Alice Tweedy McGrath

About Me

Senior Digital Scholarship Specialist at Bryn Mawr College

My professional ineterests include print and digital archives, digital materiality, feminist and queer studies, experimental fiction, text mining, metadata, and digital accessibility. My research centers on the emotional and formal valences of reading and writing as embodied practices--whether in terms of the physical affordances of a printed book, an author's representation of her composition as somatic experience, or practices of collaboration with machines through assistive technology.

In my current position with Bryn Mawr's Library and Information Technology Services Department, I support digital research and direct the Digital Scholarship Program. Before coming to Bryn Mawr in 2019 I served as Postdoctoral Fellow for Accessibility at University of Pennsylvania Libraries, where I developed an accessibility program to better serve students with disabilities, and collaborated on several digital humanities projects. I completed a doctorate in English Literature at Penn in 2016, specializing in patchwork fictions: queer experimental novels by eighteenth-century British women writers. I have taught courses at Penn and Rutgers Camden on Jane Austen, eighteenth-century British literature, and popular fiction by women.

Select projects

Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D., English Literature, University of Pennsylvania, August 2016
• M.A., English Literature, University of Pennsylvania, December 2011
• B.A., English Literature, French (summa cum laude), New York University, May 2008

Experience

Bryn Mawr College Library & Information Technology Services

Senior Digital Scholarship Specialist, 2020 – Present; Digital Scholarship Specialist, 2019 – 2020

• Establishes vision and leadership for digital scholarship program
• Provides instruction and curricular support, research and project support, and service administration
• Manages and builds training programs for undergraduate and graduate students, including Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows Program and Digital Scholarship Graduate Fellows Program
• Selection committee & consultant for Digital Bryn Mawr Project Grants. Assists with staffing, project design, project management support, development as needed
• Design and implementation of sunsetting policy for digital scholarship projects
• Participates in strategic planning for LITS, Tri-Co Libraries, and Bryn Mawr
• Convenes Tri-Co Libraries Digital Scholarship Group (including staff from Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore) and leads Tri-Co Digital Scholarship Research Institute, biennial intensive training for Tri-Co faculty

University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Postdoctoral Fellow for Accessibility, 2016 – 2019

• Developed accessibility policies for patrons with disabilities and served as library liaison to Student Disability Services
• Assessed services and user needs; acquired assistive technology tools and managed donor-funded budget for assistive technology space
• Co-founded Accessibility and Learning Technologies Group for digital access outreach
• Supervised the Hanuel Lin Digital Scholarship Fellows Program (2016-17), including bi-weekly digital scholarship instruction sessions during the school year and a summer internship
• Co-founded Accessibility Mapping Project: developed crowd-sourced data collection method using ArcGIS applications, trained and led map-a-thon events
• Curated digitization initiative of rare epistolary novels from Penn’s Collection of British and American Fiction; preparing corpus of OCR-generated texts
• Taught workshops and provided research instruction

Early Novels Database

Research Coordinator 2017 – 2019; Senior Fellow and Project Manager, 2015 – 2017

• Supervised and managed descriptive metadata creation for rare 18th- and 19th-century books the Kislak Center for Special Collections at Penn Libraries
• Data management and planning for dataset including over 2,000 titles
• Coordinated guest lectures, student research presentations, and skill workshops, including a multi-institution training week, and supervised teams at both Penn and NYU (2016)
• Supervised undergraduate and graduate researchers and mentored student digital projects

Publications

• “Unaccountable Form: Queer Failure and Jane Barker’s Patchwork Method.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 60.4 (Winter 2019).
• Dissertation: Patchwork Fictions: Imagining Intimacy Beyond the Marriage Plot (English, University of Pennsylvania, 2016). Available via ProQuest.

Select presentations

• “How I Built This: DH Methods for Eighteenth-Century Studies” (Chair of two-part panel). American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting. St. Louis: March 2023
• “Encyclopedia of the Dog”, Digital Editions Workshop for Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Virtual: January 2023.
• “Building a Critical Design Toolkit,” Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference. Virtual: October 2022.
• “Collaborating while Creating Nothing: Reflections on Digital Scholarship,” DLF Forum Meeting. Baltimore: October 2022.
• "Creating Digital Editions with and for Students". Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference. Bryn Mawr: May 2019.
• "'Marks of a Female Hand': Bibliographic Connections Between Women." American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting Annual Meeting. Denver: March 2019.
• “CTRL + ALT + Create: Accessible Course Design.” 17th Annual Disability Symposium at UPenn. Philadelphia: April 2018.
• “Access and Accessibility: What Libraries Can Do.” Pathways to Access: 16th Annual Disability Symposium. Philadelphia: April 2017.
• “Patchwork Fictions and Sapphic Forms.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting. Minneapolis: March 2017.
• “The Early Novels Dataset, 1700-89.” Poster/roundtable session. ASECS Annual Meeting. Minneapolis: March 2017.
• “Queer Futurity in Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Dead Letters.” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting. Philadelphia: January 2017.
• “Research Library Accessibility.” Drexel-Penn-Temple Libraries: Accessibility. Van Pelt Library. University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: January 2017.
• “The Preparation of the Corpus: 1760s Fiction.” With Rachel Sagner Buurma. American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting. Pittsburgh: March 2016.
• “A scattershot map of Grub Street: teaching with the Early Novels Database.” EC-ASECS Conference. West Chester, PA: November 2015.
• “‘Celestial Attachments’: Desire and Friendship in Elizabeth Rowe’s Dead Letters.” Aphra Behn Society Conference. South Orange, NJ: November 2015.
• “The Queer Art of Patchwork: Revisiting Jane Barker.” Eastern-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference. Philadelphia: November 2013.
• “Pages, Patches, and Narrative Material in Jane Barker’s Fiction.” SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) Annual Conference. Philadelphia: July 2013.
• “‘The Savage Face of Things’: The Sugar Cane and its Footnotes.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting. Cleveland: April 2013.
• “‘Pantomimical Revolutions’: Race and Adaptation in Harlequin Friday.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting. San Antonio: March 2012.

Teaching

University of Pennsylvania

• English Department, 2014-2017. Served as instructor of record for literature courses on Jane Austen, The Early Novel, and women’s writing.
• PennCAP Pre-Freshman Program, Summer 2015 and 2016. Introductory writing and literature seminar for incoming freshman needing additional preparation, curriculum designed with a group.
• Critical Writing Program, Fall 2011 and Spring 2012. Taught academic writing course primarily for first-year students.

Rutgers University–Camden

• English Department, Fall 2012. Designed and taught literature survey course, “Eighteenth-Century British Literature”.

Service and Work Experience

• College History Advisory Committee, Bryn Mawr College, 2020 – Present.
• Convener and member, Tri-College Digital Scholarship Group, 2019 – 2023.
• Committee for an Accessible University, University of Pennsylvania, 2017–19.
• Research Assistant, Penn Humanities Forum/Price Lab for Digital Humanities, 2015 – 2016.
• Organizing Committee, “Geographies of Intimacy” Colloquium, Penn Humanities Forum on Sex, University of Pennsylvania, February 17, 2016.
• Graduate Associate, Harrison College House, University of Pennsylvania, 2015–16.
• Senior Writing Tutor, Critical Writing Program, University of Pennsylvania, 2013–14.
• Organizing Committee, “Peripheral Visions: Space, Hierarchy, and Power in Humanistic Research,” Penn Graduate Humanities Forum, February 22, 2013.
• Coordinator, Eighteenth Century Reading Group, University of Pennsylvania, 2011–13.
• Classified Advertising Manager, New York Review of Books, New York, 2008–09.

Awards and Fellowships

• Digital Bryn Mawr Project Grant: "Book Traces at Bryn Mawr", Bryn Mawr College, 2019
• Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Education Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2015–16
• Doctoral Fellowship, Penn Humanities Forum on Sex, University of Pennsylvania, 2015–16
• Dissertation Fellowship, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, 2014
• Molin Award for outstanding paper by a graduate student, Eastern-Central American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting, November 2013
• Dissertation Research Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2013–14
• Mellon Research Fellowship, Graduate Humanities Forum on Peripheries, University of Pennsylvania, 2012–13
• Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2009–14
• Albert S. Borgman Prize for outstanding senior thesis in the College of Arts and Sciences, New York University, 2008

Skills

General

teaching, project management, UX design, web accessibility, writing, data management & visualization

Programming

Python, Git, Bash, Javascript, R

Web

HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Markdown, Jekyll, Eleventy, GitHub Pages, WordPress, Scalar, Omeka, Drupal, Domain of One's Own administration

Applications

OpenRefine, Oxygen, ArcGis, QGIS, Adobe (Acrobat, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator) Cytoscape, Unity, Blender, SketchUp, Team Dynamics

Languages

French (advanced); Latin (proficient in reading)

Continuing Education

• Domain of One's Own Administrator Workshop (Virtual, June 2021)
• Data Carpentries: Data Science with R (Bryn Mawr College, January 2020)
• Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (Wooster College, July 2019)
• 3D Digital Humanities (Digital Resources and Methods Lab, Penn, June 2019)
• Digital Surrogates: Representation, Engagement, and Meaning (Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching, Penn, June 2018)
• Python for Humanists, (Price Lab for Digital Humanities, Penn, November 2017)
• Accessibility in Digital Environments, (Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, June 2017)

• © Alice Tweedy McGrath
• Design: HTML5 UP