About

The Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory

Father Roberto Busa at Yale on September 24, 1956. The image shown here is kindly made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license by permission of CIRCSE Research Centre, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. For further information or to request permission for reuse, please contact Marco Passarotti by email or by post: Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milan, Italy.

About

The Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory

Our Mission

The Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLab), a unit of Yale University Library, offers space, community, and resources for Yale scholars who are using computational methods to pursue research questions in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences. Located inside Sterling Memorial Library, the Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory is a hub for consultations, training, and opportunities that support Yale students, faculty, and cultural heritage professionals in their engagement with digital tools and techniques. As part of the Yale University Library, the DHLab participates in global conversations around the analysis and use of large-scale digitized cultural heritage collections.

Our Guiding Principles

The DHLab is a shared resource designed for Yale humanists that creates prototypes, proofs-of-concept, and experiments, rather than production-ready systems.
The DHLab provides expertise in identifying and obtaining external support for DH projects, including advising on the application process and technical implementation details.
The DHLab supports digital humanities skills acquisition for both research and teaching purposes through consultations, training, and guest lectures.
The DHLab supports both initial digital humanities project ideation and innovative new directions for existing projects.
The DHLab concentrates its support in four main domains: text and data mining, image computation, spatial analysis, and network analysis.
The DHLab develops open-source software to facilitate new and accessible approaches to humanistic research and collection-scale analysis.

Our Partners and Collaborators

The DHLab collaborates with other Yale units and departments, along with external organizations to fulfill our mission. These include:

Other units within Yale University Library, including the StatLab, GIS services, and the Department of Area Studies and Humanities Research Support
The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning
The Center for Collaborative Arts and Media
Yale Center for Research Computing
Yale Pathways to the Arts & Humanities, as well as Yale Pathways to the Sciences
Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design
The Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage

A Brief History

Yale's roots in digital humanities undertakings date back (at least) to Father Roberto Busa's visit to our campus in 1956 and the Computers for the Humanities conference that was sponsored by Yale on a grant from IBM in 1965.

The 2015 founding of the DHLab signifies Yale University's continued commitment to advancing research and teaching in the humanities. Generously funded by The Goizueta Foundation and by Barbara and Richard Franke '53, the DHLab supports Yale scholars in their pursuit of humanistic questions by way of computational methods.

The DHLab is one of the digital scholarship services offered by Yale University Library.

OUR TEAM

Peter Leonard

DHLab Director
Lecturer, Statistics & Data Science

Peter received his BA in art history from the University of Chicago and his PhD in Scandinavian literature from the University of Washington. He came to Yale in 2013 as the first Librarian for Digital Humanities Research. Some of his Digital Humanities work is online at pleonard.net.

Prior to coming to Yale, Peter was responsible for humanities research computing at the University of Chicago and served as a postdoctoral researcher in text-mining at UCLA, supported by a Google Digital Humanities Research Award.

Peter has published several articles and chapters on literary diversity, equity and inclusion in northern Europe. During 2007-2008, he served as a Fulbright Scholar at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Monica Ong Reed

User Experience Designer

An MFA graduate in Digital Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, Monica first came to Yale as designer for the School of Music (2007-2015) to lead initiatives in web and mobile publishing. Her design work has been nominated for a Webby Award in 2014 and recognized by the W3 Awards and the Connecticut Art Director’s Club.

At the DHLab she specializes in user research, prototyping, and design, with an experimental eye for telling stories through data visualization and information design.

Also a visual artist and Kundiman poetry fellow, Monica’s debut collection, Silent Anatomies (2015), was selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the 2014 Kore Press First Book Award. She tweets too.

Kayla Shipp

Program Manager (starting Summer 2022)

With a background in English, computer science, and nonprofit development, Kayla earned an M.A. in Digital Humanities at King’s College London and a Ph.D. in English at Emory University. Before joining the Yale DHLab, she worked as a digital scholarship specialist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, where she partnered with museums, authors, and researchers to build interactive digital objects and publications.

Kayla’s research explores the poetics of code and virtual space, focusing on the intersection of material culture and technology. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. You can find some of her recent projects and publications at kaylashipp.com.

Douglas Duhaime

Open Source Development Consultant

Douglas Duhaime consults on the development of open-source software platforms, including PixPlot and Intertext, and previously served as the first Digital Humanities Developer at the DHLab. Before working at the lab, Douglas developed digital humanities software products at ProQuest and completed a dissertation on algorithmic approaches to early modern authorship at the University of Notre Dame. He held a Spring 2021 appointment as a Lecturer in Yale’s Department of Statistics and Data Science, for which he co-taught YData’s first credit-bearing course on Humanities Data Mining.

You can find Douglas on GitHub, Twitter, and his personal website.