RA Spotlights: Nikki Tran, Kelsey Reardon, Jacque Ramos, and Andrew McCabe

 

Nikki Tran (‘18) is a rising senior majoring in English. This is her second quarter at CESTA as a research assistant. She is continuing on with “Readers in Literary Criticism,” a project through the Poetic Media Lab that analyzes how “the reader” is imagined by literary critics across three major academic journals. For the summer, she is also working on a literacy project that is currently called the “Eye Tracking Study,” which is in collaboration with the School of Education and explores how expert readers compare to novice readers when asked to interpret different kinds of texts (i.e. a poem versus song lyrics). 

 

A typical day for Nikki consists of: transcribing audio files, tagging and qualitative coding media, organizing data, learning how to use research tools like Dedoose, and discussing her progress with fellow RAs during her daily gorging of Goldfish (her snack of choice). Nikki joined CESTA last spring because she wanted to learn and practice the technical skills necessary for her to conduct and investigate her own research projects. In particular, she is considering applying what she has learned at CESTA to her upcoming honors thesis in English, which currently looks at contemporary women writers as character. Her literary focus is on 20th and 21st century fiction and its intersections with race and gender. When she is not (frantically) writing papers for her English classes, she can be found drinking smoothies. Due to her former life as a high school thespian, she still sings show tunes to herself when no one is listening. On her book shelf right now is Solmaz Sharif’s Look.

 

 

Kelsey is a rising senior majoring in East Asian Studies working as a research assistant for the Literary Lab this summer. She is working on the “Scalar Genres” project (a working title), which essentially aims at discerning and pinpointing instances of novelistic heteroglossia, or the existence of multiple styles of discourse or viewpoints within novels. As the project is in its early stages, Kelsey currently has the glorious task of cleaning up txt files, which consists of going through digitized versions of various manuscripts, academic theories and textbooks from the late modern period and labeling their various parts as text, table, index etc. That being said, the work is far more interesting than she makes it sound, as it involves scanning through some highly influential and historically fascinating documents. For example, recently she tagged an economics text from over a century ago discussing why private land should be abolished, citing trends such as the rising gap between classes as evidence. Painfully prescient, it reminded Kelsey of the importance of engaging with such texts, whether it be through DH methods or a classic close reading. 

 

Overall, working at CESTA and speaking with the other CESTA research assistants about their projects and tasks has concretized the gray area between the digital world and the classic humanities; that is, the realities of what goes into DH work, particularly in the early stages of source acquisition and preparation for computational analysis. From transcribing old forms into excel sheets to tagging txt files to text encoding, the curation of the data upon which DH work is based speaks to the necessity of these time-consuming “translations” between man and machine in order to be able to answer some of the larger-scale questions DH is known for. And while it may not be the most glamorous of tasks, being at the edge of that frontier is pretty exciting, at least in Kelsey’s mind.

 

When she’s not typing <text> </text> <table> </table> repeatedly until hand cramps ensue, Kelsey likes to spend her time outside soaking up the unreal California weather through hikes, sunny naps, reading all the translated Japanese literature, and picnics. She is also a proud member of Cardinal Calypso, Stanford’s premiere steel pan ensemble, and can frequently be found gallivanting about with her fellow calypsonians. When the weather isn’t perfect, Kelsey can be found perching at either of her two indoor homes, the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking or COHO. Come say hi!

 

 

Jacque Ramos is an incoming senior in Urban Studies working on the internal and external communication operations at CESTA. During her final summer at Stanford, she is happy to have such an incredible opportunity to collaborate, converse, and eventually tell the story of the people here and their contributions to the field of digital humanities. The innovative and collaborative culture at CESTA is why she enjoys working at the office. Daily, she checks in with the comms team to help continue office communications and ensure that each external communication platform is telling and broadcasting their hard work in mapping, transcribing, and all the way to pushing the boundaries of digital humanities through their research projects. Jacque is also passionate about the coffee industry and has worked at the Starbucks on campus since 2014, and one day, she would love to be able to go back to the Philippines to get rid of traffic through more equitable street design.

 

Jacque can be found behind CESTA’s social media handles, posting daily updates on our Twitter and Facebook.

 

 

 

 

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From the writer’s desk