Marie Léger-St-Jean MA

PhD candidate

Area(s) of interest: Digital Humanities, Languages & Literature

Cohort/Start PhD: 2021-2022

Bringing Service Design to the Women Writers in History (WWIH) Database Project

Radboud University
Promotor(es): Prof. Alicia Montoya (promotor), Dr Chris Louttit (co-promotor)
Start project: February 2022

With a long-standing interest in digital humanities project management and open science, I will tackle the redevelopment of the New approaches to European Women’s Writing (NEWW) database by taking participatory and iterative approaches in the vein of service design, an offshoot of design thinking. Service design applies methods and tools from ethnography and management, to name but two disciplines, to iteratively improve services in the real world, treating users as stakeholders.

My research is guided by three research questions:

How can we create and maintain stakeholder buy-in and engagement in WWIH and beyond to ensure the database’s sustainability?
How can we transform humanities scholarly communication to ensure data is valued as a research product in and of itself, treated with the same rigour and respect as the traditional scholarly journal article?
What are the networks that allowed for women’s Gothic writing to circulate across languages in Europe?”