Viona Deconinck, Art History, Theory and Criticism
Viona Deconinck is a PhD student in Art History, Theory and Criticism, she’s interested in book arts and the ways in which artists move away from the linearity implied by the medium. Her past interests have included Dada poetry and the influence of rhythm in modernist art and literature. Her move towards the digital humanities was inspired by her teaching experiences, and the use of internet and technology in the classroom.
Sam Gaffney, Communications
Sam Gaffney is a PhD student in UCSD’s Communication Department whose interests meet at the intersection of communication studies, anthropology, and philosophy. Sam’s past research has focused on outsider communities prone to misrepresentation, namely the Canberra bush doof community and the now defunct KickassTorrents piracy community. His research has largely responded to the question of how to represent these communities in a way that resonates both with the community’s participants as well as the academic institution. Sam is hoping to continue along this vein through looking at the intersection of local communities with environmental policy, and the conflicts that emerge in the establishing of critical wildlife habitats. Sam hopes to continue making use of the Digital Humanities research group as a space in which to explore and develop new research skills and approaches.
Jeanelle D. Horcasitas, Literature and Cultural Studies
Jeanelle D. Horcasitas is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Cultural Studies at UC San Diego. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century multi-ethnic literature and film, science fiction, speculative fiction, immigration, biopolitics and technology. She has previously taught for the UCSD Literature department’s multi-ethnic literature sequence and English composition at San Diego Miramar College. She has also worked in various capacities with the UCSD Graduate Division and Career Center, the County of San Diego Housing Authority and the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Her interest in the digital humanities stems from her passion for sharing stories, especially the amazing work being done in academia, in multi-modal forms that are interactive and accessible to wider audiences. She has previously used Scalar as a digital companion for her qualifying paper on the Utopian/Dystopian American Dream and for a conference presentation on how using digital tools in the classroom empowers students. She is also a part of the HASTAC community as a HASTAC 2017-19 scholar. She is dedicated to making the digital humanities more visible and accessible to both UCSD and the broader San Diego community. She plans on developing a digital humanities component for her dissertation entitled, “Reclaiming Our Futures: A Speculative Cultural Study of 20th and 21st Century Multi-Ethnic Speculative Fictions”
Leonidas Mylonakis, History
Leonidas Mylonakis is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego, where he completed his Ph.D. in Modern Greek and Ottoman History. His research utilizes Greek and Ottoman archival sources in French, Greek, Ottoman Turkish, English, and Italian to track outbreaks of piracy and shifting Greek and Ottoman state relationships to pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the nineteenth century. His research in Greece and Turkey has been funded by the Fulbright and Onassis Foundations. He is currently interested in using Python to create Natural Language Processing functionality for Ottoman Turkish. He sees digital humanities as the much-needed bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences.
Linnea Zeiner, Communications
Linnea Zeiner is a U.S. historian and digital humanist conducting multi-disciplinary research in transmedia platforms of scholarship, presentation, and pedagogy. She earned her M.A. in History from San Diego State University and is a second-year doctoral student at the University of California San Diego in Communication. Linnea’s thesis, grunge feminism: performing gender paradox in queered plays of hypertexuality, published in 2015, is the first born-digital, interactive thesis at San Diego State. It is a multi-modal work presenting a non-linear and completely interactive reader experience that is designed to open up new interpretative opportunities in the digital classroom. Currently, Linnea Zeiner is a lecturer in the Classics and Humanities Department at San Diego State, working out of the experimental and collaborative environment of the ITS Learning Research Studios. As part of the Virtual Immersive Teaching and Learning (VITal) faculty, she explores inverted approaches to teaching Humanities utilizing transmedia, deformance, and mixed realities. Ms. Zeiner has been a member of the SDSU Digital Humanities Initiative since its inception, working with the consortium to help the San Diego region’s diverse learning institutions innovate DH pedagogy to enhance the learning experiences of underrepresented student communities.
Erin Rose Glass, Digital Scholarship Librarian
Erin Rose Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where she advises on participatory approaches to digital research and education practices for campus. She has seven years of experience working on digital research, education, and community projects, including projects funded by the Mellon Foundation, NEH, CUNY, and ARL. She received the 2018 Emerging Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute for her #SocialDiss project in which she posted drafts of her dissertation for public review on a variety of writing and social media platforms. She is also co-founder of Social Paper, a non-proprietary platform for networking student writing and feedback. She has a Ph.D. in English and a Certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from The CUNY Graduate Center.
Our group meets bi-weekly, please join our group on KNIT today to get updated about our next meeting: https://knit.ucsd.edu/groups/luddites.