Yadira Lizama Mué
Data Science, AI, and the Humanities:
Creating a Data-Driven Platform to Understand How We Talk About Peace and Conflict
By Busra Copuroglu
Yadira Lizama Mué, a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies and Digital Humanities Program in the Department of Languages and Cultures, first came to Western in 2016 as a visiting researcher through the Emerging Leaders in the Americas program to work with Professor Luiz F. Capretz in the Faculty of Electrical and Software Engineering. During her visit, she learned about the CulturePlex lab. Intrigued by Digital Humanities as a research area, she applied to the Hispanic Studies Ph.D. Program hoping to transfer her expertise as a data scientist and software engineer to the Humanities. Mué is now finishing her Ph.D. with a Specialization in Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Scientific Computing under the supervision of Dr. Juan-Luis Suárez. While completing her doctoral studies, Mué also worked as a project manager and data scientist in the CulturePlex lab run by Suárez. In Fall 2023, as one of the ten winners of Western Post-Doctoral Fellowships, Mué will start her Fellowship in Digital Humanities under the supervision of Dr. Suárez and continue her role as Data and Peace Researcher and Project Manager in the CulturePlex lab. Mué’s research interests are multidisciplinary and include some of the central questions of digital humanities. She focuses on the application of AI in language processing, particularly how we understand and analyze texts and how we can make machines understand, interpret and learn from the text.
Mué’s journey in software engineering and data science began in her home country, Cuba, where she studied computer science. As a high school student, she loved math and wanted to learn how programming worked. “You learn a set of very valuable skills in software engineering and then can apply those skills to any domain. You can develop software for accounting, for law, or the humanities, for example,” she said. Before coming to Western Mué worked as a data scientist and software engineer in Venezuela, Cuba, and Germany and taught science-based courses in Cuba. In her time at Western, she taught Network Analysis in the Faculty of Education, and Spanish and Theory and Practice of Intercultural Communication in the Department of Languages and Culture.
Creating a Data-Driven Platform to Study Post-Conflict Initiatives
Mué’s doctoral project examines peace negotiations and the impact of war on children. She created a data-driven platform by collecting data on six grave violations against children as identified by the United Nations: killing or maiming children, recruitment or use of children as soldiers, sexual violence against children, abduction of children, attacks against schools or hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access for children.
In her dissertation, Mué focused on the war in Syria and its aftermath. She collected and analyzed data on the six violations and built a platform, aiming it to be used to incorporate data on a global scale in the future. She then looked at peace agreements to examine “how stakeholders talk about these violations during peace negotiations, and how this can impact future post-conflict initiatives.” She examined linguistic patterns in the data, which, Mué said, can help us “understand and describe the language of peace negotiations and how various stakeholders talk about peace building.”
For her research, she connected with a violation documentation center in Syria and collected data on peace agreements from the University of Edinburgh, that houses of one of the biggest collections of peace agreements. Mué said with her research, she aims to provide “a platform that will allow us to import all this data and recognize the gaps we have in the data, to encourage initiatives to fill in those gaps.”
Her postdoctoral project builds on her Ph.D. dissertation; she will expand her scope to study post-conflict initiatives on a global scale to understand how post conflict initiatives address the issue of violence against children. The big questions that will drive the next phase of her research include“How do people negotiate peace? How does the implementation of these initiatives in post-conflict societies translate into the needs of children? How do the strategies they design help mitigate violence on children and impact the allocation of funds that relate to diversity and vulnerabilities? And how do stakeholders collaborate in the design implementation of these initiatives and how these connect with the needs of children?” are .
Finding a Path in Digital Humanities as a Software Engineer
When Mué started her Ph.D., she said she knew what she wanted to work on but was not sure about the path she wanted to take. “My time in my program has helped me explore my options in the Humanities. I spoked with my supervisor and looked into the Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction program at Western. And when I started taking courses in Transitional Justice, I felt like I found my place and wanted to apply my skills as a software engineer and knowledge as a data scientist in these areas,” she said. Thanks to her specialization in Transitional Justice, she had the opportunity to collaborate with researchers from different fields in the Humanities. “Anthropologists, art historians… people from all kinds of backgrounds help the ways in which we understand the results of the data and enrich these results,” she said.
Coming from software industry, Mué found her professional experience helpful during her transition to the academic life: “In the industry, you need to organize your project, create a timeline, connect with the stakeholders in order to implement your goals, and work in a team. It is the same in academia with research projects. You have to organize your research project, create a timeline, sort your resources, apply for grants, and create a team.”
While building her academic career at Western, Mué also raised a family in London. During her Ph.D. she took time away for parental leave. “As a mother of two little boys and immigrant, keeping a balance between my family and other responsibilities was a challenge,” she said. The support of her professors and graduate program coordinator Sylvia Kontra, she noted, allowed her to do her work and thrive. “The CulturePlex lab was a safe space for me to conduct my research and the opportunity to complete a specialization in the Centre of Transitional Justice allowed me to create valuable connections across disciplines,” she said.
Reading Data in Digital Humanities
As a software engineer, Mué sees Digital Humanities as a different way to understand and study humanities. “Everything today involves working with data, and the Humanities are not exempt from that,” she said. “With all the technical revolution that we have these days data science, computer science, coding, data analytics are very important in every research area. In Digital Humanities, we have to learn and understand that there are different research questions that we ask when we work with this massive data than when we conduct research in traditional humanities.”
Through her post-doctoral work and the projects in the CulturePlex lab, in the next chapter of her academic career, Mué looks forward to keep widening the scope of her research to work with large, popular models to such ChatGPT and GPT4 to see how she can incorporate them into her research. Mué also noted that her training in the Humanities has enormously impacted her approach to data science. “Before coming here, I used to develop software for companies. In that community, you have to understand the business model of the company to develop software for that business. Whereas in Digital Humanities, interpreting data comes with the human aspect – such as, understanding bias in the data when you apply machine learning. I learned this through my training in the Humanities” she said.
About our Contributor
Busra Copuroglu is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature with a background in French Studies. Her current doctoral dissertation, in progress, is about literary depictions of boredom and complaint from the late nineteenth century to the present.
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