This fall, the Lab is very happy to welcome a new User Interface Developer to the team! Catherine Winters joined us this September, and I talked with her about her path to the DHIL, designing cooperative interfaces, creating Twitter bots, and growing up with the World Wide Web.

Kim: Hi Catherine! So my first question is, what does a User Interface Developer do?

Catherine: Hi! Well, I make our Digital Humanities projects easier to use by improving their user experience.

When did you first learn to code, and how?

If you are interested in finding out what the most frequently occuring words are in the text(s) you are researching, you could always start by creating a Word Cloud, one of the best known text analysis visualizations. The results are simple and aesthetically-pleasing: run your text through a word cloud application to produce a roughly circular design of the most frequently used words, with the highest frequency appearing as the largest and lower frequencies diminishing in size.

Hi, I’m Kim. I’m a Digital Fellow here at the DHIL, and a PhD candidate in the English Department. I started working in the Digital Humanities in 2012 as an RA for Dr. Margaret Linley’s Lake District Online. Dr. Linley was creating a digital bibliography and archive of the large collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Lake District travel literature housed at SFU Special Collections.

Hi there folks, it's Doğan. I’ve just become a Digital Fellow at the DHIL this fall and I’m already enjoying our work here. I’m currently doing my masters in the Philosophy Department at SFU, working on a project about how dreaming is not so much as we conceive it to be, but in general I’m into anything about consciousness. While I immensely enjoy digging the puzzles of mind though, I have a ‘meta-philosophical’ interest in the way we operate in philosophy, which, at some point, introduced me to digital humanities.

In addition to being one of the new digital fellows at DHIL, I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of English. My interest in digital humanities has been fairly recent, and the result of my work on the Women’s Print History Project, 1750–1836 (WPHP), a relational database that seeks to account for women’s involvement in print by recording bibliographical data about the texts they were involved in producing.