Past Events
This is a record of the past events that have been held by the Centers for Digital Scholarship. The Centers for Digital Scholarship hosts a variety of recurring events that are available to the wider Northeastern community, that can be found on our general events page. To see the events scheduled for this semester, please visit the upcoming events page.
Fall 2025 Events
Date: September 17, 2025 | Report
Join DSG Associate Director, Caitlin Pollock and Tieanna Graphenreed, the Community History and Digitization Specialist at the Boston Public Library as they share an update on the Boston Research Center (BRC). The Boston Research Center is a digital community history and archives lab based in the Northeastern University Library. The mission of the BRC is to help bring Boston’s deep neighborhood and community histories to light through community-driven digital projects and initiatives. Caitlin and Tieanna will talk about what BRC has achieved over the past year, what is planned for this upcoming year as the BRC wraps up its Mellon Grant, and the plans for the BRC post-Mellon funding.
Date: September 24, 2025 | Report
DSG Data Engineer Joel Lee will lead a gentle workshop to Airtable, a spreadsheet-database hybrid that excels at representing complex relationships and structures. If you are thinking about ways to collect data on your project, Airtable can be a useful, no-code tool to help you organize your work. This workshop will guide you through the basics of Airtable, from creating tables and populating them with your data, to using views and interfaces to gain new insights on your work. No prior technical knowledge is required.
Date: October 7, 2025 | Report
“Pension Claims to Networks: Logics of African American Women’s Community Making at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
The turn of the twentieth century had been described as the “nadir” of American race relations and as the “woman’s era.” African American women applied for federal pension claims during this period within a “grassroots pension network” as Brandi C. Brimmer writes in Claiming Union Widowhood (2020). My project aims to visualize the networks that validated African American women’s social status within the state using federal pension claims and network analysis software. Methodologically, I will argue that using network analysis tools allows for an additional reading of large datasets, revealing the clusters of relationships in the counties. My paper will culminate in a walkthrough of the interactive versions of the networks.
The project is triggered by historical scholarship on Civil War pension claims and the emerging welfare state such as Administering Freedom by Dale Kretz. The project is also in conversation with digital history projects such as the Mapping Marronage network project, an visualization of the trans-Atlantic networks created by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century.
Attendees will be introduced to the project as a use case of network analysis platforms for historical analysis and engagement with archival materials. My paper will also introduce some potential strategies for infusing data collection and processing with scholarly insights. These strategies will be of interest to digital humanists working with African American history.
Attendee feedback would support my development of additional digital approaches to the analysis of the documents.
A previous version of this paper was posted on the NULab for Digital Humanities & Computational Social Science’s website in May 2025.
Bio: Halima Haruna is a PhD student in World History at Northeastern University. Her research interests are in African American women’s history, intellectual history and digital and public history. Her ongoing dissertation research involves the study of black women’s associational life, and black women’s roles in communities under segregation at the turn of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a project creating Wikipedia articles for prominent but undersung Black women in Boston as a Research Associate at the Boston Research Center.
Date: October 21, 2025 | Report
This is the second workshop of the CDS and Humanities Center’s 2025-26 Digital Practice Workshop Series. How do successful research teams collaborate across colleges, time zones, and disciplines, and which campus services actually move work forward? In this October 21 workshop, the library shares findings from its recent initiative exploring new ways to support distributed research teams. You’ll get concrete takeaways on tools, workflows, and partnership models that improve collaboration, speed up compliance and data management, and reduce administrative friction. After a concise, insight-packed briefing, we’ll demo a new tool connecting you with resources from library, research computing, data, compliance, funding, and project support services.
Date: October 22, 2025
Please join the Digital Scholarship Group, the Centers for Digital Scholarship, and the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science for our annual fall scholarship celebration on October 22, 1–4pm Boston (hybrid + in-person), 10–11:15am Oakland (virtual), and 6–7:15pm London (virtual).
This year’s event will begin in 350 Snell Library with hybrid lightning talks, with support for remote participation via Zoom. The lightning talks will feature researchers and projects from across the Northeastern community including CSSH, NULab, Northeastern University Oakland, CAMD, and the Northeastern University Library. Come learn about the diverse array of digital scholarship happening at NU from Isaac Fellman, Claire Lavarreda, Joel Lee, Candace Hazlett, Seo Eun “Sunny” Yang, and Meg Heckman.
Following the talks, there will be an in-person fair in the Centers for Digital Scholarship in which participants will have a chance to tour the CDS to meet with the projects and organizations in these spaces. Each project will include a “booth” with opportunities to meet with project staff, engage with the projects through activities, ask questions, and learn more about what is coming up for 2025–2026. Booths will include: the Digital Scholarship Group, the Centers for Digital Scholarship, the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, the Women Writers Project, the Boston Research Center, the Center for Transformative Media, the Reckonings Project, the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence, the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac, the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, and the Digital Transgender Archive.
Please see the event program page for a full schedule and list of speakers and activities.
Date: November 5, 2025
Wikipedia is the most visited site on the Internet, as well as an open and free source of knowledge driven by a community of editors from all over the world! But Black women only make up a small portion of contributors and content subjects on Wikipedia. To address these gaps in shared knowledge and knowledge-making, join us for an event to create and edit Wikipedia articles about Black women who have shaped Boston histories from the colonial era to present times.
Learning how to edit Wikipedia can strengthen public writing skills while also making sure Wikipedia reflects the world around us. We will provide tutorials for beginner Wikipedians, reference materials, and light refreshments.
Bring a device (like a tablet or laptop) for editing, but we will have a few on hand if you can’t bring one. This is a hybrid event. RSVP by filling out the registration form.
This event is being sponsored by the Boston Research Center and The Reckonings Project.
Date: November 13, 2025 | Report
Join Reference and Outreach Archivist Molly Brown for a tour of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections records available in the Digital Repository Service (which includes over 85,000 records). Learn more about the histories of Boston arts, activism, and infrastructure available digitally as well as some tips for searching and navigating the collections. Participants will also become acquainted with opportunities for collaboration and potential ideas for projects using newly added collections.
Date: December 2, 2025
Crowdsourcing is a powerful collective tool that allows volunteers and citizen researchers to contribute metadata, transcription, and descriptions to research materials such as archival documents. Join us in the Critical Making Lab in the Centers for Digital Scholarship to learn more about crowdsourcing methods and platforms. Emily Jones, Simmons MLS and the intern for CDS Crowdsourcing Initiative, will be presenting on best practices of crowdsourcing as part of her practicum in the CDS. She will share documentation on how to add your own project onto Zooniverse and make use of crowdsourced data. Learn more about crowdsourcing and spend some time crowdsourcing together!
Summer 2025 Events
Date: June 17, 2025 | Report
Please join us for the Centers for Digital Scholarship (CDS) Open House on Tuesday, June 17 from 11am–1pm. This in-person event will take place at the CDS (360 Snell Library). The event will have light refreshments. The Open House will be an opportunity to generate more tangible connections and collaborations between the projects and individuals that are part of the CDS community.
We will gather for snacks at 11:00am. Around 11:30, we will start an informal walking tour of your projects. At each project space, we’ll learn a bit from the project team about their work in progress, and have a chance to ask questions. We expect the tour overall to take ~45 minutes and to conclude ~12:15pm. The remaining 45 minutes of the event will be an informal “problem sharing/problem solving” session.
Date: July 15, 2025 | Report
The Centers for Digital Scholarship (CDS) and the Humanities Center jointly hosted the first workshop in the Digital Practice Workshop Series. This workshop was focused on metadata and ethical considerations of metadata. Led by Shireen Zaineb, the Humanities Center Digital Project Archivist, and Colleen Nugent McLean, the Centers for Digital Scholarship Coordinator, students learned about how metadata can shape how individuals and communities are represented.
Spring 2025 Events
Date: February 14, 2025
Join the Digital Scholarship Group, Archives and Special Collections, the Women Writers Project, and the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences for a transcribe-a-thon in celebration of Douglass Day, an event honoring the life and birthday of Frederick Douglass. We are excited to celebrate Douglass Day this year as part of Black History Month and Love Data Week. No experience is needed.
Organized by The Colored Conventions Project in 2017, Douglass Day brings thousands of people together nationwide to contribute to crowdsourced projects that improve digital access to Black history and culture. Douglass Day 2025 will take on a larger breadth of materials, focusing on the African American Perspectives Collection at the Library of Congress. Materials you can look forward to transcribing include speeches, sermons, biographies, narratives, and records from Frederick Douglass, William Still, Angelina Grimké Weld, and other activists. Explore the collection ahead of the event or jump in during the transcribe-a-thon.
This event will be hybrid: please join us in-person in 360 Snell Library (Centers for Digital Scholarship, Boston campus) or online via Zoom. Please bring a laptop or tablet if you are joining us in person.
This event connects with the national Douglass Day, an annual celebration organized, in part, by The Colored Conventions Project, with local events happening across the country on February 14.
Douglass Day is made possible by a large number of past and present partners and supporters. They include: The Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State, the Colored Conventions Project, the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Princeton University Center for Digital Humanities, the PSU Libraries, the PSU Center for Humanities and Information, and the PSU College of Liberal Arts, the American Studies Association for a Community Partnership Grant, Zooniverse, and By The People at the Library of Congress.
We hope to see you there!
Date: March 27, 2025 | Report
Led by: Marina Strauss, LMHC, Expressive Art Therapist and adjunct Human Services Faculty
What is your relationship to creativity and play? What can the creative process teach us?
Our creativity is there! Let’s take time in community to draw upon your creativity with prompts and guidance from Marina Strauss, LMHC, Expressive Art Therapist and adjunct Human Services Faculty.
Art supplies and light refreshments provided. We hope to see you there!
Date: March 27, 2025
Please join us for a screening of Always in Progress: Three Decades of the Women Writers Project, a documentary on the WWP directed by John Melson. We will be gathering both in person in the Centers for Digital Scholarship (360 Snell Library) and virtually by zoom. Please RSVP to join us.
We are so delighted with this documentary and we can’t wait to share it with the WWP’s communities. We’d also like to take this screening as an opportunity to thank the many people who have contributed to the project over the years, and to look forward to what we hope will be many more decades of work on women’s writing. If you are joining in person, we will be providing light refreshments.
If you are not able to join, the documentary will be available from the Northeastern University Library website soon.
Date: April 16, 2025
Join the CTM for a Reading Day film screening! ANOTHER BODY follows American college student Taylor’s search for answers and justice after she discovers deepfake pornography of herself circulating online. After discovering that what happened to her is not a crime, Taylor takes matters into her own hands, diving headfirst into an exploding online culture of men violating women’s consent.
This event is organized by the Center for Transformative Media and co-sponsored by The Ethics Institute and The NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science.
Date: April 23, 2025 | Report
For many digital scholarship research projects one of the first steps is digitizing analog and paper materials. Managing the digitization well is crucial to a successful digital project. Kim Kennedy, the Digital Production Librarian, will provide an introduction to how to plan and manage a digitization project. Come hear how the library can help support your digitization plans and needs, as well as some of the interesting work of the Library’s Digital Production Services
Date: April 29, 2025 | Report
Digital accessibility is an important aspect of digital projects that helps keep research equitable and available to everyone. Chloe Lee, the DSG Accessibility Co-op, will be providing an introduction to digital accessibility. She has completed full, thorough accessibility audit reports on the Massachusetts Historical Society PSC Lab Space website and the BNDA/CRRJ Archive website. Her presentation will also include her process on researching modern digital accessibility practices and standards, creating an accessibility report, and implementing accessibility features or remedying accessibility errors.
Fall 2024 Events
Date: November 5, 2024
Please join us to celebrate the launch of the Centers for Digital Scholarship! This event will be held as part of the annual joint Fall Welcome hosted by the NULab and the Digital Scholarship Group. A keynote by Professor Margaret Burnham will be followed by lightning talks on current research in progress, and a reception and tour of the CDS.
Date: December 3, 2024
Please join us for our first in-person Digital Humanities Office Hours brown-bag lunch event in the new CDS space!
Joel Lee and Misha Ankudovych will be presenting their work on creating a data visualization lab to support exploration of data from the Massachusetts Historical Society’s documentary editions. We’ll have a chance to learn more about how these visualizations were created, and to provide user-testing feedback on the interface.
This event will be held in person and will be free and open to the public. Feel free to bring a lunch!