Vilja Hulden named first CHA/CRDDS Digital Humanities and Arts faculty fellow

Vilja Hulden, a historian using computational methods to aid in her research and scholarly work, has been awarded the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) and the Center for Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS) Faculty Fellowship in the Digital Humanities and Arts at CU Boulder!

Through the fellowship, Hulden will further her work on the project, Speaking to the State: Representation at U.S. Congressional Hearings since 1977. 

“This appointment will be a huge help in my work on the project,” said Hulden. “I'm really looking forward to the collaborative opportunities it offers. Collaboration is in so many ways at the heart of digital humanities. I know from before what great ideas the people at CRDDS have, especially in digital publication and data visualization, and I'm also excited that as the digital fellow I get to be part of the spring '22 cohort of CHA fellows."

The project examines who gets to “speak to the state,” and what they say when they do, creating a computational analysis of a data set covering over a million instances of testimony at hearings, analyzing the metadata as well as the full text of testimonies. 

The final product will be an open-source, freely available digital publication aimed at scholarly and general audiences. 

“Vilja’s project is a great example of how computational methods can help make sense of large bodies of data that would be difficult to understand otherwise,” said Thea Lindquist, executive director of CRDDS. “And the issues she’s focusing on remain relevant today—how people make their voices heard on topics like labor relations, women’s rights, and the environment. CRDDS is delighted to partner with CHA to offer a fellowship supporting open and innovative digital humanities research like hers.”

The CHA/CRDDS Faculty Fellowship is a new fellowship program that will run over the next three years to support faculty working in digital humanities and the arts. 

“Collaborating with CRDDS on this digital humanities faculty fellowship truly speaks to the mission of the CHA,” Jennifer Ho, director of the CHA. “We want to foster as many robust relationships with other units in our support and promotion of humanities and the arts. Digital humanities is such an exciting and dynamic field of study, and we’re so happy to have Vilja as our first faculty fellow.”

Hulden will participate in the fellowship program in the spring of 2022. Learn more about the fellowship.