The Affiliation and Liaisons Committee issued a call for liaison volunteers in November 2019 and we received a number of expressions of interest from members of our community! In this informal, but important role, the liaison volunteers will work with this Committee to advance the mission of ACH through communication, outreach, and partnerships with digital humanities-centric communities, groups, and organizations. The new liaisons include:
Alyssa Alabassi is a medical doctor in London, England who works at an advanced computation laboratory devising digital integrated care pathways and solutions for the purposes of reducing medical errors and improving information flow. She also has a background in Big Data and data science applications and discussions with particular interest in Population Based Solutions and Disease Prevention. Alyssa’s interest in the humanities stems from the need for the practice of medicine to engage with social sciences, culture, philosophy, ethics and forms of expression including the arts to facilitate optimal care, since they reflect societal heterogeneity, the understanding of which is vital for the personalisation of medicine to fulfill the needs of the respective populations and communities. As an ACH liaison, Alyssa will work to promote a convergence between the digitalisation of medicine and the humanities by raising awareness and encouraging conversation and information sharing.
Tara Carlisle is head of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Oklahoma Libraries where she works with faculty, students, and technologists to explore new avenues in humanities computing research. Throughout the year, the Lab offers software and data carpentry workshops and a brown bag series focusing on digital humanities topics and projects. Previously, Tara was project development coordinator for the statewide repository The Portal to Texas History and was the lead administrator for up to 30 digitization grants annually that included teaching digitization and metadata standards. Tara serves on the curriculum committee for OU’s Digital Humanities Graduate Certification and is Vice Chair for the Digital Public Library of America’s (DPLA) Advisory Council. She will serve as the ACH liaison to the DPLA.
Andrew Janco is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Haverford College and is the ACH liaison to the Association for Slavic Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Andy has worked with the ASEEES SlavicDH group since its founding and helps to organize annual pre-conference workshops. Last year’s workshop engaged scholars with data from a crowd-sourced corpus of more than 3,000 Russian-language diaries. At Haverford, Andy is the lead developer of a digital archive and research applications for the Groupo de Apoyo Mutuo, Guatemala’s oldest human rights organization. Andy regularly teaches workshops on natural language processing and the spaCy library. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family in the woods or by the water, brews beer, and translates poetry from Russian.
Corinne Kennedy serves as Humanities Librarian at Mississippi State University (MSU) located in Starkville, MS. Her research and teaching interests incorporate the use of images. In addition, she works with faculty to incorporate digital humanities tools in the undergraduate classroom. She recently published an Open Access project through the NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities using Knight Lab’s story map using images for art history, literature, and religion classes. Corinne will serve as the ACH liaison to the Mississippi Library Association.
Rikk Mulligan is the Digital Scholarship Strategist in the University Libraries of Carnegie Mellon University. He consults on digital research and publishing, and tracks library support for digital scholarship infrastructure, digital publishing platforms, and digital humanities project and tool development. Prior to CMU, as an A.W. Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow, he was Program Officer for Scholarly Publishing at the Association of Research Libraries, researching sustainable forms of digital scholarship, tracking digital publishing within ARL member libraries, and analyzing library-based centers supporting digital scholarship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Michigan State University and an MA in History with a focus in Digital Humanities from George Mason University. He has extensive experience in online history pedagogy, user interface design, usability, and customizing content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka). Rikk will serve as the ACH liaison to the Popular Culture Association.