Niamh Clarke is a Digital Research Specialist in the Digital Humanities Core Facility (DHCF) for Textual Recovery Projects. She graduated from in 2024 with a degree in English and a distinguished minor in history.
After graduating, Clarke joined the core. She provides diligent management to projects she oversees and communicates the happenings of the core to the campus with DH鈥檚 newsletter 鈥淏its, Bytes, and Scripts.鈥� As an undergraduate, Clarke worked with David Mazella, associate professor of English, as a student and research assistant on the 1771 Project, noting it taught her perspective.
鈥淗is classes push you to think in ways that you haven鈥檛 considered. His job is not to make you a perfect writer but to advance your abilities beyond where they were at the beginning of the class.鈥�
Clarke鈥檚 thinking grew to new heights and worked on Mazella鈥檚 literary history-based project, Project 1771. As a REACH Scholar, she was hands-on engaging with 18th-century literature and data cleaning. Clarke learned to fully immerse herself and consider multiple perspectives, specifically how those perspectives influence the ways primary texts are analyzed and presented to audiences.
Clarke applies what she learned as an RA to her work at the DHCF. She leads software tutorials, keeps the 1771 Project on top of their deadlines, and supports Howar Mena and Gabriela Baeza Ventura as a project manager.
She also has been curating student spotlights of her colleagues. Clarke sees these interviews as textual recovery. 鈥淚鈥檓 recovering students鈥� stories before they become necessary, before they become famous. I鈥檓 getting autographs and publishing them because at the core, we believe everyone is going to be famous one day.鈥�
Clarke reflected on what it鈥檚 like to be the one interviewed. She鈥檚 done teacher spotlights and was the opinion editor of her high school鈥檚 newspaper, The Elsie Howler. When it was her turn as the interviewee, she said, 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e constantly trying to understand what an audience wants to learn from someone and what kind of questions an average person might ask, it鈥檚 easy to forget your own perspective.鈥�
Clarke noticed her position evolved with multiple teaching opportunities. She was originally hired as temporary staff to work on the newsletter before developing teaching material for ClioVis software trainings. 鈥淚 had no idea what I wanted to do with my degree, except that I enjoyed teaching and felt that there was somewhere I could make a positive impact.鈥� She says.
What鈥檚 next is a Master of Arts in English at the University of Virginia. There Clarke will be creating her own digital humanities project on 19th-century Irish Gothic fiction and monster theory. Clarke is fascinated with monster theory thanks to Jeffery Cohen鈥檚 writings. 鈥淚 would be interested in producing a project that analyzes the word choices and depictions of Gothic monsters or figures of monstrosity and comparing the similarities and differences between those creations from Irish Catholic and Protestant authors.鈥�
Her research interests will tie into her thesis鈥攅xploring elements represented in fiction such as creativity, psychological, physical, and social dimensions while adding chimera-style visualizations to demonstrate the differences. Looking ahead, Clarke is planning a career as an academic professor while also considering research administration as a possibility in the future.