Molly Nebiolo, Ph.D.

Experience

I have been a major contributor to the Women Writers Vector Toolkit, the Women Writers Project, the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative, the Boston Research Center, among other collaborations. For three years, I was a part of the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary project at the Massachusetts Historical Society and various digital initiatives for the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society. My skills as a historian of medicine have also been used to map the smallpox deaths during the 1721-1722 Boston epidemic for the Historical Epidemics project, and I am transcribing and constructing an open-sourced database on the victims of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia.

I am also producing a digital exhibit related to my research, called “Visualizing Colonial Philadelphia” (VCP). VCP confronts the notion of what it meant to be a city in early America and what “urban” meant in an early colonial context. The project exemplifies ways to extract these histories using digital tools and colonial cartographic data, and shows how digital processes can assist in historical work. An early iteration of this project can be found on this website as I make progress on modeling Philadelphia. Scholarship on this work is available in the Age of Revolutions in the Digital Age Anthology.

I have also participated in the DH community through the HASTAC Scholar program, and I have participated at DHSI and various national and international DH conferences.

DH pedagogy

My digital humanities – focused pedagogy is centered on experiential, intentional, and relatable work. I see DH as a field that allows scholars to use digital or computational tools to analyze primary sources to answer or speak to critical questions in the field. I want the way I teach DH to focus on the experiential by making the process of working with digital tools as important as learning about the content and history of the field. I provide “lab time” in my courses to emphasize the experiential nature of becoming a DHer. I highlight the intentionality of this work, as well, to show that making something ephemeral on a digital platform is not doing good digital humanities work. Instead, there needs to be strong research questions, intentional outputs, and sustainable actions to keep the work ongoing or make it reproducible for others. Lastly, I want DH projects to offer an aspect of relatability to the user; to make the process of accessing the data, project, or website approachable to the audience that the project set out to reach. Otherwise, the output might be difficult to analyze, navigate, or convince users the importance of its existence. At the center of all three of these pedagogical tenants is the fact that DH work should be community-centered and community-driven.

Please email me if you would like to learn more about anything.