On Thursday, December 4th, the DLA hosted a special brown bag lunch session featuring presentations by current DLA faculty fellows. Professors Hang Du (Faculty Fellow 2014-2015) and Louisa Stein (Faculty Fellow 2014) and their student research assistants shared the challenges and serendipitous discoveries of working with new digital technologies.

In her research, Du uses methods from corpus and computational linguistics to assess Chinese language learners’ uses of the “bah” construction. Aaron Kano-Bower (’15), a Computer Science major and Chinese minor, wrote several programs in close collaboration with Du to organize and standardize her large collection of transcribed interviews with Chinese language learners. Du is currently in the process of analyzing and comparing this corpus to other available corpora of spoken Chinese.

Stein is currently using Scalar, an online publishing platform, to compose a book on the transformative media produced by members of fan cultures. Her research assistants Denisse De La Cruz (’17) and Annie Wymard (’15) discussed the digital exhibits they have created using Scalar. While each student has focused on different areas of media and fan culture, they have contributed both to the form and content of Stein’s larger Scalar book.

[Photos by Matt Lennon (’13), DLA Arts Tech Assistant]