New Digital and Data Studies incubator sparks research possibilities on campus

As technology evolves, it offers ways to expand and deepen research possibilities — but only for those who master it.

Enter the Digital and Data Studies (DiDa) incubator, which aims to help faculty members overcome the time, effort and knowledge barriers they face when integrating the digital humanities into their scholarship.

Established with donor funds, the initiative is a collaborative effort that includes Harpur College’s Digital and Data Studies Program, the University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Department and the Digital Humanities Laboratory Collaborative. Digital scholarship librarian Ruth Carpenter wrote the application guidelines, funding criteria and project management expectations, with input from the Incubator Review Committee; the Digital Scholarship Lab and the Libraries run the incubator’s operations.

“The overall aims of the incubator are to create conversations about what it is like to engage in long-term digital projects and to excite more researchers on campus about working within the digital humanities and creating collaborative outputs,” said Director of Digital and Data Studies Gregory Hallenbeck. “The incubator, as a collaborative project itself, also shows the value and power of working together on campus to create more opportunities for research and professional development.”

Recipients receive a stipend and access to consultants who will help them determine the technologies that work best for their project. The consultants then train faculty members to use this technology independently.

The incubator’s review committee chose two projects to fund out of 12 applications.

One project is led by anthropologists Şule Can and Lubna Omar; Can is outreach coordinator and Omar associate director of the Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies (CMENAS). The two are working on a crowdsourcing tool and interactive map that will share the locations and memories of those who died in a catastrophic 2023 earthquake in Antakya, Turkey.

Meanwhile, a team headed by Associate Professor of Human Development Laura Warren Hill, PhD ’10, is creating a collection and digital exhibit of upstate New York policing practices. They will work together with team members from the Libraries and DiDa with expertise in building digital exhibits and classifying information, according to Hallenbeck.

“We’re really appreciative that this isn’t being done for us; we’re actually learning how to do it ourselves,” Warren Hill said.

Mapping a disaster

On Feb. 6, 2023, parts of Turkey and Syria were struck by a pair of magnitude 7.8 and 7.7 earthquakes, the deadliest in the region since the year 526. By official reckoning, the earthquake toppled buildings in 11 cities, claiming thousands of lives.

The ancient city of Antakya — known as Antioch in English — was nearly destroyed.

“It was one of the biggest disasters in the history of the country, but also catastrophic even in terms of world history,” said Can, a native of Antakya.

But precisely how many people died is a controversial matter. According to the Turkish government, 53,000 people died in the country and 6,000 in neighboring Syria. However, locals believe that almost 60,000 people died in Antakya alone, Can said.

Can and Omar’s project will use mapping software and crowdsourcing to gather information about the number of people who died in each collapsed building in Antakya. A website will function as a digital memorial, allowing people to share memories of those who were lost.

While Can expects to complete the website by the summer of 2025, it will take years to establish the true number of casualties.

“Eventually, if this works out, you will know how many people died in certain neighborhoods that were completely destroyed,” she said.

The researchers are currently creating a survey using ArcGIS Online software to collect data on the building locations. During the winter break, they will go to Turkey to conduct fieldwork in Antakya, collecting additional data and disseminating the survey.

The incubator’s technical team includes Associate Professor of History Bradley Skopyk and Undergraduate Director of Digital and Data Studies Melissa Haller, as well as Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies John Cheng, the project facilitator. The team is helping the project leads learn how to operate new software and is available to answer any questions, Omar said.

“I’ve used maps and visuals as an urban anthropologist, but the digital humanities is about digital storytelling and website design,” Can reflected. “In our case, there’s an effort to understand geocoding and geolocating.”

Creating a policing archive

The Upstate New York Policing Research Consortium (UNY-PRC) is an interdisciplinary team of historians and social scientists who explore current policing practices in a historical and structural context. Their goal is to advance the academic and public understanding of policing in Upstate New York and increase citizen engagement and oversight of criminal justice administration.

Founded a year ago, UNY-PRC is part of Binghamton University’s Human Rights Institute. Founding members span four disciplines — criminal justice, sociology, computer science and history — and three institutions in Rochester and Binghamton; the initiative has since expanded to three other schools and currently has around 20 interns.

In addition to providing research experience for undergraduate and graduate students in social justice research methods, the project aims to fill significant knowledge gaps. Much of the research on policing in New York state has concentrated in the New York City region, explained Warren Hill, a historian by training.

“We know that the experiences of both the police and the public are very different in upstate New York,” she said. “We’re also eager to bridge the gap between community groups, scholars and activists.”

UNY-PRC is creating a publicly accessible digital archive of documents related to policing in upstate New York. Many of the collected materials were difficult to obtain, requiring time-consuming Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, Warren Hill said.

It’s not an easy task. Project staff must first digitize the documents and then move them to the web-publishing platform Omeka, where they will be available to researchers, students, activists and policymakers interested in New York state policing practices.

“Ideally, we will also become a repository for community organizations who are doing work around the carceral state but who haven’t yet thought about archiving their materials,” she said.

In addition to Warren Hill, the UNY-PRC team consists of sociology graduate student Andy Pragacz, English and philosophy, politics and law major Carissa Bayack and human development major Delaney Painter. They were partnered with Sasha Frizzell from the library and Jacopo Mazzoni from DiDa.

Currently, the team is beta-testing an ingest form, which includes titles, streamlined keywords and specific rules that allow documents to be found in the archive. Once operational, a researcher interested in a specific topic — for example, use-of-force reports involving women in Buffalo— would be able to use specific keywords to locate those precise materials. Building the intake system is detailed and time-consuming, and the team is currently testing its usability with around 30 digitized documents.

“We expect difficulties and imperfections and things not to work the way that we anticipated,” she said. “This test run will let us figure out what we have to do differently and how to make this more user-friendly.”

Projects graduate from the incubator after a year of support. Receiving the seed grant gave the UNY-PRC project the push it needed to apply for external funding, Warren Hill said.

“The incubator gave us the confidence that we’re on the right track. We’re starting to figure out how to put this together,” she said.