Associate Professor of Digital Humanities Crystal Hall was joined by two of her students to showcase their research at a recent literary festival in Florence, Italy.
“The energy in the audience completely changed when Giovanna and May presented their findings,” said Hall, who is also an Italian studies scholar. Joining her were May Yuan ’26 and Giovanna Parnoff ’28, who shared results from a data-driven analysis of a collection of their work.
“When the students spoke,” said Hall, “people in the audience leaned forward and took photos of some of their visualizations. Not only were the digital humanities methods new to them, but they were excited to see students working at such an advanced level,” she added.
The conference, which occurred in December 2025, took place on the Florence campus of Unicollege, a private university in Italy that specializes in applied languages and international studies. Titled “Literatures of a Different Genre,” the event brought together literary and cultural scholars to explore the fluidity of literary boundaries and how genres are defined.
For its part, the Bowdoin cohort focused on the contribution of female writers promoting the creative labor of Italian women at the turn of the twentieth century. Of particular interest, says Hall, was the French-born British writer Vernon Lee (1856–1935), who spent most of her life in Florence and whose work was examined in the broader landscape of women's rights in Italy and Italian politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“Our presentation examined Lee’s hybrid letter essay, ‘La Donna Come Cittadina’ (‘Woman as Citizen’), along with the work of other women writers who advocated for women's rights, defying genre barriers,” said Parnoff. “We established this through a series of digital text analyses, which examined the placement of smaller, generally overlooked words in sentences. I am incredibly grateful to Bowdoin and the Digital and Computational Studies Program for this opportunity, and I am excited to continue this research with Professor Hall,” she added.
Also present at the conference, although not taking part in the presentation, was Isabelle Fitzgibbon ’27, who, along with Parnoff and Yuan, is coauthor of an article currently under review for publication in a respected academic journal. “In the article, we use digital humanities and close reading analyses to contextualize Lee’s essay ‘La Donna Come Cittadina’ within her other work and the broader essay collection ‘Operosità Femminile’ (‘Female Industriousness’), published in 1902,” said Fitzgibbon, a Romance languages and literatures and biology double major. Fitzgibbon traveled to Florence from Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, where she spent the fall semester studying abroad.
Although they didn’t make the trip to Florence, four other Bowdoin students were also involved in creating the data used in the presentation and the article, said Crystal Hall. They are seniors Mila Bonometti and Andrea DiTeodoro, Monriseth Escobar ’28, and Jackie Miller ’25.”
“I hope that for all of the students involved in the project this has been a rewarding way to see how their knowledge of Italian connects with computation and can have an impact outside the classroom,” she added.
Hall’s and her students’ trips to Italy were funded through enrichments grants provided by Digital and Computational Studies Program and mini-grants from the Office of Student Fellowships and Research.
