The Project Team
Taylor-Dawn Francis is a Master's student in the English MA program at San Jose State University. In addition to her interest in gender studies, queer theory, and critical race theory, she also wishes to help create spaces for the voices of people of color in academia. She works on-campus in the McNair Scholars Program, which assists first-generation undergraduate students and preps them for graduate school so they have the tools and resources necessary to pursue their PhDs. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing and collaborating on short stories and novels, playing video games, and thinking critically about movies and TV shows.
Keith Giles is studying English Literature at San Jose State University. He is interested in how class, race, and gender are privileged or marginalized in literature. His formal focus is within Post-colonial studies. He also has a personal interest in existential and post modern philosophy. Some personal hobbies include: reading, video games, hanging out with friends, and massive coffee consumption. Keith currently works at AT&T as an installation technician for fiber optic internet, DirectTV, and telephone. His work experience has been a large influence on how he reads class struggles in literature.
Marisa Plumb is graduate student at San Jose State University, interested in computational approaches to historical language change, and how they differ across disciplines. Her research considers emerging methods in natural language modeling, with a focus on the method’s history and mathematical precepts. She is interested in a larger thesis about the knowledge categorizations involved in text mining, drawing on perspectives from natural language processing, corpus linguistics, critical code studies, and science and technology studies. She is also interested in evolutions in technical language since the rise of disciplinary science during the Romantic era.
Samantha Douglas is a graduate student at San Jose University hoping to further her teaching career with a degree in English Literature. Her main areas of interest are examining the treatment of gender and sexuality within literature, especially in respect to traditional gender roles and how they are supported or rejected. She is an avid gamer and artist, and spends much of her time being a huge nerd with her fiance, who she hopes to write graphic novels with someday. She never thought her gaming experience would be helpful in a research situation and was very thrilled to bring Discord into the digital humanities sphere.
Dan Dirilo is a graduate student at San Jose State University with the intent of acquiring a position in teaching with a MA in English. Originally enrolled as a mechanical engineer, he changed his major to English and later Creative Writing after realizing his interest in writing and literature. His interests cover many fields in popular culture such as videogames, movies, creative writing, mythology, and anime. Going straight into the graduate programs the next semester after his graduation, he hit the ground running by enrolling into four graduate English courses totaling in at sixteen units along with doing a part-time job as a paraprofessional at James Logan High School. Having just started in the graduate program and having never done a digital project beforehand, his first semester was very education and provided him with many experiences and knowledge that will be helpful throughout the rest of his time in the MA English program.