Brianna Blackwell is a PhD student in the Department of English at McGill University. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Kansas and an MS in Information Sciences from the University of Tennessee. For her doctoral research, Brianna investigates the ways machine learning, archival science, and the literary digital humanities can benefit each other. In particular, she researches methods that archivists have developed over centuries to describe their complex historical documents and collections. These archival methods can improve the contextualization, description, and availability of the large sets of texts used in natural language processing (NLP), a machine learning method. NLP can be used in any field that produces a large amount of text, but literature is an especially useful training ground because of the complexity that literary texts bring to the table. Not only do literary texts contain figures of speech, bias, and ambiguity, but they are also situated in particular historical contexts that impact their meaning. Brianna works to encode the complexity of literature in ways that make the texts more understandable for the computer and the process more effective for the researcher. By addressing how machine learning deals with language and historical or social contexts, NLP can be made more ethical and accurate in all of its applications.
Amy Donovan
Amy Donovan is a PhD candidate in anthropology. Her passion is multi-species storytelling; her PhD work, titled “Song, Sonar and Story: An ethnography of listening with whales,” is on whales and how scientists come to know them. Her multi-sited research, with sites in Nova Scotia, Quebec and South Africa, seeks to learn both from whales themselves and from these scientists’ intimate knowledge of them, through participant observation on the water as well as in-depth interviews with marine biologists. Amy’s work is particularly attentive to forms of listening and documentation to and of whales and the data we draw from them. She is also interested in the art of ethnographic writing: how it might work as a research practice and method rather than simply a mode of disseminating data; how closely it might approach the lifeworlds of nonhuman others, and what possibilties for transformation such closeness holds. Amy holds a BA and MA in anthropology from Dalhousie University, and a master’s in creative writing from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her creative work, much of which probes human-nonhuman relations and formally experiments with the articulation of nonhuman lives, has been published in several journals and collections, including Riddle Fence magazine and Book*hug's 2019 collection Write Across Canada (ed. Joseph Kertes). Her most recent published work is an academic chapter titled “Raw, Dense, and Loud: A whale’s perspective on cold water energy,” in the collection Cold Water Oil (Routledge, 2021; eds. Fiona Polack & Danine Farquharson). In addition to the Wolfe Fellowship, Amy's doctoral research is supported by the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.
Sebastian Rodriguez Duque
Sebastian Rodriguez Duque is a PhD candidate at the Philosophy Department at McGill University. His dissertation seeks to address the epistemological and ethical challenges that arise through the design and use of health outcome measures. Very often researchers and clinicians are stuck with an array of measurement scales for depression, anxiety or other constructs, and they do not know either how to choose among these scales, or how to interpret the numerical scores that these scales yield. This uncertainty is partly because scales that may have been developed for some purposes may not be fit for a new purpose or context. His work focuses on examining the role of ethical and social values in the development and use of such measures. He argues that the scientific rigour that underpins researchers’ and clinicians’ judgments about the quality of fit of a measure depends not only on epistemic considerations addressed by the usual validation practices in psychometrics (the science of measuring mental traits or attitudes), but also on the alignment of the values and goals of interested parties within a particular context of use. As an embedded philosopher, he has joined a team of health outcome researchers in the design of a new health-related quality of life questionnaire. His work describes the ways in which ethical and other values are implicated at each stage of the process, from the focus group stage onto the testing of the prototype measure. He likewise has been part of a team that has drafted a guidebook and piloted workshops on measurement for clinicians working in mental health. He argues that interested parties using measurement must also coordinate their values and goals to produce data that is legitimate and fit for purpose and proposes a procedure to do so called ‘ethical iterations’.
Katrina Casey Kosyk
Katrina Casey Kosyk is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in sensory archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. She is interested in the materiality and construction of ancient sound practices (including music), and how peoples from the past may have engaged with their social spaces through sound and other sensorial experiences. Her doctoral project reconstructs how past central Mexican communities (re)imagined their own sound practices by forming learning networks that may have differed from their own political and cultural affiliations. Her project analyzes variable sonic experiences from the Late Postclassic to early Colonial (A.D. 1250 – A.D. 1650) periods in central Mexico. This includes the imperial Aztec core, conquered Aztec communities, and independent Aztec enemy territories, all part of the Spanish colonial empire after A.D. 1521. Katrina uses social learning theory to identify the extent of variability in the production and use of musical instruments. More specifically, she relies on two units of analysis: community of practice (CoP) and a community of engaged performance (CEP). These learning communities are groups of people that regularly come together to share knowledge and practice a common interest, but they differ in terms of engagement and size. A CoP, for example, may be a group of musical instrument producers that share knowledge in the processes of making a musical instrument in a shared context of learning, which can be discerned from archaeological evidence. A CEP is defined as the collaboration between musical instrument, a performer, and an audience. These communities can be identified from remains of musical instruments and historical/cultural documents. For example, group practices can be identified in how sound is depicted in writing and images, and fragments of musical instruments reveal information on bodily motions while playing an instrument and their accompanying auditory/tactile sensations. These approaches to understanding how communities produced and used sound emphasize inter-generational learning that links sound practices with meaning and identity. Katrina is also interested in how ancient peoples may have promoted, blocked, or impeded sound, to promote specific forms of cultural expression. Finally, her research extends beyond a human centric musical narrative by investigating the relationship between human action resulting from sounding agencies.
Katrin Rohrbacher
Katrin Rohrbacher is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the Department of Languages, Literature and Cultures. In her dissertation entitled “Space in the Novel: Quantitative Evidence and Fictional Worlds” Katrin examines how the formation of space in novels has changed through time across three centuries of German writing beginning in the eighteenth century. In particular, the project asks how the use of quantitative methods and digitized texts can produce new insights on the practices used to configure fictional space in the novel across centuries. In addition, she investigates how the emergence of domesticity, and its sociohistorical and cultural role is related and can be connected to the development of narrative space and setting in the novel, the way it affects the story’s telling: How it shapes the narrative from “within” as opposed to the way of how its itself represented in the narrative. By analyzing digitized corpora at scale, Katrin aims to identify not only the larger historical contours of how setting has been employed in the history of the novel, but also how the techniques of narrative domestication can advance and shed new light on the role of space in literary history. Katrin holds a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Vienna. She is managing editor for the “Journal of Cultural Analytics” and course lecturer in German at McGill. Previously, she worked as a researcher and content manager in the interdisciplinary action-research project PIVOT that aims to create a peer-to-peer community of Canadian Small- and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to take action on climate change.
Andy Kelleher Stuhl
Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Unmaking a Medium: Automation and Art in American Radio, 1950–2010,” examines how radio industries and radio artists have shaped the cultural meaning of sonic automation. Automation often appears in recent media scholarship and criticism as a 21st-century phenomenon. In sound and music in particular, writers tend to imply that it poses unprecedented challenges for artists through algorithmically mediated streaming platforms. Radio history complicates this notion. Since the early 1950s, automation has been an active and controversial presence within auditory media by way of its role in radio broadcast studios. By tracing how automation and the American radio medium have shaped one another over the course of sixty years, Andy’s research aims to repair continuities across an analog/digital divide – both for media studies and for artists confronting automation in their work today. Andy received his bachelor’s degree in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University and a master’s in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. His doctoral research is also funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture (FRQSC). Andy was the 2021-2022 Radio Artist Fellow with Wave Farm, a New York non-profit organization that sponsors and archives transmission art.
Hannah Tollefson
Hannah Tollefson (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. Informed by environmental humanities and media and technology studies, her research areas include environmental media, logistics, and oil and energy cultures. She is interested in how relationships of place and scale are mediated by infrastructure. Her dissertation project, “To Tidewater: Logistics and Conservation in the Salish Sea” is a study of how the coastlines and waterways of the Staľəw estuary and the Salish Sea, which host the terminals and shipping lanes that comprise the Port of Vancouver, have been constructed and maintained as logistics space. Ninety percent of global commodities move through maritime space, putting immense political and environmental pressure on oceans and coastal port spaces. This project traces the role of scientific and technical mediation in the politics of logistics by studying key sites of environmental and supply chain management. These include environmental assessments, vessel optimization and standardization efforts, habitat offsetting, and remediation, and distributed sensing and monitoring systems. Analyzing these practices and infrastructures, the project seeks to understand the mutual relationships between settler colonial governance, environmental management, logistical infrastructures, and supply chain capitalism. Hannah holds an MA in Communication Studies from McGill University and a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.
