Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti (they/them)

Leadership in experimental & digital humanities research infrastructure & community-building.

My research imagines and realizes just and joyful research communities at the intersections of technology, information, and culture. I shorthand my work as “digital humanities”, which means I:

  1. apply technical methods (e.g. coding, data visualization) to explore humanities questions, 
  2. ask humanities questions (e.g. ethical and historical ones) about technologies, and
  3. advocate for the urgency of GLAM skills to inform both directions of inquiry. 

Ever-accelerating creation of digital technologies urgently demands assessment—review, critique, whistleblowing, improvement—informed by humanities strengths (e.g. history, ethics, narratology) as well as Information Studies (e.g. systems evaluation, ethical data and catalogue design, archival accessibility). Simultaneously, emerging technologies 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.

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.
Scholarly coding experimenting with new approaches to public textual interpretive annotation

Current research activity

Screenshot of the most recommended channels on the Digital Humanities Slack, including channels for text analysis, linked open data, data etics, and archaeology
Founded & run the Digital Humanities Slack (3.5k+ members)
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 using electronics, lasercutting, etc.
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).
Database of DH, social justice, tech reads in many formats, including a zine collection/distro.
Scholarly interface design and digital edition building
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
Participatory design and user research on digital humanities projects
My sketches and notes planning the layout of the Mini Book List Printer's acrylic case. A photo of a spiral-bound sketchbook, white paper with black ink. The page is full of notes and drawings, including sketches of a simplified Mac Classic-style computer case, as well as the various pieces of acrylic that would need to be cut to assemble the case and their dimensions. The notes contain ideas about how to assemble the case (e.g. does it need air holes?), supplies I needed to procure for the project, and note working out how to cut and adhere various case piece edges to achieve the desired final case dimensions.
Makerspace fabrication for retro tech history, bookish library exhibits
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 with QR codes linking to online-readable research & tech zines
Photo of a life-size resin skull (front half), transparent, with embedded chatter teeth in the teeth place and ramen noodle block in the brain area. The skull is next to a metal clipper tool to show full-size scale.
Resin casting / memento mori
UX and web design for digital forensics in the archive
Visualizing social citation networks in the digital humanities
Innovative UX design for digital museums

Universities teaching my work

My scholarship has recently appeared on syllabi including at 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.

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.

“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)

Information M.S.

(Specialization: Digital Humanities Human-Computer Interaction)

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

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.