A Digital History of the Close-Up in Narrative Film and Television

A Digital History of the Close-up in Narrative Film and Television, supported by a Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge Grant, is a join collaboration with University of Rochester and Bowdoin College. Principal Investigators, Joel Burges, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies and Allison Cooper, an associate professor of romance languages and literatures and cinema studies lead the project. The project is, in part, providing use cases to present to the Library of Congress to request exemptions for text and data mining for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As part of that work, Emily will be testifying at a public hearing before the Copyright Office. The student curators on the project annotate clips from film and television using Mediate, a time-based media annotation platform developed by Digital Scholarship at UofR. Emily has served as the Project Director for Mediate since joining UofR in December of 2016. Her work on the project has included extracting, cleaning, and visualizing the data generated by the students curators in order to help facilitate further research questions, answers, and areas of study on the corpus.

Rochester Digital Annotation Project (RDAP)

The Rochester Digital Annotation Project, supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice Seed Grant, has two primary objectives: 1) to grapple with how digital annotation can enable community members and scholarly researchers to understand the racial and sexual histories in various audiovisual archives held in Rochester and 2) to explore how to generate accurate and inclusive data and metadata about these archives over which community members and scholarly researchers have shared authority. To these ends we will prototype five data dictionaries through the digital annotation of a selection of materials from the Portable Channel collection held by the Rochester-based Visual Studies Workshop: two centered in the knowledge and needs of Black and LGBTQ+ communities and three in the knowledge and needs of Black studies, queer studies, and media studies. Emily has worked closely with PI Joel Burges on every stage of the project from initial community engagement training; to working with library colleagues, the Nomadic Archivists Project, and Visual Studies Workshop; to planning and running the community workshops.

Studio X

As the hub for extended reality at University of Rochester, Studio X fosters a community of cross-disciplinary collaboration, exploration, and peer-to-peer learning that lowers barriers to entry, inspires experimentation, and drives innovative research and teaching in immersive technologies. Emily began working on Studio X in February of 2019. Since then, she has collaborated with Advancement to build an endowment for the program and space; facilities, Cannon Design, Events and Classroom Management, and Building and Technology Services to design and build the 3,000 sq. ft. space; faculty from across the college to determine teaching and research needs in order to build a robust and useful program; the Digital Scholarship staff to build capacity and understanding around XR; colleagues at centers and institutes around UR and beyond in order to collaborate to meet the needs of the campus; and UR students to build engaging programming and community. Learn more about our work in the Studio X annual reports for 2022 and 2023.

The New York Data Carpentries Library Consortium (NYDCLC)

With generous support from the Museum and Library Services Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, in collaboration with Colgate University, Cornell University, and Syracuse University, planned and executed a skill-sharing program. NYDCLC utilized the Library Carpentries train-the-trainer model to promote continuing education and cross-institutional collaboration throughout central and western New York State. The planning grant analyzed two intertwined needs within the library community. The first was how to train and support librarians in the digital fluencies that are increasingly relevant to research and teaching efforts. The second was how to meet those demands by working regionally across libraries and institutions and drawing on a range of expertise. This work can serve as a template for structuring a community of practice that supports public and academic partnerships to meet the evolving needs of libraries across the country.

Elizabeth Bourne

Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies. This collection, co-edited with Cristina Alfar, consists of a series of letters and legal documents regarding the marriage of Elizabeth and Anthony Bourne; and includes letters by Elizabeth Bourne, Anthony Bourne and Sir John Conway, a family friend and adviser. In Mistress Bourne’s complaint to the Privy Council (1582), she requests a divorce from her husband. Routledge, March 2021.

Precarious Wife

Precarious Wife: Narratives of Marital Instability in Medieval and Early Modern Literature intervenes in the propagation of the binary of privilege and marginalization inherent in discussions of the institutional identity of wife. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability, this dissertation questions the normative trajectory of daughter, wife, widow for medieval and early modern women that excludes people with alternate narratives or identities. By attending to the vulnerability of wives and uncovering the permeability of conjugal relationships, this dissertation refutes the notion that “wife” was a stable and knowable category sufficient to define women by showing that it was partial, at best, and ideologically inscribed, at worst.

The West Encounters the Rest

Designed and developed the digital projects with Janice Mann, Art and Art History, as part of a summer course design grant. Students in this upper division Art History course collaborated on a range of digital projects over the course of the semester. Beyond regularly contributing to a course blog, students developed concepts for curating works of art from the Samek Art Museum. They created two SmartHistory-style videos: the first assignment was based on works housed in the Samek and the second assignment was based on works housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They researched, wrote, and collaboratively edited a Wikipedia entry on Chinoiserie. The Wikipedia assignment resulted in heated and thoughtful conversations about description vs. opinion and the cultural readings and ramifications of word choice. In producing the culminating project for the semester, students worked with objects housed in the local Packwood House Museum. Students identified objects that aligned with the focus of the course and created a digital exhibition: Asian Objects at the Packwood House. The project was created in Adobe Spark. There are formatting limitations to Spark, but two of the deciding factors in using the platform was that it was free and HTML5 compatible, which means that it readily adapts to smart phones and devices. This was crucial for us in deciding on the platform because we wanted people visiting the museum to be able to use the project as a virtual tour guide.

FemTechNet Distributed Open Collaborative Course

Designed and developed the digital collaborative space for a Fall 2013 hybrid course Imagining Gender: Exploring Narratives of Technology at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY that ran as part of the Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) organized by FemTechNet. The course mixed online and in person discussions and events that centered around issues of gender and technology in literature. Worked with the professor to plan assignments that fostered students’ digital literacy skills. Experimented with a variety of online environments—blog posts, a forum, and an interactive white board space—to facilitate student discussion. Brainstormed creative solutions in direct response to ongoing assessments of the effectiveness of the various online environments in our course. Created tutorials and ran workshops on using various digital tools, including Prezi, Soundcloud, TimelineJS, Slideshare, Mural.ly, image maps, and multiple WordPress plugins and customization features, to prepare students for their final project: a virtual companion to Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.

JustPublics@365

An initiative at The Graduate Center, CUNY sponsored by The Ford Foundation, “JustPublics@365 brings together media practitioners, academics, community leaders, policy advocates and digital activists to inspire informed public debate on issues of inequality and social justice.” Worked as a Project Assistant to organize and run multi-day conferences and summits; managed a $550,000 budget; oversaw contracts and payments for freelance staff and vendors; processed all invoices, reimbursements, and speaker honoraria; designed and copy edited event materials, quarterly reports, the annual report, a weekly newsletter, and a digital media toolkit; and served as a liaison to various groups within The Graduate Center community, including academic, administrative, and service departments. For more information see JustPublics@365.