As a Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow, Amanda is resident at MITH for the 2014–2015 academic year. A Ph.D. candidate in the University of Maryland’s Department of English, she also holds a master’s degree with a specialization in digital humanities human-computer interaction from the University of Michigan School of Information and is a professional web developer focusing on interfaces for the future of reading.
At UMD, she focuses on creating and theorizing digital edition interfaces for reading, research, and teaching. Her dissertation, “’How Can You Love a Text, If You Don’t Know It?’: Critical Code and Design toward Participatory Digital Editions”, uses a novel methodology combining critical building and use/usability testing (volunteer to beta-test her Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition). Her master’s thesis, “’Songs of Innocence and of Experience’: Amateur Users and Digital Texts”, was built around a quantitative and qualitative study of amateur DH archive and edition use experience. Read more about Amanda’s building-as-scholarship research at LiteratureGeek.com.
Amanda has served in three other MITH roles in the past. As an IMLS Digital Humanities Model Intern (2009), Amanda performed physical and digital archival processing as well as finding-tool creation for the Deena Larsen E-lit Collection, and also created an Omeka web presence for the research collection. As MITH’s Webmaster (2011–2013), Amanda designed websites, wrangled servers, co-taught e-lit and other DH topics in MITH’s Digital Storytelling course, and coded for projects such as Making the Digital Humanities More Open. As a research assistant on the BitCurator project for born-digital collection digital forensics (2013–2014), Amanda’s work included web development, documentation and user support, and usability testing.
Past Staff