My name is Tianyi (Titi) Kou and I am a third-year PhD student in German Studies. My research focuses primarily on the ways in which the sociological phenomenon of football influences national and regional identities in Germany. As one of the returned fellows, I am looking forward to getting to know the new fellows, enhancing my digital skills, and working on my next project.

Last May, with the full support of the CHI Fellowship, I successfully launched my project “Multiculturalism in the German Football World”. This project aims at further illuminating the recently heated debate over “multiculturalism” in contemporary German society through the lens of football. In November, I am invited to attend and present this project in “The Digitalization of Research” Conference hosted by University Leipzig in Germany. I can still recall when I first joined CHI, Ethan said several former fellows used them as part of the job presentation, and some were invited to a conference talk. I never would have thought that I could be one of them.

For me, CHI is the perfect place to combine my research interests with the digital skills I acquire. Last year, I learned how to modify Bootstrap framework, host my website on Github, and use mapping tools, such as Mapbox. Over the summer, I spent a few weeks in Germany attending the European Summer University, where I dabbled in text mining and cultural analytics. So far I have not come up with a concrete idea of what my next project will look like. However, this year I prefer to work with a larger dataset and enhance my skills in data visualization.