{"id":45,"date":"2025-12-15T12:23:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T18:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/?page_id=45"},"modified":"2026-05-21T14:18:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:18:06","slug":"supercharging-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/fall-2025\/supercharging-the-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"Supercharging the Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Supercharging<\/h1>\r\n\r\n
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    Within the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities, technology is a powerful tool that enables scholars to transform and deepen their research, broaden information access, and engage the public. At the University of Houston, those scholars receive support from the Digital Humanities Core.
\r\n    Created as a partnership between the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute and UH Libraries, the DH Core serves both student and faculty researchers with a digital project production and publishing facility equipped with technological infrastructure, research tools and interdisciplinary expertise. Scholars are encouraged to reach out with ideas and strategize with DH Core specialists around how they can use technology to elevate their research plans.
\r\n    The world of digital humanities at UH is growing, thanks in large part to the efforts of talented, driven students. These self-starters bring a variety of strengths and specializations, such as data science skills, to the program. Opportunities abound for students to analyze and clean research data and to collaborate with faculty on identifying data issues and offering solutions.
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\u201cA Community of Practice\u201d<\/h2>\r\n    As director of the Digital Humanities Core Facility, Linda Garc\u00eda Merchant is reimagining ways for UH students of any discipline to get involved in digital humanities.
\r\n    \u201cWe\u2019re beginning to shift the culture,\u201d Garc\u00eda Merchant says. \u201cFaculty don\u2019t have to do this work by themselves anymore. We\u2019re building a community of practice, finding practitioners suited to create better opportunities for the scholarship they\u2019re producing.\u201d
\r\n    DH gives students autonomy and challenges them to get comfortable with explaining their work and making points clearly. For example, DH students teach their peers how to use data visualization tools such as Tableau and ClioVis. And, because students learn best from one another, they often create better outcomes.
\r\n    Students have helped in other ways \u2014 hosting public-facing DH events, publishing a newsletter, leading virtual workshops on data tools and holding their own walk-in consultation hours. Along the way, they\u2019ve mastered the techniques of building DH projects and gained real-world experience, making them more marketable when it comes time to find a job.
\r\n    Supported by the DH Core, the digital media internship pilot program empowers students to work as developers of humanities projects with public-facing deliverables. They become part of a multidisciplinary team, collaborating over 15 weeks to create a fully developed research site that may consist of blog posts, data visualizations and mapping, descriptive content, and other interactive features.
\r\n    One such project is Se\u00f1ora Power, a 2023 US Latino Digital Humanities Center Grant in Aid recipient. The project, which will live on the USLDH project portal provided by the DH Core, is led by principal investigators at several universities who track the changes in political consciousness and identity expression of women of Mexican descent living in Houston or Los Angeles from 1900\u20131984. The investigators research archival material and interview community members, piecing together a narrative with the goal of making Chicana history widely accessible.
\r\n    That\u2019s where Lauryn White (\u201923) and current undergraduate student Maryam Eldershaby come in. As interns, their task was to bring the Se\u00f1ora Power project to life online. In coordination with the principal investigators, White determined how they wanted to present the project findings to the public on the website. She organized the website\u2019s planning and production and facilitated asynchronous communication.
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\r\n    After learning about Eldershaby\u2019s experience and skill set, White recommended her as the team\u2019s lead designer. Eldershaby\u2019s role was to preserve the digital archives by creating a user-friendly, interactive website containing data visualizations, audio files, archival images and geographical data. She designed visuals and wireframes in Figma that aligned with the project\u2019s message.
\r\n    Eldershaby says she\u2019s grateful for her teammates, who were professional and collaborative. \u201cWorking with this group opened new experiences for me and advanced a lot of my skills,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m really proud of all the work we have done.\u201d
\r\n    Eldershaby also previously worked on SYRIOS: Studying Urban Relationships and Identity Over Ancient Syria, a DH project that \u201cbrings the history of ancient Syria to modern audiences through a study of coins.\u201d It was working on this project, she says, that helped her realize that preservation for posterity is a primary factor in the field of digital humanities, which presents a wealth of opportunities for researchers to collect, evaluate and share information in new and dynamic ways.
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\u201cDH connects the arts and technology in a more engaging, accessible way while preserving history.\u201d \u2014 Maryam Eldershaby, Digital Humanities Intern and Lead Designer<\/h2> \r\n    \u201cThe Se\u00f1ora Power website is accessible for individuals to explore the stories, and it also preserves important cultural knowledge for the future, unlike a paper that could be crumpled up and gone forever,\u201d Eldershaby says. \u201cDH connects the arts and technology in a more engaging, accessible way while preserving history.\u201d
\r\n    During her time in the DH Core, White learned how to code a website, among other technical skills. She\u2019s now studying for a master\u2019s in neuroscience and behavior at UH-Clear Lake, but she was pursuing her bachelor\u2019s in psychology when she began working on her first DH Core project, The Year 1771, which provides a new approach to reading texts to uncover word patterns.
\r\n    \u201cI was in charge of migrating website material from Wix and building the 1771 website in the DH Core facility domain,\u201d she says. \u201cI eventually took what I learned and used it to give helpful critiques when I evaluated Maryam\u2019s Se\u00f1ora Power website.\u201d
\r\n    White says DH offers something for everyone. \u201cThere\u2019s always something that needs to be preserved. Digital humanities is so expansive; it\u2019s not just computers and numbers. There is a humanities portion that needs people to preserve community material, such as photos or writings. It\u2019s more than just tech.\u201d
\r\n    DH creates entry points that allow us to see concepts and data anew. It\u2019s about showing and telling stories in a way where we all can understand them better.
\r\n    \u201cThe great thing about DH is that it helps us engage our curious selves,\u201d Garc\u00eda Merchant says. \u201cI always tell students to do DH with joy, because when you\u2019re really interested in what you\u2019re doing, you\u2019ll be fascinated by all the different potential directions you can take.”<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\"Supercharging","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"    Within the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities, technology is a powerful tool that enables scholars to transform and deepen their research, broaden information access, and engage the public. At the University of Houston, those scholars receive support from the Digital Humanities Core.     Created as a partnership between the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute and […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":7,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"newsletter-2-column.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-45","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45\/revisions\/386"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.uh.edu\/reimagined\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}