In the pilot survey of undergraduate students’ views and values about data with my colleagues Drs. Kleintop, Carew, and Healy, I snuck in a question that I was particularly excited to see the results for. In this survey, students across five undergraduate courses…

In “What Does Data Say,” Cora Wigger described our pilot survey about how undergraduate students view, understand, and evaluate data. In the survey, we used a question that I often use in exams in my intro-level course on US History…

I don’t know where the phrase came from, but as a long-time data person, I’ve heard it roughly one million times: “data speaks for itself.” Perhaps I’m assigning my current beliefs onto my past self, but I’ve never really understood…

This blog post shares our transcription project’s ethics statement and how we developed it by working with students as partners. The statement integrates the frameworks of digital slavery studies, library and information science and archives, as well as the ethics of work-integrated learning.  About…

My first career after college was as the Data Manager for a nonprofit in Kentucky that provided services to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. As an overly ambitious 23-year-old, I was the inaugural holder of that title and…

Though the use of data for analysis is often framed as a way of answering questions about the world, it also helps us come up with new questions, questions more aligned to the mysteries that drive us to ask questions in the first place. We (Amanda and Cora)…

Black Digital Humanities scholars have often grappled with the contradiction that digitizing slavery’s archives, in the words of historian Jessica Marie Johnson, “threatens to replicate the death work of the slave ship register,” re-enacting the commodification of the people whose lives and histories they…

As a Civil War historian, I know the power of sharing primary sources with students to understand causality and intentionality in the past. For example, the former Chief Historian of the National Park Service has argued that few can read Confederate states’ declarations of…

During the summer of 2025, I spent hours and hours on end working with historical documents that weren’t intended to be heard or used in the way we are using them. As a Black woman attending a predominantly white institution (PWI), doing this transcription work went deeper than internship…

This semester, I’ve been working with two wonderful students doing mentored research projects of their own design. As they’ve been developing their research questions, I am reminded fondly of an exercise I did in a research methods class during grad school.   The professor, Dr. Ellen Goldring,…