Black digital and public humanities

[aminaas1573]

Looking ahead, the project team plans to present their work at academic conferences and aims to diversify the team’s expertise further. The overarching objective is to enhance the visibility and interconnectedness of projects, while also welcoming external contributions for the initiative’s continual refinement and expansion.

Thomas: It sounds like the project adopts a holistic approach to experimenting with and integrating the functionality of a wide range of tools and methods (e.g., mapping, data visualization). How do you see tools like ARCH fitting into the project and research services more broadly? What tools and methods have you used in combination with ARCH?

Kevin: ARCH offers faculty and students an invaluable resource for digital scholarship by providing expansive, high-quality datasets. These datasets enable more sophisticated data analytics than typically phone number library encountered in undergraduate pedagogy, revealing patterns and trends that would otherwise remain obscured. Despite the increasing importance of digital humanities, a significant portion of faculty and students lack advanced coding skills. The advent of AI-assisted coding platforms like ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot has democratized access to programming languages such as Python and JavaScript, facilitating their integration into academic research.

For my work, I employed ChatGPT and CoPilot to further process ARCH datasets derived from a curated sample of 20 websites focused on Black digital and public humanities. Utilizing PyCharm—an IDE freely available for educational purposes—and the CoPilot extension, my coding efficiency improved tenfold.