Sep 22, 2025 Digital Matters Fall 2025, Graduate Fellow Announcement
Digital Matters is thrilled to announce the addition of new Faculty and Graduate Fellows to our team for the Fall of 2025. These individuals bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience that will undoubtedly contribute to the field of digital humanities and we look forward to the new ideas and perspectives they will bring to our work.
Graduate Fellows
Mapping Displacement and Reimagining Development: A Mixed-Methods Digital Exploration of Housing Justice in Salt Lake City
Juliana Landis (MA Student, Urban City Planning)
This project grows out of research I started in my Spatial Data Analytics course and expands it through a digital public humanities approach. My goal is to create an ArcGIS Story Map that not only maps displacement risk in Salt Lake County, but also visualizes housing development activity and explores community-driven solutions like community land trusts. Building on Salt Lake City’s existing displacement risk model, I aim to update and expand it by incorporating recent development data and infrastructure projects that are currently missing. This is important because, as surveys show, many residents view new development as a key driver of displacement. While housing supply arguments suggest building more units should relieve pressure, research highlights that without equity safeguards, new development often worsens exclusion. To balance quantitative analysis with lived experience, my project will also include community perspectives. By gathering oral histories and documenting how residents experience displacement and neighborhood change, I will pair data with human stories. The result will be an interactive StoryMap that blends spatial analysis, photos, and audio with policy proposals for more equitable development. Ultimately, I hope this project makes data about housing pressures more accessible and useful for community members, organizers, planners, and policymakers—supporting more just and community-rooted housing strategies.
Digital Humanities in Online Grief Management: Analyzing Online Grief Narratives for Therapeutic and Educational Insights
Joseph Mayaki (PhD Student, Writing and Rhetoric)
During my residency, my primary objective is to develop the necessary insights and competencies to effectively conceptualize the digital humanities (DH) component of my broader research while integrating appropriate DH tools and methodologies. The growing prevalence of online grief narratives has transformed digital spaces into therapeutic environments where individuals publicly navigate loss and mourning. These narratives, frequently shared across online platforms, constitute rich sites for rhetorical and emotional analysis. My study will examine how digital humanities methodologies, such as text mining, sentiment analysis, and narrative visualization, can be applied to the study of online grief narratives, uncovering their therapeutic affordances and pedagogical implications for health professions education. The successful completion of this project will fulfill the DH component of my larger research, with the work undertaken here contributing directly to the broader trajectory of my scholarship
