Kelly Hammond
Kelly is pursuing a master’s in Digital Humanities at CUNY’s Graduate Center. She has spent the last two decades integrating technology into humanities curricula in secondary schools, first at the Cincinnati Country Day School, where she served as the Dean of Studies, and more recently at the Chapin School in New York City as head of the Humanities Department. While at CUNY, she has focused on coding and data visualization. Her html and css work include a TWINE game focused on the publication history of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and a network-independent website intended to teach digital humanities to incarcerated citizens pursuing a college degree. Her data visualization projects include an interactive in Tableau investigating the authors and publishers behind the last decade of New York Times hardcover bestsellers. While an undergraduate at Amherst College, she investigated the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, initiating a lifetime of interest in the story of race in America, especially since Reconstruction—a passion that drew her to this project in the first place.
Kelly’s responsibilities for this project include automating data collection where possible with Python, cleaning data for analysis, and creating an interactive visualization of the data in Tableau. As an educator, she is keenly invested in this project, as her own diverse students and their parents are often steered to award-winning books.
Georgette Keane
Georgette is the Library and Archives Curator at the American Irish Historical Society. She received her Masters of Library Science and Certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from CUNY Queens College in 2015, and is pursuing a master’s in the Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research background is in Digital Palimpsests and promoting access to archival collections at historical societies and museums.
Georgette serves as the Project Manager, which includes managing the Newbery/Caldecott project and creating a detailed project schedule to ensure completion by the established deadline. She is also responsible for providing support to the other team members, including assisting with data collection and establishing connections with children’s literature professionals and librarians.
Emily Maanum
Emily is currently pursuing a master’s in Digital Humanities (DH) at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has a B.A. in History, with minors in Anthropology and Film Studies, from the University of Richmond. She recently began her journey into the field of DH. Her research interests include British history, georeferencing historical maps with GIS software, textual analysis and learning new DH tools.
For the Newbery/Caldecott book award project, Emily serves as the Designer/User Experience lead. In conjunction with the Outreach Coordinator, as well as the rest of the team, Emily developed and now maintains the project’s website so it may continue to be useful and informative for the project’s audience. Her other tasks include assisting with data collection and contributing to the project’s outreach.
Meg Williams
Meg Williams is a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, pursuing a master’s in Digital Humanities and holds an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, where she worked as an adjunct lecturer and a substitute administrative coordinator. With this background, Meg explores art and technology through digital poetics. She is currently working as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Group at Queens College, where she works on issues such as higher education affordability and campus sustainability.
Her main role in the Newbery/Caldecott project is outreach. She is particularly interested in issues around the importance of minority representation, the concept of whiteness, the economy of prizes and their ancient origins. Meg hopes her explorations of these topics contextualizes her groups finding in a critical analysis of the Newbery and Caldecott prizes.
