<DirectHERS> Miaoling Xue is a junior scholar whose research focuses on Japanese women’s/gender history, women in literary narratives, multilingual Digital Humanities, and digital tools for premodern studies. She has studied and taught in China, Japan, Canada, and the United States, and her background shaped her awareness and appreciation of cross-cultural understanding and knowledge-sharing. During the rapid shift to remote research and collaboration in the past three years, Miaoling had the opportunity to acquire new digital competencies while managing many collaborative public-facing initiatives. She led a team launching an educational video project (Exploring Premodern Japan) that guides the audience through the world of premodern Japan; she conducted a pilot study on a seventeenth-century Japanese travel account to test how to harness the power of ArcGIS StoryMaps in understanding travel writing and poetry. These attempts show her passion for dedicating greater effort to acknowledging and utilizing digital spaces and tools in order to improve pedagogical practice and connect expert knowledge in Asian Studies/Digital Humanities to the public. Miaoling serves as the project manager of the Feminist Markup project. She is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the project, from the initial TEI/XML training to the final delivery of customized tagsets and XML models with searchable features. Specifically, she is working with the team to define the overall goals in this phase (spring semester), allocate technical and content resources, and develop plans to mitigate potential risks generated during the experimental process.
María F. Buitrago is a M.A. student in Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center completing a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Spanish Literature from Los Andes University, Bogotá, Colombia. Her undergraduate work had an emphasis on cultural analysis, creative writing, pedagogy, and ethnographic research. Among her current interests are collaborating with rural women from the Global South to understand their distinctive forms of authority, resistance and self-determination. María joins the Feminist Markup JWDP as an Outreach Coordinator. She also contributes to the encoding of the XML files, like the rest of the members. Her interest in joining the project comes from her desire to learn more about the intersection between TEI/XML and feminist methodologies.
Gem is a governance and control specialist whose expertise is deployed across the main US financial markets; she has an accounting background and holds a Master’s degree in Economics but, in her free time, keeps cultivating her passion for the literature classics and theatre. Gemma’s decision to join the Feminist Markup Project is not just driven by her interest in learning more about text encoding, but also by the vision of the project which is to tackle an almost unchartered territory in a way that could be understood, and potentially replicated, by others. Her project focus is web development; her efforts are aimed at displaying the results of the encoding process and, possibly, the outcome, either partial or complete, of the database built throughout the semester. With Zico, she is part of the dev team.
JP has one foot in academia and one foot in the arts. His undergraduate degree is in philosophy and graduate degrees are in Linguistics and English. He trained in photography with many photographers, including Charles Smith, a respected music photographer. His passion is for literature and the arts, specifically painting and photography. He shares his passions by facilitating university courses blending literature with visual images. He is a proponent of visual literacy as fundamental a skill as text-based literacy. His 3 photography books include a history of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Archeological Sites of Central America, and Select Treasures of the Middle East. JP’s desire to work participate in the DirectHERS project springs from his deep admiration for film as an art form and as a tool for knowledge and activism. As his coding skills are in the preliminary phase, his role in the project involved research for underrepresented women filmmakers worldwide as well as organizing the encoding tags and dictionary used for the project. Given the incredibly staggering number of underrepresented women filmmakers discovered, he hopes that this project will continue to grow exponentially in order to showcase the wonderful work these women have created and have their voices heard.
Zico is a tech nerd with tech skepticisim at his core, an open source enthusiast, an avid bug hunder, a privacy concern citizen of the world who tries to manage his digital footprint carefully. Zico holds a bachelor and a master's in Computer Science and he is now in the Digital Humanities Program. Zico's research interests are computational photography, neural networks, financial markets, consumer behaviors and human psychology. With Gem, he is part of the dev team.