At least three motivations propelled us to tackle the task of fine-tuning OpenAI’s GPT-2: our previous foray into fine-tuning, the inherent linguistic biases in tech (discussed in our last post), and Ole...
Digital Humanities, Analog Style
Feb. 9, 2021—by Laura Carpenter, Mellon Faculty Fellow for the Digital Humanities, Department of Sociology When I applied to spend a year as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities, knitting was the last thing on my mind. Sure, I knew how to knit—my mother was a home economics teacher, after all—but it had...
Announcing the 2021-2022 Mellon Fellowships
Feb. 3, 2021—MELLON FELLOWSHIPS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES FOR FACULTY, POSTDOCS, AND GRADUATE STUDENTS The College of Arts and Science is now accepting applications for several fellowship opportunities during the 2021-22 academic year for Vanderbilt faculty, recent Ph.D. graduates, and current graduate students. These fellowships are generously supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant that funds...
GPT-2 no habla español: Artificial Intelligence, Anglocentrism, and the non-human side of DH
Feb. 1, 2021—By Caroline B. Colquhoun and Sahai Couso Díaz, Mellon Graduate Student Fellows for the Digital Humanities 2020-2021, CMAP, Department of Spanish & Portuguese “Have you ever wondered what it would be like if a computer wrote a blog post? I mean, let’s face it – if a computer could write a blog, then there would...
Graduate Education, DH, and the Digital University
Jan. 26, 2021—By Wendy Timmons, Mellon Graduate Student Fellow for the Digital Humanities 2020-2021, CMAP, Department of German, Russian, and East European Studies Just as with any other institution or aspect of our lives, the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the university. Whether the university will ever return to “normal” – and whether that’s what established and...
Masculinity Studies and the Digital Humanities: A Review Essay, Some Experiments, and Some Thoughts on Future Directions
Nov. 17, 2020—By Anna Young, Mellon Graduate Student Fellow for the Digital Humanities 2020-2021 In recent years, digital humanists have been particularly vocal about the gendered politics of their discipline and the academy at large.[1] Digital humanists have also produced a number of projects that look critically at historical constructions of gender. However, a cursory examination of...
What Does it Mean to be a Social Scientist in a Digital Humanities World?
Nov. 3, 2020—By Rachel R. Underwood, Mellon Graduate Student Fellow for the Digital Humanities 2020-2021 As a sociologist in training, I’ve given a lot of consideration to my positionality within the digital humanities sphere. I first entered into DH through my joint-PhD media program (i.e. PhD in Sociology and Media) and finding my role in this space...