Recap: Lightning Presentations of PhD Projects
A festive end-of-term event concluded the first semester of the DHNetwork. PhD students from various fields and departments in the humanities presented their use of digital methods.
Hovedinnhold
After everyone arrived and settled in with a sandwich at Mesaninen, two rounds of students introduced their projects. Seong-Eun Cho (LLE) demonstrated his use of Microsoft Azure's Cognitive Services and Python to retrieve and process large quantities of news articles from the web. In his PhD project in computational linguistics, he examines how to identify news article titles that indicate speculation around company mergers and takeovers. Then, Dinara Yangeldina (SKOK) introduced her project on intersectional feminism as discourse, in which she analyses public pages on the Russian medium vk.com. She is considering combining her analysis with digital methods to interrogate the geopolitics of knowledge production within gender studies and feminist activism. Johanne Kalsaas (IF) highlighted that she did not consider herself a DH scholar but that she needed digital tools to research the subjects and questions she is interested in. She uses the program Media Cloud to track and analyze Russian online media posts about Norway.
After a short break, the second round started with Ragnhild Gjerfsen (LLE). Her project about stage language identifies phenomena in language trend in Norwegian theatre, for which she primarily focuses on audio-material. She demonstrated her use of the program Praat, which visualizes sound and allows her to comment on audio fragments in a structured way. Runa Falck Langaas (IF) then presented her research within the LINGCLIM research project. She will analyze data from the Norwegian Panel and Facebook posts of environmental organizations to analyze how people regard climate change, how this influences their daily lives, and who they consider responsible for solutions. Finally, Moa Christina Airijoki (AHKR) talked about the database systems Monastica and APDB, the plans of merging these databases, and the role of the databases in creating a research community.
The presentations showed the variety of digital methods within the humanities, including online and offline subjects, digital and analogue tools, and qualitative and quantitative methods. At the same time, there were many points of overlap between projects, which resulted in interesting informal discussions and plans for collaboration after the event. All in all a perfect end of the semester for the DHNetwork!
A big thank you to everyone who attended and presented at DHNetwork events this semester. We will be back with new events in September, do check out our calendar to see the plans for this fall!
