The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is pleased to announce that Micki Kaufman, Doctoral Student in History at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, has received the Paul Fortier prize awarded for the best paper presented by a young scholar at the 2015 Digital Humanities conference.
The Fortier Prize honours the memory of Paul Fortier, late University Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Manitoba, Canada. The award honors his long, active career in Humanities Computing and particularly remembers his kind encouragement and support for fledgling scholars in the field. The winner of the Fortier Prize receives a 500 GBP prize and a featured publication of the presentation in one of ADHO's publications.
Kaufman won the prize for her paper, "'Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me': Quantifying Kissinger", an application of ‘big data’ computational text analysis techniques to research the Digital National Security Archive’s recently released Kissinger Collections.
One Fortier Prize Reviewer describes how Kaufman’s paper “stood out to both the Reviewers and the Awards Committee as particularly strong, both in its research and in her presentation of her findings. It was clear, well researched, highly relevant and combined quantitative textual data with historical research, commenting not only on a particular historical phenomenon, but also on the process of studying history through the digital humanities.”
Kaufman's full presentation is available here, and further information regarding the project can be found here.
Kaufman's presentation was selected from a group of finalists that included: Matthew Lincoln "Modelling the (Inter)National Printmaking Networks of Early Modern Europe"; Silvia Mazzini and Laura Brazzo, "From the Holocaust Victims Names to the Description of the Persecution of the European Jews in Nazi Years: the Linked Data Approach and a New Domain Ontology. The Italian Pilot Project"; Benjamin Schmidt, "Data Revisualization as Critical Humanities Practice: Reinterpreting 19th Century Data with Modern Tools"; Takeo Yamamoto, "Music Score Representation of Poetry Reading: Can Prosody Be Studied by Analyzing the Author’s Voice?"