New funding, new teammate

Due to a generous grant from The Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Humanities and Information (CHI), Tom and Dawn’s once proof-of-concept project on world literature in English translation and network analysis has evolved into a much larger, collaborative and community-focused research venture. Building on the University of Rochester’s work on their Three-Percent Translation Database, our project has broadened its scope and is working on the creation of a comprehensive and (eventually) publicly accessible database of translation data for English translations of literary works.

CHI, in its efforts “to support and generate research at the intersection of information and the human sciences,” provided funding for the first stages of the project’s expansion, which include a good deal of data collection and dataset expansion, the development of an open graph database platform, and the construction of a public UI.

As a PhD candidate in English at PSU (and the only graduate student on the research team), the grant has also funded my own involvement in the project. To be fair, my contributions have been rather meager and logistically-oriented thus far—data collection, external funding research, etc.—but as the dataset is nearing its “Stage 1” completion, CHI’s funding provides me the chance to learn about, develop, and apply digital methodologies to large datasets in a collaborative environment. Having focused my own previous DH research around the intersections of gender and nationalism and the formation of literary communities, I’m excited to begin exploring similar trends as they arise (or don’t!) in the many networks of English literary translation.