Jennifer Isasi
Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship
Dr. Jennifer Isasi is an Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship at The Pennsylvania State University. She is the Assistant Director of the Office of Digital Pedagogies and Initiatives and Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative. This position establishes a research support hub to articulate and integrate digital research in projects in the humanities and social sciences. She also collaborates with the Center for Black Digital Research at PSU Libraries to organize hybrid events, provide training, and assist with Douglass Day.
Jennifer is also a member of the editorial board of the open access journal Programming Historian, where she currently serves as the Managing Editor of Programming Historian en español with editing, translations and original lessons. Driven by her willingness to learn more skills on website creation and management, Jennifer is also a member of the Technical Team.
Prior to her position at PSU, she was a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation in Latin American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Texas Libraries, where she contributed to collections as data efforts, educational resources, and digital scholarship initiatives at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. She also worked with academic engagement staff, affiliated faculty, the post-custodial archival team, and partners in the United States and Latin America to develop curated data sets, open-access resources that support scholarly and public engagement with digital materials, and to inform the development of forthcoming digital collections.
Isasi holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with a specialization in Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her dissertation “Data Mining Possibilities for the Analysis of the Literary Character in the Spanish Novel: The Case of Galdós and the Episodios nacionales” (written in Spanish) establishes a computational reading methodology to extract, analyze and visualize literary character-systems or social networks, noting how they reflect novel genres and degrees of historicity that replicate close readings of the novels.
In Nebraska she collaborated as a metadata archivist and researcher in the digital project Family Letters and she co-organized the monthly DH Dialogues with her peers in the Digital Humanities Student Association. And she taught Spanish, Analysis of Communication, and Culture as a teaching assistant for the Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures at UNL and a lecturer at UNK.
She has a BA in English Philology (2011) from the University of Deusto-Bilbao (Spain), a MA in Hispanic Studies (2013) and a Certificate in Digital Humanities (2015) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA), and a Certificate on Professional Qualification on Digital Humanities (2015) from the National University of Distance Education (Spain).