My name is Constance Holden and I am a fifth year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. My research examines race, gender, and visual culture in late 19th and early 20th century Latin America. My interest in visual culture led me to think about integrating digital humanities into my studies. Greenhouse Studios seemed like the ideal space to explore the questions that I have about the DH tools that would best support a project like mine. My dissertation specifically historicizes the representations of women of African descent in the Argentine cultural imagination alongside the ways in which African-descended women represented their own lives, dreams, and hopes. I envision my dissertation as an imaginative historical space that expands temporal and conceptual frames for how we think about the African Diaspora, Black feminist thought, and the cultural reverberations of Latin American nation-state formation. In fusing African Diaspora and Latin American histories through a study of popular and visual culture, my project offers a meditation on the gendered meanings of Blackness, national identities, and how people of African descent refused, shaped, and/or embraced the varied politics of cultural belonging and citizenship. I am excited about the interdisciplinary environment of Greenhouse Studios that fosters the safety to ask new questions and to collaborate with different stakeholders. Through this work, I am able to engage with a broad range of projects that encourage me to think alongside the already expansive collection of digital humanities scholarship at UConn.
My time at Greenhouse Studios as a CLAS Graduate Assistant will offer the time, tools, and creative community for developing the skills needed to complete my dissertation. I want to use digital humanities research and methods to analyze the photographs and illustrations that form the foundation of my source base. I aspire to use image analysis and data visualization to inform my assessment of the historical material, moving beyond traditional methods of interpretation to arrive at perhaps previously obscured or overlooked conclusions. I hope to convey these findings on a website that accompanies my written dissertation. I imagine this website as an example of multimodal scholarship that remedies misconceptions about Blackness in Latin America.
As I consider my job as a historian as one of collaboration and innovation, I understand my tenure at Greenhouse Studios as the chance to experiment with new modes of knowledge production, consumption, and representation. I am excited to acquire the toolkit necessary for growing into a scholar comfortable with digital modes of analysis. I am curious about how digital media, design, and humanities expand understandings of the possible archives that scholars can create and rely upon to tell stories about the past, present, and future. I hope to contribute to projects that make archival resources more accessible, that draw on web design and GIS mapping skills to counter narratives of erasure and disappearance, and that reengineer institutional relationships to digital humanities. I’m also curious about technical concepts, techniques, and principles that bridge the humanities with technology, such as (but not limited to) text analysis, text mining, coding, and data extraction.
By the end of this academic year, in addition to contributing to a range of existing Greenhouse projects, I hope to have gained the knowledge and experience to create my own, whether as a component of my dissertation or in service to future research goals. I am excited to engage more explicitly with Digital Humanities because it offers a pathway toward generous scholarly thinking and the radical acceptance required to truly embrace the unknown and unexpected. I believe that Digital Humanities is not just a method or a framework, but a philosophy for how to study, how to share stories, and most importantly, how to live. It is my hope that my time at Greenhouse Studios will allow me to learn and live just a little bit better–as a human, scholar, and student.