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Dr. Diane Jakacki’s career sits at the lively intersection of early modern literary studies and the evolving landscape of digital humanities, a field she has helped shape with equal measures of technical fluency, historical insight, and collaborative spirit. As Professor of Practice and Coordinator of Digital Humanities Research at Bucknell University, she explores how computational methods can illuminate cultural histories that have long rested in archival obscurity. During her tenure as a 2022–23 Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph, she brought this expertise north, where she pursued a major project whose ambitions stretched across time, media, and scholarly communities.
Her Fulbright project, Early Modern Performance 'Events’ and Linked Open Data, centers on developing a data model to make the Records of Early English Drama (REED) London materials discoverable on the semantic web. These records, which document performance culture in medieval and early modern London, are rich but challenging: they reference places, occupations, and activities embedded in historical contexts where terminology shifts, orthographies multiply, and spatial assumptions differ from modern ones. Jakacki’s work engages those complexities directly. By partnering with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS), she is helping to define shared vocabularies that enable researchers to align the “events” embedded in historical documents with the geospatial and conceptual frameworks needed for computational analysis.
Her broader research profile reinforces this commitment to bridging disciplinary divides. She is the lead researcher on the REED London project, the principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation–funded Liberal Arts-Based Publishing Cooperative (LAB Cooperative), and a collaborator with CWRC on the Linked Editorial Academic Framework (LEAF), a virtual research environment designed to support sustainable, interoperable digital scholarship. Alongside these roles, she co-leads the NEH-AHRC-funded Emerging Hands project with James Cummings of Newcastle University. Her recent co-edited volume, What We Teach When We Teach DH, published in 2023, reflects her dedication not only to research but to the pedagogical dimensions of digital humanities, especially within liberal arts environments. This commitment continues with a new collected volume, Teaching Text Encoding, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in early 2027.
In conversation, Jakacki often describes herself as a “critical maker”—someone who writes and applies code to make data machine-readable, then analyzes, disseminates, and preserves it. This commitment extends into her teaching at Bucknell, where she cultivates intersectional approaches to data and ethical engagement with emerging technologies. Her students learn that technical skill is not an end in itself but a means of articulating, connecting, and sustaining cultural knowledge.
Her Fulbright year offered additional space to reflect on ethics and sustainability in the digital humanities. Projects more than a decade old often rely on outdated technologies, prompting Jakacki to emphasize future-proofing, succession, and multilingual equity—ensuring that tools and data models accommodate linguistic diversity rather than flatten it. She has also engaged in international leadership as Chair of the Executive Board for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and as Chair of the TEI Board of Directors, contributing to strategic planning that supports multicultural, interdisciplinary, and multilingual research communities.
AI’s accelerating influence is another of her ongoing concerns. Jakacki works with teams exploring handwriting text recognition and other AI-driven tools, which are now accessible to museums and archives. Yet she consistently stresses responsible use, clarity around limitations, and awareness of how human behaviour shapes the outputs of large language models. Her experiences collaborating across borders—especially during her time in Guelph—reinforce her belief that digital humanities thrives in environments where researchers can share insights, confront assumptions, and collectively tackle the fragile task of rendering the past intelligible through digital means.
Jakacki’s Fulbright year was also personally meaningful: time spent immersed in a new community, working closely with collaborators, writing, planning future projects, and enjoying the quieter rhythms of life with her dog. She expresses deep gratitude for the Fulbright network and often encourages future scholars to understand their dual role as researchers and ambassadors—participants in a global conversation about education, exchange, and the responsibilities of scholarly citizenship.
Her story reflects the ongoing evolution of digital humanities, where innovation depends not only on technological sophistication but on collaboration, care, and a willingness to wrestle with the interpretive challenges that historical materials present. For those curious about pursuing projects with similar breadth—or eager to connect their own scholarly work to international networks—Fulbright Canada’s programs offer pathways to the kind of transformative experience that shaped Jakacki’s time in Guelph and continues to shape her work today.
Whether you are interested in the digital humanities, artificial intelligence, or advancing technological research, Fulbright Canada offers a wide range of award programs to undergraduates, graduates, professionals, and accomplished researchers.
To find out more about the Fulbright Canada Scholar Program, please visit: https://www.fulbright.ca/programs/american-scholars