News

  • December 5, 2023

    Joan Dejean, 1948-2023

    We're sad to learn Joan Dejean passed away over the weekend. Joan worked with DH Specialist Cassandra Hradil and Ph.D.

    We're sad to learn Joan Dejean passed away over the weekend. Joan worked with DH Specialist Cassandra Hradil and Ph.D. candidate Paule Carbonnel in the Price Lab to developed an interactive map of the French Quarter in New Orleans related to the last of her many and influential books, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast. Our thoughts go out to Joan’s family.

    Read the full rememberance here: https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/joan-dejean-romance-languages

  • November 10, 2023

    Genre Juggernaut: Measuring "Romance"

    J. D. Porter, Angelina Eimannsberger, James English, May Hathaway, & Ashna Yakoob come together to write about the literary genre of “romance” and its presence in the literature industry.

    J. D. Porter, Angelina Eimannsberger, James English, May Hathaway, & Ashna Yakoob come together to write about the literary genre of “romance” and its presence in the literature industry. Read the full article here. 

     

  • September 23, 2022

    Price Lab Alum Zain Mian Takes Faculty Position at the University of Toronto

    “The Price Mellon Fellowship helped me approach [postcolonial literature] at a scale and in ways that I had not thought possible.”


    We were thrilled to hear from our former summer grad fellow Zain Mian that he will begin a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Urdu Language, Literature, and Performance at the University of Toronto in July 2023.  Zain will be overseeing the development of Urdu literary studies and language teaching at the university.  He will hold a joint appointment in the English and Language Studies departments, as well an appointment to the Graduate Group in the Center for Comparative Literature. He will also be affiliated with the Center for South Asian Civilizations. 

    As a 2020 Price Mellon Graduate Fellow, Zain undertook a computational study of the postcolonial literary canon. His project aimed to explore the boundaries of the postcolonial canon by comparing the prominence of  certain literary works on Goodreads with the likelihood of their appearance on PhD Comprehensive Exams lists. As Zain describes the experience, “Working with the Price Lab, I developed a new digital skillset that sharpened my understanding of literary institutions and canon formation. The Price Mellon Fellowship helped me approach my topic at a scale and in ways I had not previously thought possible. I found it invaluable for the practical skills I developed and the new perspectives I gained on my work.”

    Congratulations to Zain from the Price Lab staff! 

  • September 7, 2022

    DH Summer Fellow May Hathaway's Letterboxd Project


    Price Lab DH Summer Fellow May Hathaway working on a data visualization with DH Specialist J. D. Porter.

    May Hathaway, a rising sophomore studying English, Linguistics, and Computer Science, spent this summer as a Mellon Undergraduate Fellow at the Price Lab. As a  research assistant on Dr. Jim English and Dr. J. D. Porter’s Literary Eclecticism project, May developed her own project to study film ratings and user behavior on the popular Letterboxd social movie-review site. By applying the web-scraping skills she learned on the Eclecticism project, May wrote Python scripts to harvest user data from the Letterboxd website, and then created data visualizations with Tableau.

    “My project has focused particularly on the distinction between ‘influencers’ and regular users,” explains May. “I'm interested in how their user ratings may conform to a bell curve, a J-curve, or other common shape as visualized on their profile page. Additionally, my project has shed some light on the different ways users use Letterboxd's rating function; for example, some users may only rate their 5-star movies or may write many reviews but not rate any movies at all. Through my project, I've been able to identify common rating curve patterns and rating differences between influencers and regular users.”

    May plans to continue working with Jim and J.D. this fall to refine her work and prepare to submit for publication in the spring.




    Data visualizations from May Hathaway’s Letterboxd research.

  • April 22, 2022

    Angelina Eimannsberger awarded the Arthur M. Daemmrich and Alfred Guenther Memorial Prize

    Congratulations are in order for Mellon Middoctoral Fellow Angelina Eimannsberger (Comparative Literature) who has been selected by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Comp

    Congratulations are in order for Mellon Middoctoral Fellow Angelina Eimannsberger (Comparative Literature) who has been selected by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program to receive the Arthur M. Daemmrich and Alfred Guenther Memorial Prize in the amount of $2,500 for her outstanding achievements in Comparative Literature Studies.

    Professor Emeritus Horst Daemmrich (University of Pennsylvania) and Professor Emerita Ingrid Daemmrich (Drexel University) established the Daemmrich-Guenther Memorial Prize in honor and in memory of their respective fathers.