Anisah Khan, a fourth-year University of Houston student, is finishing her undergraduate studies by learning to use technology to improve research and communication.
“There’s so much overlap now between STEM and the humanities—the division is getting smaller and smaller,” Anisah said.
As an English major with minors in Psychology and the interdisciplinary program in Laws, Values, and Policy, Anisah is dedicating her senior thesis to partition literature. Her research explores how first-generation authors recount lived experiences of partition while second-generation writers rework historical context and familial memory in contemporary South Asian communities.
In the Fall of 2024, Anisah joined the Digital Humanities Core Facility (DHCF) as a Digital Research Specialist and the Production Editor for a new project led by Taylor Davis-Van Atta (Head of Research Services) and Dr. Woods Nash (professor at the Fertitta Family College of Medicine). Together, they are creating Innovations in Art and Health, a web-based book using Pressbooks, an open-source publishing platform. Anisah's role is to design interactive textbook-style chapters.
“It’s a collection of essays and articles written by medical professionals throughout Greater Houston about how they combine medicine and art to improve patient outcomes,” Anisah explained. “The book actually came out of a conference called NOAHCON, the National Organization of Arts and Health, which was recently held here at the University of Houston. So when you go to Pressbooks, you’ll see a table of contents on the side, where you can navigate through chapters, explore different sections, click on links, or be able to watch a video. There are interactive parts in the book that readers can really enjoy and browse through.”
Last year, the project hired a copy editor and made great progress in acquiring software for media integration, revising chapters, and ensuring accurate references. Now, with the finish line in sight, the team hopes to release the book in 2025. Anisah thinks that, once published, the book will inspire people across disciplines to engage with the research being presented, especially at conferences that many majors might not typically be exposed to.
"It's really, really interesting because I've seen some familiar faces in the book from the English Department,” Anisah said. “So it's not just centered on one discipline—it's all disciplines. I'm an English major, I have a psychology minor, and I think it's great to be a master of your craft and completely zoned into your major. But with the kinds of jobs out there, a lot of employers are looking for people with a diverse skill set. Creative writers can do so much if they step outside the fiction world and engage with reality—even though that can be scary.”
“It feels like it's been so normalized to keep disciplines separate, not tension, but kind of division between disciplines,” she continued. “I think that's a shame because, as someone who has been in both worlds, I feel like we need writers in the STEM fields to tell stories."
However, for Anisah, this project is also about advocacy.
“I have a brother, Ibrahim, who was diagnosed as autistic at age three on the severe level,” Anisah said. “Doctors said he wouldn’t speak or feed himself, but he defied those expectations with a strong support system at home and in school. In his early years, he improved significantly, but when he reached high school—the same one I attended—he struggled because the special education department was underfunded and lacked proper resources. After transferring to a school with better support, he flourished again.”
“I’ve seen how special education is often neglected, and it’s inspired me to focus on engaging with disabled communities through civic engagement,” she explains. “Representation is so important, and the project allows me to show how medicine can have a meaningful impact on those communities.”
Anisah's approach to design and communication is inspired by her early love for storytelling. “I loved taking information—words and numbers—and turning them into pie charts, bar graphs, you name it,” she said.
That passion came full circle in the Spring of 2024, during the UH micro-credentialing course, Foundations in Digital Humanities Project Development. “I didn’t realize what I was doing back then was digital humanities,” she explains. “I’ve always been such a visual learner, and I liked being able to transform blocks of text into something my audience can understand—without having to read the whole paper.”
She was introduced to the DH micro-credentialing course by Dr. David Mazzella, a professor of 18th-century British Literature and Project Director of The Year 1771, who encouraged her to enroll while she worked as his research assistant.
“Before this course, I didn’t know about oral histories. I didn't know about using Google Colab or OCR. Through the resources they showed us, I was able to explore these tools on my own and fit them into my projects,” she said. “I even used my project proposal to prepare for a symposium at the College of the Mainland.”
The proposal became part of her presentation on preserving language plurality in immigrant families, a project inspired by her own experiences as an ESL student. “I grew up fluent in Urdu, but I lost much of it after starting school. My project focused on finding ways to preserve both English and first languages,” she said, noting that her presentation earned her an honorable mention.
Anisah shared that after taking the course and working on projects, she sees Digital Humanities as the key to understanding the connection between STEM and the Humanities. She defines it simply as "material plus processing plus presentation," turning raw data into clear, visually engaging results through analysis and interpretation.
“Keep an open mind,” she said. “Digital humanities might sound complicated at first, but it’s not as overwhelming as you think. Don’t hesitate to ask questions. I remember being afraid to ask because I didn’t want to present myself as a fool, but Digital humanities is up and coming. You might discover things you’re already doing in your research that fall under this field. It really broadens your perspective.”