Zhihui Zou
HASTAC Scholar
History and Computer Science Student at Duke University
Zhihui Zou is a History and Computer Science student at Duke University. His historical research focuses on the oil industry in Los Angeles between 1892 and 1930, and his digital humanities research focuses on Named Entity Recognition and UI/UX development. He currently leads a research team that uses NLP to study Asian American short stories.
Why did you apply to HASTAC?
I applied to HASTAC because I believe scholarship should not be defined by the very artificial boundaries of “STEM,” “arts,” “humanities,” or the like. These boundaries, especially today, appear to be more and more arbitrary. Scholarly curiosity should encompass all angles and perspectives. After all, the different disciplines are just different tools to solving a problem in our society. I really appreciate HASTAC’s opportunity for people to engage in interdisciplinary inquiries. The word “interdisciplinary” has been used frequently these days as a buzz word; however, true “interdisciplinary” work is not that easy to come by. It requires risk-taking, acknowledging gaps in our own experience, and confronting the intellectual comfort zones or norms that our existing training has provided for us.
How do you see digital humanities evolving as a field in the future?
I believe DH is inherently not necessarily a discipline but a philosophy. It is a philosophy about giving scholarly attention not just to the content of research but also to our tools we use during research and the people whom we conduct research with. A lot of us are coming from a humanities background. Traditionally, humanities research has been isolated with tasks performed by one researcher only. This does not have to always be the case. Research in any discipline benefits from the insights from multiple scholars. DH provides us with a good model. No scholar could be a master at both the humanities and also the technical tools that DH requires, so it almost requires the collaboration of multiple people on a team. This leads to the creation of structured organizations to support collaborative work across departments, schools, disciplines, and career level. “Interdisciplinary” has been a keyword in recent years, as researchers focus on combining the perspectives from various fields together to produce new insights. To me, the future should be human-focused. Meaning, “collaboration” is what should be at the forefront. Interdisciplinarity comes naturally with collaboration.
What are you currently working on, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?
I’m currently working on a project that uses Named Entity Recognition (NER) to study how the Los Angeles oil industry was represented in US newspapers throughout the country between 1890 and 1930. I’m using newspapers from Library of Congress’s Chronicling America database. My goal with this project is to show that, using a scalar approach, we can defy the overrepresentation of a few major newspapers in history. Major outlets like the New York Times have received prominent positions in research and public memory. The smaller or more rural newspapers do not have this privilege. By using a scalar approach to study all newspaper sources possible, my data analysis will treat a NYT article and a rural Montana newspaper article equally. With this project, I hope to see how geography and newspaper publication location did might have influenced the language that newspapers used to describe the Los Angeles oil industry.
What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?
I’m currently reading James Tejani’s A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America. I recently discovered the podcast “New Books on the American West,” and I’ve been following the author interviews on there.
Collaboration and community are central to HASTAC. How have these shaped your work, or how would you like them to in the future?
Because my work focuses a lot on data collection and database construction, what I value a lot is User Interface development. This interest stems from classes in archive theory that I’ve taken a while ago. An archive (digital, physical, or existing through another means) can be described by what it holds and how it makes itself accessible to users. Academics mostly focus on what an archive holds, but it is equally important to think how it makes itself open to users (or maybe an archive doesn’t make itself available). With digital databases or archives, the UI is the first point of entry in answering this question. A good and user-friendly UI naturally invites more users to engage and use our data, promoting digital collaboration across the internet. However, I think not a lot of institutions or researchers who develop digital archives have put a lot of thoughts into developing good UIs. I fear that the mindset of a lot of researchers or companies is to focus on building the largest digital archive (under whichever metrics), but few focus on making the interface accessible and easy to use, especially for non-technically experienced users. Turning from an API interface to a Graphic User Interface, for example, could be a lot of work, but I think it is worth it. It is unfortunately that the work in building a good UI is often not awarded, especially in academia, because it is often not considered as part of the traditional research work. However, to be responsible DH practitioners, building accessible interfaces is not just a task but almost a duty to me.