Kelly Hammond 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.