Team Members

Avery Blankenship, Institutes Team

Avery is a PhD student in the English Department at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American cookbooks and recipes and utilizes Digital Humanities methods such as text analysis and digital archiving. As a member of the WWVT team, Avery worked to write word vector code in Python as well as develop a word vector tutorial and walkthrough using Jupyter Notebooks.

Ash Clark, Infrastructure and Corpus Teams

Ash serves as XML Applications Developer for the Women Writers Project and other projects at Northeastern. Eir expertise lies in metadata-driven web publications. E also designs and helps to maintain ecosystems of data, metadata, programmatic processes, and people. Ash wrote the XSLT and XQuery scripts used to turn the WWP’s XML-encoded documents into plain text for ingestion.

Sarah Connell, WWP Associate Director

Sarah is the Associate Director of the Women Writers Project and of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. She received a Ph.D. in English from Northeastern in 2014. Her research focuses on early women’s writing, text encoding, early modern national histories, and digital pedagogies. She helped to organize the WWVT project work and also focused on outreach, the development of pedagogical materials, and corpus preparation.

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Co-Principal Investigator

Elizabeth is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. She teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, Atlantic theatre and performance, and transatlantic print culture. For the WWVT project, she contributed usage scenarios and pedagogical ideas, and participated in the overall project planning and design.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Infrastructure Team

Fitz completed his PhD in English at Northeastern in 2018 and is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Regis College. His research interests include the history of literary journalism, media studies, nineteenth and twentieth century American nonfiction, American religion, and digital humanities. For the WWP, Fitz built the prototype for the WWVT and contributed to its development through a series of iterations.

Julia Flanders, Co-Principal Investigator

Julia is a Professor of Practice in the English Department and the Director of the Women Writers Project and the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. Her research focuses on data modeling, digital scholarly communication, and digital humanities research platforms. For the WWVT project, she participated in developing research scenarios and testing the Word Vector Interface, and also contributed to the overall project planning and design.

Juniper Johnson, Institutes Team

Juniper Johnson is a PhD student in the English Department at Northeastern studying digital humanities, nineteenth-century health and sex education, queer disability studies, and archives. Their research interests include exploring frameworks of identity and embodiment in text markup, digital documentary editing, and exploring classification systems in data and health and medical texts. As a Research Assistant for the WWVT, they assisted in corpora building and cleaning, word embedding model creation for participants, and facilitating the WWVT Word Vectors for a Thoughtful Humanist Institutes.

Cara Marta Messina, Pedagogy and Infrastructure Teams

Cara is a doctoral candidate in the English Department with a focus on Writing and Rhetoric. Her research interests range from digital humanities, writing studies, digital pedagogy, and online fan communities. Her pedagogical, scholarly, and overall personal values center transparency, documenting and valuing process, subverting normalized cultural and social narratives, vulnerability, justice, and cross-disciplinary conversations. For the WWVT project, she worked on the pedagogy team to organize, design, and write up the website. She wrote several case studies and assignments, thinking specifically about making the toolkit accessible to users with diverse expertises. Finally, she helped develop and build much of the WWVT website.

Molly Nebiolo, Project Manager

Molly is a PhD student in the History Department at Northeastern. Her research encompasses the history of science and medicine, colonialism in world history, and North America and the Atlantic world. She is also completing a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities and is working on a project with her advisor for the Boston Research Center. She was the project manager for the WWVT project, and focused part of her time on creating documentation for the website.

Danielle Nguyen, Data Visualization Researcher (with Prof. Cody Dunne)

Danielle Nguyen is an undergraduate student in her senior year at Northeastern University majoring in Computer Science with a minor in English. Her interests include data visualization, computer graphics, visual design, fine arts, and literature. She used her cross-disciplinary interests to repurpose a genomic data visualization platform in order to show word-to-vector models in an interactive way using adjacency matrices.

Colleen Nugent, Videographer

Colleen is a MA student in the History Department at Northeastern. Her research interests include Global Islam, British and French empires, digital humanities, and Modern European Immigration. She is also completing a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. For the WWVT project, she produced an explanatory video on the Word Vector Interface, as well as an introductory video on the WWVT.

Elizabeth Polcha, Pedagogy Team

Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in the English department at Northeastern. Elizabeth’s dissertation, “Redacting Desire: the Sexual Politics of Colonial Science in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” foregrounds the centrality of women of color to the development of transatlantic naturalist science. Most recently, Elizabeth’s research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. As a Research and Encoding specialist for the Women Writers Project, she brought her knowledge of early women’s writing to WWVT, where she helped document and publicize the project’s research agenda during the first year of development.

Bill Quinn, Corpus Team

Bill Quinn is a doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s English Department with a focus on modernism and early twentieth-century periodical studies. His dissertation examines the role of readers and their letters to the editors in the tentative and serialized formations of literary taste within magazines. For the WWVT project, he worked on the corpus team to help prepare, standardize, parse, and test the word embedding models of the WWO and TCP corpora. He wrote and implemented code in Python and R as well as writing documentation.

Lara Rose, Pedagogy Team

Lara is a doctoral student in the English Department, studying visual and written presentations of mental and physical health, illness, and disabilities. She tends to work in the digital humanities because of its possibilities for disrupting traditional academic and political hierarchies and for its vision of activism and access. She helped prepare the WWVT for its public-facing presentation, including creating explanatory blog posts, case studios, and annotations.

Parmeet Singh Saluja, Corpus Team

Parmeet is a graduate student majoring in Computer Science at Northeastern University. For the WWVT, he worked on the corpus team to help prepare, standardize, and parse the word embedding models of the WWO corpus. He also worked on Victorian Women Writers Project data and carried out word vector analysis, as well as developing some of the pages of the website. He wrote and implemented code in Python and R as well as writing documentation.

Parth Tandel, Infrastructure and Corpus Teams

Parth is a graduate student majoring in Data Science at Northeastern University. His main focus of work at WWVT was to develop the tools necessary to carry out word2vec analysis on the early women writers’ texts. He worked on the corpus team to prep the corpora for model training. His work for the infrastructure team also contributed to the software development side of the project by building architecture for the web interface and server management.

Yunus Emre Tapan, Institutes Team

Yunus Emre Tapan is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University, specializing in Political Methodology and Comparative Politics. He completed a graduate certificate program in Computational Social Science. He has a strong background in online extremism and radicalization. He employs machine learning, computational text analysis, and network analysis methods to explore digital trace data. He contributed to the WWVT team by improving web resources and interfaces.

Anna Zhang, Institutes Team

Anna is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at Northeastern University, specializing in labor and Asian American studies with a focus on labor market creation and participation of Asian immigrants. As a member of the WWVT team, Anna contributed content and accessibility improvements to the WWP website and WWVT interface.