During the summers of 2015 and 2016, Dartmouth’s Information Technology Services (now Information, Technology & Consulting) and the Dartmouth College Library funded a Digital Humanities Summer Residency. ITS and the Library wanted to prototype a team-based approach to supporting digital projects across units on campus and to deepen staff competencies for supporting digital scholarship. I participated in the selection of projects for both residencies and served on both project teams as a supervisor and project manager.
Summer 2015: Multimedia in the Long Eighteenth Century
Project Team
Scott Sanders (Faculty PI; research, subject-area expertise, design collaboration)
John Wallace (project planning and management)
Scott Millspaugh (project planning and management, budget, student-worker supervision, outreach)
Laura Braunstein (project planning and management)
Mark Boettcher (programming)
Jill Baron (master list design)
Eric Bivona (master list programming)
Description
Multimedia in the Long Eighteenth Century (MMLEC) is a big-data project that seeks to quantify the frequency with which musical paratext, including both lyrics and musical notation, appear in English- and French-language novels published between 1688 and 1815. Led by Scott Sanders, Assistant Professor of French at Dartmouth College, MMLEC is still ongoing, and the results of the project will be published in Sanders’ monograph in progress, The Voice of Reason, 1730-1783.
Media
Watch this video for more information about MMLEC and the Digital Humanities Summer Residency:
Summer 2016: Jamaican Slave Names Project
Project Team
Margaret Williamson (Faculty PI; research, subject-area expertise, design collaboration)
Scott Millspaugh (project planning and management, budget, outreach)
Laura Braunstein (project planning and management)
John Wallace (database support)
Hazel-Dawn Dumpert (editing)
Jennifer Mirsky (project management and digital editing)
Cliff Rubin (user experience design)
Charles Forcey (database integration and search)
Description
The Jamaican Slave Names Project (JSNP) is a searchable database that makes available for analysis over 5,000 records for named individuals on eighteenth-century Jamaican plantations. The project arose from research conducted by Margaret Williamson (Associate Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Dartmouth College) on naming patterns of enslaved people. Some conclusions from that research are available in “Africa or Old Rome? Jamaican Slave Naming Revisited,” Slavery and Abolition 38.1 (2017): 117-34. JSNP is still in development.