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Digital Research Start-Up Partnerships for Graduate Students (DResSUP)

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Increasingly, humanities scholars (and scholars in humanistic social sciences) recognize the value of digital research tools and methods such as text-mining and spatial analysis. As more content is digitized these methods are becoming more useful, especially to graduate students who are at a formative stage in their careers. However, even if these researchers assemble a collection of digitized resources, these resources may not be in a format that is conducive to digital methods.

To address these needs, the UCLA Library has established a partnership program to assist UCLA graduate students with initiating and incubating digital research projects. Students are encouraged to apply for the partnerships that could be used during the summer to:

  • digitize, transcribe, geo-reference, or perform OCR on materials
  • write scripts to “mine” data from digitized collections (e.g. Hathi Trust)
  • create metadata following appropriate standards
  • convert materials from one format to another (e.g. raw text to spreadsheet)
  • collect data from social media
  • crawl and/or archive websites
  • prepare data for storage or publication in a repository

The purpose of the partnerships is to engage librarians with researchers in the process of moving from digital collection-building to analysis to publication, partnering with new scholars as they navigate the various types of expertise needed during this process. We will hire a student assistant to work with each participant intensively for one week.

Meet the Digital Research Team

Zoe Borovsky
Zoe Borovsky is UCLA’s Librarian for Digital Research and Scholarship, where she works within the Collections, Research, and Instructional Services department as a liaison to the Digital Humanities Program, and the Anthropology department. Zoe has a background in the humanities (PhD in Scandinavian Literature from UC Berkeley), she has been a professor of Scandinavian Literature at University of Oregon, and she has worked for over ten years with UCLA faculty incorporating digital tools and methods into their research. She consults with researchers and teaches workshops on topic modeling, network analysis, and text-analysis projects.

Peter Broadwell
Peter Broadwell is an Academic Projects Developer in the UCLA Digital Library Program, working with faculty, library specialists, and students to develop novel online resources that use emerging technologies in computational analysis, digital archiving, and multimedia presentation to support collaborative scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Peter has a dual background in the humanities (PhD in Musicology from UCLA) and computer science (MS from UC Berkeley) and has been actively involved in digital scholarship projects for the past seven years. Some of the projects he has helped to implement involve text mining and geo-semantic mapping of folklore and literary texts from a variety of cultures and eras, such as nineteenth-century Denmark, medieval Iceland, and the Tang Dynasty in China; social network analyses of East Asian pop music groups and Hollywood composer collaborations; and the application of machine-learning algorithms to mine large digital corpora, including library circulation records, contemporary television news and social media collections, and Holocaust survivor testimonies.

Claudia Horning
Claudia Horning is the Director of Metadata Services in the UCLA Library Cataloging and Metadata Center, where she works within the rapidly evolving realm of information, content management, and discovery. Her academic background is in United States History (BA, UCLA) and Information Science (MLIS, UCLA). Her work on metadata and standards has involved collections including photographs, international AIDS posters, sheet music, cuneiform objects, oral histories, and Ethiopian magical scrolls.

generic avatarDawn Childress is Librarian for Digital Collections and Scholarship at UCLA’s Digital Library Program. Her work and research activities include digital libraries; digital and analog approaches to bibliography, book history, and archival studies; digital scholarly editing; and translation. Dawn consults and collaborates with faculty and students on projects related to text encoding, network analysis, metadata, data modeling, digital collections, and digital scholarship and pedagogy more broadly.around those materials.