Since 2015, the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab has partnered with academic departments on campus to support 2–3 postdoctoral associates. During their appointments, each postdoc both participates in the intellectual life of the lab and also pursues independent digital humanities research that is relevant to their discipline.
Along with receiving dedicated workspace in the Digital Humanities Lab, postdoctoral associates also have the opportunity to collabroate with a faculty mentor from their home department, as well as technical staff, including a Digital Humanities Developer and User Experience Designer.
Damon Crockett’s present work concerns the role of visual evidence in the social sciences. In particular, he considers the ways in which image data can be used to ground substantive explanations in fields like media studies, cultural studies, and digital art history. During his appointment with the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, Damon plans to develop a set of flexible software tools for the direct visualization of image data. Additionally, he will conduct an in-depth user study aimed at making the tools as useful and learnable as possible.
A historian of photography and the press, Nadya Bair holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California. Her book project, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, examines the role of photo agencies in shaping postwar visual culture. Based on years of research in over a dozen archives around the world, The Decisive Network looks beyond heroic photographers and their iconic images to demonstrate how a range of professionals brought the aesthetic and production mode of news images into multiple markets for photography. Bair has published articles in the journals History of Photography and American Art, and in the edited volumes Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News and Visualizing Fascism (forthcoming). At Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab, Bair will be mining data from thousands of pages of Magnum business correspondence in order to visualize and analyze the full scope of the agency’s networks. Working on a scale that exceeds the limits of chronological and linear narrative, this project will model new ways to study image saturation and the collaborative labor that yielded it.
Gabor Toth, formerly a fellow of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, joined the DHLab in October 2017. His background spans both Digital Humanities and History. During his dual appointment in the DHLab and Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Gabor will work on a digital tool that will enable the exploration of a big collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors. Besides, Gabor will prepare a monograph on the computer-assisted analysis of Holocaust interviews.