Digital Portfolio

Project Twitter Literature (TwitLit)

I am the Principal Investigator (PI) of Project TwitLit, a project which I founded, designed, launched, and have been developing since 2017. In 2020, I trained three undergraduate Research Assistants (RAs) to assist with data collection for Project TwitLit.

Project TwitLit seeks to address a growing gap in the literary-historical record by establishing a consistent, rigorous, and ethical method for scraping and cleaning up Twitter data for the use of humanities scholars. In particular, this project explores the growing community of amateur writers who are using Twitter as a means of publication and dissemination for their literary output. There are three parts to Project TwitLit: the research findings related to the global literary community on Twitter, the tools and resources developed as part of the project and made openly available to other scholars, and partnership with a university library to ensure the long-term preservation of the collected data. Information relating to the data collection process and research findings – including detailed instructions, the Python scripts used to collect Twitter data, and a list of resources – are free and openly accessible on the project’s website and GitHub repository.

Project TwitLit was the recipient of a DH Prototyping Fellowship from the University of Virginia Scholars' Lab (2018) and of a Confounding Problems Mellon Grant from Bucknell University (2019-20). Project TwitLit has also been peer-reviewed in Reviews in Digital Humanities.

Presentations & Publications
Christian Howard, "Studying & Preserving the Global Networks of Twitter Literature," Post-45 (Sept. 2019).

Christian Howard-Sukhil, "Project Twitter Literature: Scraping, Analyzing, & Archiving Twitter Data in Literary Research." A presentation published on Humanities Commons as part of the Digital Humanities 2020 Conference (July 2020).

DH@Bucknell Networking Initiative

I served as the Project Leader of the DH@Bucknell Networking Initiative, the development of which was one of my primary projects as the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Bucknell University. When I arrived at Bucknell, this networking initiative was a mere hope of the community with no clear manifestation.

DH@Bucknell aims to provide the Bucknell community with the resources and tools necessary to implement and maintain a DH project. In order to help further these goals, I planned, developed, and launched a networking initiative to connect DH students, scholars, and practitioners at and beyond Bucknell. This networking initiative included designing and implementing the DH@Bucknell website, as well as organizing and hosting an ongoing event series - titled "Humanities Lab (HumLab) Bytes" - related to the Digital Humanities at Bucknell.

From 2019-20, I trained and worked with an undergraduate Research Assistant (RA) on the DH@Bucknell Networking Initiative; this RA assisted with social media outreach and website development. The tools, resources, and aims of the DH@Bucknell Networking Initiative were undertaken with the approval and input of the Bucknell Digital Humanities Coordinating Committee (DHCC).

Presentations and Publications
Christian Howard-Sukhil and Rennie Mapp, "Enhancing Community through Open DH Website Design." A presentation published on Humanities Commons as part of the Digital Humanities 2020 Conference (July 2020).

UVA Reveal: Augmenting the University

I was the Project Manager for the 2017-2018 Praxis Cohort, which consisted of an interdisciplinary team of six graduate students. As a cohort, we developed a charter as well as a full-fledged project, titled UVA Reveal: Augmenting the University, from conception to implementation. UVA Reveal has two instantiations: an app and a website. In developing UVA Reveal, we used Unity, an augmented reality (AR) application, to virtually layer documents from Special Collections on top of buildings at the University of Virginia.

UVA Reveal was recipient of the award for the Best Poster Presentation at the 2018 Huskey Research Exhibition. Our team also presented UVA Reveal at the DH 2018 Conference in Mexico City.

For more information, please visit the project website.

The Antigua Sugar Mills Project

I joined The Antigua Mills Project in Fall 2019 and served as Project Manager. In this role, I oversaw the website redesign and launch of the project's next phase, namely the development of the site's resources and use as a teaching tool. I regularly led team meetings to assist with trouble-shooting and ensure that all team members had a concrete action plan.

For more informaiton, please visit the Antigua Sugar Mills website.

DH@UVA Curriculum Development Team

From 2018-2019, I served as the Project Manager for the DH@UVA Curriculum Development Team, in which capacity I managed a team of six individuals, including graduate student assistants and website designers. Our team worked to implement the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia (UVA), which was launched in May 2019. We also updated and managed the DH@UVA website, researched DH course design, and conducted user testing to develop best practices for the improvement of DH opportunities and services at UVA.

For more information, please visit the DH@UVA website.

Circulating Spaces: Podcast Series

Circulating Spaces is a podcast series that explores what it means to engage with literature as a global-scale community. Circulating Spaces was co-founded by Christian Howard-Sukhil & Samantha Wallace in 2017. Season 1, “Literary and Language Worlds in a Global Age” (Fall 2017-Spring 2018) was co-hosted and co-produced by Christian Howard-Sukhil and Samantha Wallace. Season 2, “The Global Reach of Public Media” (Fall 2018-Spring 2019) was co-hosted and co-produced by Christian Howard-Sukhil and Ankita Chakrabarti.

For more information, please visit the Circulating Spaces website.

UVA Scholars' Lab Makerspace

From 2016-2017, I served as a Makerspace Technologist in the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia. My responsibilites included managing the day-to-day operations of the Makerspace, maintaining the 3D printers, and assisting faculty and students with project design.

For more information, please visit the UVA Makerspace website.

Collective Biographies of Women

I served as a Research Assistant (RA) for Alison Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women (CBW) from Summer of 2015 to Fall of 2016. I participated in the Textual Coding Initiative (TEI) at CBW, which specifically employs BESS (Biographical Elements and Structure Schema), the language created for recording narrative events in biographical stories. Given my experience with TEI, I was asked to create a step-by-step guide for turning a plain-text document into TEI. This document is still used to instruct new RAs at CBW.

For more information, please visit the CBW website.

The Modernist Journals Project

As a Masters student at the University of Tulsa, I served as a Research Assistant (RA) for the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) from 2013-2014. My work as an RA involved digitizing 20th century literary magazines using OCR and TEI technologies.

For more information, please visit the MJP website.