Early digital modern humanist.
I am Digital Scholarship Coordinator and Associate Faculty in Comparative & Digital Humanities at Bucknell University, exploring and instituting ways in which Digital Humanities tools and methods can be leveraged in a small liberal arts environment.
My research focuses on digital humanities scholarship and pedagogy, early modern British literature and drama (especially its intersection and enhancements using DH tools and methods), as well as visual rhetoric, and multimedia theory and design. I am what some would describe as a critical maker: one who writes and applies different code and scripting languages to make different kinds of data machine-readable, then to undertake computational analysis of that data, disseminate results through a variety of languages, and to build and maintain the systems that allow the resultant knowledge to be shared, remixed, interlinked, and sustained.
I am the lead researcher of the REED London project, principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation funded Liberal Arts Based Publishing Cooperative (LAB Cooperative) project and partner with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) in developing the interoperable Linked Editorial Academic Framework (LEAF) virtual research environment that supports the LAB Cooperative. I am Site Tech Lead for LEAF and Research Contributor to the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Scholarhship (LINCS) project. I am co-PI (with James Cummings, Newcastle University) of the NEH-AHRC funded Emerging Hands project.
In 2023 I will be a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph, where my research will be on “Early Modern ‘Events’ in Linked Open Data.”
I am one of the architects of the Digital Humanities minor at Bucknell, where I teach courses ranging from a DH methods survey course, to an Intro to Coding and Encoding, to advanced courses in text and spatial analysis, and digital culture writ broad. As important to me is the work I have done to develop and support opportunities for Bucknell’s undergraduate students to participate in meaningful ways in a range of digital humanities research environments. In and beyond the classroom, I try to raise students’ awareness of the constraints of digital culture and the limitations of the tools we use to learn and do DH. I incorporate discussions about the fallacies of ubiquitous technology: universal wireless connectivity, on-demand access to computers and devices, reliance upon telecommunications to continue to learn and collaborate during times of pandemic.
I serve as Chair-Elect of the Executive Board for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), the international disciplinary body for DH, having just completed a three- year term as Conference Coordinating Committee Chair. I also serve as Chair of the TEI Board of Directors. In these positions I participate in strategic planning and implementation of large- scale international interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multilingual projects and initiatives, with the goal of reflecting within the discipline complex international understandings of professional standards for inclusion in terms of gender, identity, race, and ethnicity.
I earned my PhD in English at the University of Waterloo, Canada. My dissertation, “‘Covetous to parley with so sweet a frontis-peece’: Illustration in Early Modern English Play-Texts” analyzes patterns of visual rhetoric in the illustrated title pages of seventeenth-century English printed drama, examining publication practices, politics, and the relationship between the contemporary theatrical audience and the reading public.
I live in a beautiful old farmhouse in Central Pennsylvania with my dog Bear (who has taken to making appearances on Zoom and with my students). Eagles fly by my house somedays – that never gets old. I like LEGO, knitting, and during the pandemic learned how to bake bread and plant things that actual grow edible and floral plants. My students cannot understand why I don’t understand Instagram. But perhaps I don’t want them to give me a tutorial after all …
Before grad school I was a TV and web programming executive at Home Box Office. But that’s a whole different story!
I tweet and retweet compulsively about DH, society, and politics at Twitter handle @DianeJakacki. Views my own.