Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti (they/them)

Designing just & joyful knowledge-making communities at the intersections of code, craft, & culture.

My research imagines and realizes just and joyful research communities at the intersections of technology, information, and culture. I specialize in empowering critical, creative, public, “do-it-yourself” scholarly communication—a wheelhouse connecting textual scholarship and book history, book arts and humanities makerspace practice, and digital humanities theory and building-as-scholarship—with the community design and public leadership activity that ensure these pursuits contribute to communal knowledge and public good.

I shorthand my work as “experimental & digital humanities”, which means I:

  1. apply technical & creative methods (e.g. coding, book arts, data viz) to explore humanities questions, 
  2. ask humanities questions (e.g. ethical & historical ones) about technologies (digital or not!), and
  3. advocate for the urgency of library and archival skills informing both directions of inquiry. 
A graphic with a background yellwoed to look like aged paper, the words "Infinite Ulysses: what if we built an edition and everyone showed up?" written in the center, with an illustrated silhouette of a person holding a walking stick and with a bowler hat falling across the page. The background has stripes of text from James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Ever-accelerating creation of digital technologies urgently demands caution, care, and analysis—review, critique, whistleblowing, improvement—informed by humanities strengths (e.g. history of non-digital technologies, ethics, narratology) as well as library and information expertise (e.g. systems evaluation, ethical data and catalogue design, archival accessibility) and creative practice (e.g. book arts, critical makerspaces). Simultaneously, emerging technologies—and the possibilities for refocusing on the often-social solutions excitement about tech can forget—offer opportunities for creating better futures.

We need practitioners working across tech and cultural fields to recognize opportunities to proactively dream, build, and assess our own interventions. To productively unite minds across the intersections of technology, information, and culture, we need just and joyful communities of interdisciplinary practice. Designing, building, analyzing, and sustaining such just and joyful knowledge communities is the heart of my research.

Scholarly coding experimenting with new approaches to public textual interpretive annotation

Universities teaching my work

My scholarship has recently appeared on syllabi including at University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Northeastern University NULab, Washington State University, the Catholic University of America, University of North Carolina, Northwestern University, University of Maryland, and the Pratt Institute.

Current research activity

Scholarly education

Literature Ph.D.

University of Maryland, Department of English (September 2010-May 2015)

First Fully DH Literature Dissertation: Infinite Ulysses

Successfully argued for, designed, and defended a unique literature dissertation with zero written chapters—the first fully digital humanities dissertation in an English Department, and (at least one of) the first full DH dissertations period. I achieved scholarly design, code, usertesting, and blogging around my Infinite Ulysses social reading platform, evaluated as the full critical work they were, not balanced/apologized for with written chapters.

This project showcased my strong project design and management skills: getting buy-in across my university, completing a unique project in the minimum possible time, parlaying an extremely non-traditional project into a tenure-track professorship. I blogged my design research and technical challenges twice monthly, and authored a whitepaper discussing design process and product during the month before its defense.

Information M.S.

University of Michigan, School of Information (September 2008-April 2010)

M.S. Specialization: Digital Humanities Human-Computer Interaction

I’ve been thinking and doing human-computer interaction for over 15 years. I’m trained in HCI (human-computer interaction) and information science via a master’s degree from the University of Michigan School of Information, where I designed, ran, and analyzed a formal user study looking at what small design changes to scholarly archives and digital editions would open these interfaces to public audiences.

“Amanda Visconti’s digital dissertation, Infinite Ulysses, is another compelling example of the power of born-digital work. Combining deep literary insight with interface design, web development, community building, and best practices in user testing and analytics, Visconti has created a space for collaborative interpretation of a text. Since its launch, hundreds of readers have annotated James Joyce’s text. Further, Visconti has provided an invaluable service to the community by blogging every stage of her research, development, and defense, helping to make transparent the hurdles that other emerging scholars might anticipate when working on digital projects.”

– Katina Rogers, Council of Graduate Schools report (2015; emphasis added)
Photo of materials for the Ghost Books project artfully arranged on a floor, including a swirl of blue LEDs with silicone diffusion making them look like neon lights, superglue, acrylic and glass cut to size to be assembled into a rectangular-prism/book shape with smoothe or crenellated edges, and one of the books I'm basing the initial prototype on (10 PRINT) because of it's interesting blue and white patterned cover.
Book-adjacent data physicalizations
Digital edition code+design
Photo of a person in a dark room, wearing a necklace of TTRPG transparent resin dice lit up from inside with LEDs in various colors
Resin casting & electronics
Screenshot of a digital grid of photos of zine front covers; it's very colorful, and around 200 zine covers are shown
Zine viz & research
Laser block & typemaking for queer & multilingual access & art
Letterpress printing
Non-hypebeast ethical technology
Zine making
Screenshot of a small slice of the reads database entries and their metadata, using the main title-based data view. It looks like a spreadsheet, which is to say a table of rows and columns; the columns have headers such as "zine title", "creators", and "tags". Some of the entries include "Residential schools" by Jenna Rose Sands, which is tagged with the terms "social justice", "Indigenous", and "history" and is part of a zine series; and "Bite Size Linux!" by Julia Evans, tagged "tech" and "tutorial". The author names and tag terms all have a gray oval as a background, which makes it clearer these are reusable/interlinked terms (it looks like if you click on one author's name, for example, you might be given a view of all zines by that author).
Cataloguing for book-arts data science
Hopepunk community building
Screenshot of the most recommended channels on the Digital Humanities Slack, including channels for text analysis, linked open data, data etics, and archaeology
Digital Humanities Slack Founder
Example themed reading card deck, prepared for the ACH 2023 conference's #DHmakes (digital humanities making) session. An open plastic playing card case holds a playing-card-style card with information about the "#DHMakes at #ACH2023" project governing the readings chosen for inclusion in the deck; next to the case is a fanned-out pile of playing-card-style cards showing tech, GLAM, and social justice zine titles such as "Kult of the Cyber Witch #1" and "Handbook for the Activist Archivist"; on the top of the fanned pile you can see a whole card. The whole card is white with black text; the title "Design Justice for Action" is in large print at the top of the card, followed by a list of the zine's creators (Design Justice Network, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Una Lee, Victoria Barnett, Taylor Stewart), the hashtags "#DHMakes #ACH2023, and a black square QR code (which links to an online version of that zine).
“Themed reading list” card deck
Participatory humanities interface design
Archival digital forensics
Social citation network viz
Digital museum UX