Congratulations to Tiana Birrell (Environmental Humanities) and Jace Brittain (English), who have won our first round of graduate fellowships for Digital Matters!

Tiana Birrell comes to Digital Matters from the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in Environmental Humanities. At her time in Digital Matters, she will be putting together a workshop series on data and privacy and will be working on “Water You Doing? Finding Place in the Digital” which seeks to emphasize the materiality of the digital by looking towards data servers and their water footprint. She will draw attention to the physicality of the digital via an art installation comprised of digital software, video, projections, and physical objects. This piece will render the invisible network of data consumption as holding material form, specifically emphasizing the amount of water and energy that is necessary to run our massive archives of digital information.

Jace Brittain comes to us from the English Department, where he is working on a PhD in Creative Writing. As part of his fellowship, Jace will be offering a multi-part workshop on using digital media (inDesign, Photoshop, or 3D printing) as a generative and experimental tool for creative or scholarly writing. His multi-model project called “A Mountain Pine Script” will be a digital novel (with physical/spatial components) which conceptualizes the bark beetle epidemic in the western US to address issues of scale in discussions about environmental degradation.