2016 Digital Scholars
Karl Aho
Karl will receive his Ph.D. in Philosophy in August 2016. His dissertation explores the ethical implications of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of time. Before coming to Baylor, he studied at Valparaiso University and Boston College. His Summer 2016 digital scholarship project involves using text mining to trace main philosophical themes in English-language articles from the journal Kierkegaardiana, 1955-2007.
Daniel Benyousky
Daniel is a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Baylor. He is writing his dissertation on the stereoscopic poetic witness of W.H. Auden and Derek Walcott, detailing how their poetic visions focus on the displacement and trauma around them, as well as attempting a return to place and expressing a gratitude for the gift of poetry. Daniel’s digital project will be a data map of St. Lucia, Walcott’s birthplace and current home, and Trinidad, his former home. The project will coordinate photos of specific places taken during his recent archival research trip to the islands with poems that mention these places, as well as interviews from the research trip.
Jordan Carson
Jordan began the doctoral program in English (religion and literature) in fall of 2011. He grew up near Dallas, Texas, and earned a B.A. in the University Scholars Program from Baylor, an M.Div. from Truett Seminary, and a Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Jordan is beginning his dissertation on the critique of American civil religion and the place of the Transcendent in the works of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, and Ana Castillo. He has also written on Faulkner, Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy. His digital project will use text mining to examine the presence and significance of religious language in the novels of Thomas Pynchon.
James Cochran
James is a doctoral student in the Religion and Literature PhD program in Baylor’s English department, and his research centers broadly on twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, religion, and culture. His digital project uses text mining to compare J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with Salinger’s early Catcher-esque short fiction. James can be found online at https://baylor.academia.edu/JamesCochran.
Melinda Creech
Melinda is finishing up her dissertation for a Ph. D. from the English and Religion departments. Her dissertation is entitled “Hopkins’s Homer: A Scholarly Edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Dublin Notes on the Iliad.” My Digital Scholar program for this summer involves a text mining/analysis of the shared vocabulary between those notes and his English poems.
Lois Johnson
Lois is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Religion and Literature Program housed in the English Department, where she will be writing on the theological anthropology portrayed intentionally or otherwise in Modern and Contemporary American Literature. One such piece of literature comes from the 20th Century’s “original flapper girl,” Zelda Fitzgerald. Zelda’s first and only finished novel Save Me the Waltz has been generally overlooked for a variety of reasons, not the least of which includes the historical claims that her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited out and rewrote pieces of the novel which he found unacceptably revealing. Lois’ project for the Digital Scholars Program employs text-mining techniques, comparing Scott and Zelda’s short stories in search of their individual authorial “tics,” in an attempt to locate Scott’s writing in Zelda’s novel.
Travis Snyder
Travis is three years into his PhD in English at Baylor University. His interests include all things American of the 20th and 21st century. He applies a light, postmodern touch to all that he does. His dissertation is tentatively going to be on Midwestern Gothic Literature. To that end, his digital project is data mapping what people perceive the Midwest to be, since no one seems to agree about its boundaries or be aware that it exists in the first place.
Adrienne Steely
Adrienne is working on her Masters Degree in Music Composition at the Baylor School of Music, with the intention of graduating in December of 2016. For her digital scholars project, Adrienne is creating data driven art in the form of musical composition. Her data includes statistics about caffeine intake in the U.S.