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The Bread and Butter of Digital Humanities: Enduring Tools and Methods in the Field
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Digital Humanities event in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab Technology is changing quickly, and especially so in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It can feel overwhelming to learn something new only to have that knowledge quickly become out of date shortly after. This workshop series, presented by the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, pauses to take a breath and look at enduring skills and knowledge in the field of digital humanities that remain relevant in the midst of rapid technological change.
Join us to learn about seven core “bread and butter,” or consistently important, foundational forms of knowledge in the field of Digital Humanities:
- Data modeling, or the process of structuring and organizing your data.
- Data cleaning, or taking your data and determining the best ways to organize it for findability
- Natural Language Processing with Python, a branch of AI that has roots in the 1950s that can process “natural language” in order to process documents or other materials for speech recognition and other forms of text classification.
- Introduction to HTML: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language used to create and structure the foundation of all web pages on the Internet.
- Vibe Coding: AI has made creating computer code easier. Vibe coding uses natural language prompts to tell an AI what to build without the user coding themself. This workshop will share how to read the output and how to think critically while you’re coding with AI.
- GitHub and Git: a popular cloud-based platform and version control system, primarily used for software and code, but also useful for long-form prose and educational resources
- Creating a Digital Archive in Collection Builder: Do you want to make an argument with a collection of images or other files for long-term access? Collection Builder is an open source tool for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and powered by static web technology.
Join us for one workshop or all seven! Lunch is provided for all workshops at noon.
Schedule
- September 23 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137) and on Zoom, Rockefeller Library: Getting Started in Digital Humanities taught by Tarika Sankar, Digital Humanities Librarian (lunch provided!)
- September 30 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Rockefeller Library room 160: Structuring the mess: Turning real-world complexity into computable data taught by Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services (lunch provided!)
- October 16 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Hecker Center, room 134, Rockefeller Library: Data Cleaning the “tidy” way: practical skills for messy spreadsheets and unruly documents taught by Cass Wilkinson Saldaña, Social Science Data Librarian (lunch provided!)
- October 23 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137), Rockefeller Library and on Zoom: Natural Language Processing with Python taught by Micah Saxton, Humanities Librarian (lunch provided!)
- October 27 from 2 to 3 p.m. on Zoom: Introduction to HTML taught by Elizabeth Yalkut, Front-end Developer
- November 4 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137), Rockefeller Library and on Zoom: Using A.I. as an on-ramp to computer programming taught by Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services (lunch provided!)
- November 10 from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137), Rockefeller Library: GitHub and Git for Everyone taught by Cass Wilkinson Saldaña, Social Science Data Librarian, and Elizabeth Yalkut, Front-end Developer
- November 18 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137), Rockefeller Library and on Zoom (lunch provided!): Creating a Digital Archive in Collection Builder taught by Tarika Sankar, Digital Humanities Librarian
Learn More and Register
Registration is not required, but strongly encouraged. We look forward to seeing you soon!
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Namwali Serpell, “On Morrison” Book Talk
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Join award-winning author Namwali Serpell for a reading and discussion of her new book On Morrison, a critical work on the writings of Toni Morrison.
Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Time: 4 to 5:30 p.m.
Location: Racial Justice Resource Center, 2nd floor, Rockefeller Library, and onlineRegistration Required
Free and open to the public. Registration required. REGISTER HERE.
The author will open the event with a short reading from On Morrison followed by discussion with Professor Kevin Quashie, Brown University Department of English, and audience Q&A. Copies of On Morrison will be available for purchase on-site through the Brown Bookstore.
The event is sponsored by The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and Brown University Library.
On Morrison
On Morrison is a national best seller, named a best book of the year so far by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, Esquire, The Guardian, and Lit Hub.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer — and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison at Harvard University to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.
This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence. – Penguin Random House
Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell © Jordan Kines Photography Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She is a fiction writer, a literary critic, and a professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of three works of criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), Stranger Faces (2020), and On Morrison (2026), and two novels: The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022), for which she was awarded the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in 2020 toward the advance of its completion.
Kevin Quashie
Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022).
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First Two Titles in Brown University Digital Publications–MIT Press Book Series Garner Prestigious Prizes
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Awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Studies Association recognize excellence and innovation.
Providence, R.I. [Brown University] Major prizes spotlight the first two titles in the On Seeing series, a joint venture by Brown University Digital Publications and the MIT Press. Devoted to visual literacy, publications in the series foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, these books articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual
Mortvevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (2024) by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, is a finalist for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the multimodal category. The awards are among the largest for peer-reviewed open access monographs in the humanities, with $20,000 for authors and $30,000 for publishers to support future open access projects.
In addition to demonstrating an original and compelling disciplinary contribution, impact to the wider scholarly conversation and/or to nonacademic audiences, and inclusive design and technology, multimodal submissions are evaluated for:
- innovative and judicious use of digital components that serve to advance the work’s core argument or narrative;
- intuitive navigation and seamless integration of text and digital content; and
- attention to preservation concerns.
The multimodal edition of Mortevivum employs a Consentful Tech framework, or the intentional development and use of technology to create safety, to prioritize care, and to foreground consent to mitigate trauma. In an interview with ACLS, the author explains:
Exploring a space between evidence and erasure, the Brown University Digital Publications design team deeply considered how to transform [challenging] images for various audiences. An icon indicates that viewers may opt to see more of an altered image, but only if they choose to do so. By including images that do the work without doing the damage, the multimodal edition introduces a new form of visual literacy that comes through agency.
Multimodal projects engage the senses at different registers, allowing the greatest measure of immersion to take place. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have moved between literature and visual culture in my writing and pedagogy, and this has allowed readers and students to engage where they feel most comfortable. We live in a multimodal world. Our research and writing should reflect this.
Landing page for Mortevivum digital publication Mortevivum is the second work developed by Brown University Digital Publications to be shortlisted for the ACLS–Arcadia prizes. In 2024, Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), by Brown University Professor of Italian Studies Massimo Riva, also advanced in the multimodal category. For the 2026 competition, the winning book will receive dual awards, presented in October during International Open Access Week.
Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning
Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. Courtesy of Getty Images. Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning, also by Kimberly Juanita Brown, has been named the winner of the 2026 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize by the American Studies Association. The prize honors the most outstanding book published in the field of American studies. The award ceremony will take place in October at the annual meeting of the Association.
Whereas Mortevivum studies the relationship between documentary photography and histories of antiblackness, Black Elegies examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief of sustained racial violence. Structured around the sensorial, the book moves through sight, sound, and touch, offering a framework of mourning while black, within the parameters of contemporary artistic production. Brown explains:
Multimodal projects engage the senses at different registers, allowing the greatest measure of immersion to take place. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have moved between literature and visual culture in my writing and pedagogy, and this has allowed readers and students to engage where they feel most comfortable. We live in a multimodal world. Our research and writing should reflect this.
Cover of Community Engagement Toolkit for Black Elegies. Brown University Digital Publications
Award-Winning Publications
Other award-winning publications in the Brown portfolio include Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), awarded the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize in Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association; Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), finalist for the ACLS–Arcadia multimodal prize and category winner for Best E-Product for the 47th Annual PROSE Awards juried by the Association of American Publishers; and A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), shortlisted for the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan International Book Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy.
Contact
Questions about Brown University Digital Publications can be addressed to Director Allison Levy (allison_levy@brown.edu).
About
Brown University Digital Publications — generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation in 2015 with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge by advancing scholarly arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. Brown partners with leading scholarly presses to bring peer reviewed, open access, multimodal content to global audiences. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel approach to born-digital monograph publishing is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship.
