DH 101: What is Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application.
Digital Cartography
Eliza Jane is interested in digital humanities as an urban planner seeking an interdisciplinary field that bridges her interest in data visualizations, mapping, art and the humanities. As the first CALI-BAMA digital urban humanist, she has utilized this discipline to strengthen her ongoing research project on Lynchings in Alabama and to participate in group digital projects.
As a Black Girl Cartographer (Butler, 2018), she utilizes digital cartography (digital mapping) as a means to visually display social injustices beyond the walls of the institution. One of her ongoing projects is mapping a dataset featuring the lynchings within Alabama by county onto a “thick map” with multiple layers. Her goal is to build upon this mapping project and expand juxtaposing formation of KKK chapters throughout the state with lynching occurrences. Her great-grandfather, Willie Lee Jenkins was lynched in 1922 in Eufaula, AL. He alongside many other Black persons have been honored at the EJI museum in Montgomery, AL. It is because those most impacted by these incidents, the descendants, do not have a voice, Eliza Jane wants to utilize her platform to provide an alternate lens of understanding while humanizing the events and their generational impacts. A link to her Black Girl Digital Cartography Project, Heart of Dixie: Alabama Lynchings, Analysis of the Stolen Legacy of Willie Jenkins can be found here: