DHQ People

Julia Flanders was born and raised in the New Jersey suburbs, and attended a local public high school where computers were taught as "Computer Math". She received her first undergraduate degree from Harvard in History and Literature, and her second from Cambridge University in English Literature. In 1989 she began a PhD in English at Brown University, but migrated early in her graduate studies into humanities computing. She started working at the Women Writers Project in 1992, first as a proofreader, then as Managing Editor, Textbase Editor, and Project Manager. Upon completing her doctorate in 2005 (on " Digital Humanities and the Politics of Scholarly Work") she found herself with enough free time to work on the founding of a digital journal.

Julia currently works as the Director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University, where her research focuses on the challenges of digital text representation, text encoding, and scholarly communication. She also does a variety of freelance technology consulting. She has written and spoken on a variety of issues including the gender politics of scholarly digital editing, documentation, the history of quantitative methods of literary analysis, digital textuality and materiality, and various practical problems in text encoding. She has served as President and Vice President of ACH and Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.

Wendell Piez was born in Frankfurt, Germany to American parents, and raised in Somerville (Massachussets), Kabul (Afghanistan), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Manila (the Philippines), Reston (Virginia), and Tokyo (Japan), before attending university in New Haven (Connecticut). A graduate of the American School in Japan and of Yale College (MC 1984), where he received a BA in Classics (Ancient Greek), he has been using and programming computers since 1977 (BASIC, 6502 Assembler). From 1985 to 1998 he attended and taught at Rutgers University, where he specialized in English literature, critical theory, poetics and rhetoric. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1991 (writing on the aesthetic theory and prose practice of the Victorian literary critic and belletrist Walter Pater), he worked in Rutgers University Special Collections and Archives (1991-1995) and on the faculty at CETH (the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, 1995-1998). Since 1998, he has been employed by Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy in private practice, where he is responsible for the development and application of electronic text technologies both for clients and in house. Author and presenter of journal articles, papers and courses presented at academic and industry conferences and teaching events, he is a regular contributor to HUMANIST, TEI-L, and XSL-LIST, a recognized expert in XML, XSLT and related technologies such as SVG, and co-originator of LMNL, the Layered Markup and Annotation Language. He resides in scenic Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Melissa Terras hails from Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, and ignored computers until her final year of her undergraduate MA, in History of Art and English Literature at the University of Glasgow (1998). Discovering the Internet (and something that she was good at) led to an MSc in IT (Software and Systems), also at Glasgow in 1999. In 2002 she completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, which was a joint project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, on using image processing and artificial intelligence to try and "read" the Roman documents from Vindolanda.

Melissa then spent a year at the Royal Academy of Engineering, as assistant manager of the Policy unit, providing impartial advice to the UK government on matters scientific. Now at University College London, she is a lecturer in the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies on Internet Technologies, Web Publishing, and Digital Resources in the Humanities. She is acting Secretary of ALLC (2005/6) and an Officer of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (2005-8), as well as being involved in other consultancy activities within the Digital Humanities field. She is interested in computational techniques which would allow research in the Humanities that would otherwise be impossible.

Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and worked at the University of Toronto as a Senior Instructional Technology Specialist. He has published and presented papers in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. From 1994 to 2008 he was at McMaster University where he was the Director of the Humanities Media and Computing Centre (1994 - 2004) and he led the development of an undergraduate Multimedia program funded through the Ontario Access To Opportunities Program. He has published and presented papers in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. He is the project leader for the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) funded project TAPoR, a Text Analysis Portal for Research, which has developed a text tool portal for researchers who work with electronic texts and he organized a SSHRC funded conference, The Face of Text in 2004. He has published a book "Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet" with Humanity Books.

Joseph Raben is a professor emeritus of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he taught for 30 years. Before that he was a teaching fellow at Indiana University and an instructor at Princeton University. He was awarded a B.A. with honors at the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. at Indiana University, where he minored in folklore under Stith Thompson. His bachelor's honors thesis was on pronunciation as revealed by rhyme schemes in American folksongs, and his doctoral dissertation studied folk speech in Scott's novels. After graduating from Wisconsin, he worked as an engineering aide on the construction of the Hanford Engineer Works, and then entered the Army, where he was trained in spoken Japanese and served in Tokyo as an editor of translations in the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service, attached to GHQ. In this service he translated documents used in the war crimes trials.

At Queens he developed an interest in using computers in humanities research and in 1966 founded the innovative journal Computers and the Humanities to provide a platform for younger pioneering scholars to publish their research. He both edited and carried a large share of this journal's publication chores for 20 years. Among its most useful features was a semiannual Directory of Scholars Active, which informed practitioners around the world of recent applications of computer technology to humanities and related social science problems. These notes he cumulated into a print volume, Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities (New York: Pergamon Press, 1977). In 1978 he founded the Association for Computers and the Humanities and served as its president for two years before turning it over to younger successors. During this same period, he helped to organize several international conferences at the University of Southern California, Grinnell College, Dartmouth College, Rutgers University, North Carolina State University and Auburn University. He also presented papers at many international conferences organized by others and represented humanities computing at conferences organized by groups within the computer industry, such as the ACM, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, the International Federation for Information Processing, and the American Society for Information Science. He organized special interest groups at several MLA conventions and within the ACM. He was an invited lecturer at academic institutions all over the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and in India, China, and Japan. Much of the same effort was contained in articles published in a variety of journals, along with his contributions to Shelley scholarship, some of it based on the manuscript materials in the Bodleian Library. In 2010, he was awarded the Roberto Busa Prize of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations for lifetime achievement.

John A. Walsh is an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of digital humanities and digital libraries. His research focuses on electronic textuality and the nature of the document in the digital age. He explores the evolution of the document, the book, and the literary text--both born-digital new media texts and digital representations of written and printed texts. Digital environments and tools offer possibilities for new representations of texts, new readings, and new strategies and habits of reading as documents evolve from more or less static and fixed texts to fluid and malleable data. As part of exploring these transformational developments in textuality, Walsh studies the application of metadata and semantic web technologies to facilitate new forms of close, distant, and social reading and interpretation. In addition to his research activities, Walsh has over ten years experience as a developer, manager, and librarian working on digital scholarly projects. Current research projects include The Swinburne Project, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton , and Comic Book Markup Language.

In 2003, John Unsworth was named Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with appointments as Professor in GSLIS, in the department of English, and on the Library faculty. During the previous ten years, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. He received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1988. In 1990, at NCSU, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture (now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as part of Project Muse). He also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, co-chaired the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, and served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

Jessica Pressman is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. She specializes in 20th and 21st century experimental American literature, digital literature, and media theory. She received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. From 2002-2004, she served as Associate Director and, from 2001-2002, as Programs Director for the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). She is the co-founder of the Yale Media Studies Collective and the faculty convener of the Yale English Department’s Theory & Media Studies Colloquium. She is completing a manuscript titled Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media and starting a new book project on bookishness in 21st-century print and digital literature. http://jessicapressman.commons.yale.edu.

Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn professor of modern Dutch book history at the University of Leiden. Until the tyranny of the distance between Australia and Europe forced him to ponder their potential for asynchronous two-way communication in 1987 he had carefully steered clear of computers. He has taught TEI and humanities computing courses since 1996, co-founded the Electronic Text Centre Leiden in 1997 (and was on its board of directors till it ceased its activities in 2002), and currently coordinates the Book and Digital Media Studies MA programme at Leiden. Among his research interests is the history of textual transmission, with special emphasis on the (dis)continuities in the current transition from print to digital media.

Stéfan Sinclair is an Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at McGill University. His areas of interest include 20th Century French literature (especially Oulipo), computer-assisted text-analysis, literary databases and educational technologies. He is the creator of online Digital Humanities tools such as HyperPo: Electronic Text Reading Environment, LePatron: French Writing Assistant, and SatorBase: Topoï in French Literature from 1200-1800, as well as contributor to projects such as the Text Analysis Portal for Research. His Ph.D. in French Literature is from Queen's University (2000), his M.A. in French literature is from the University of Victoria (1995), and his honours B.A. in French is from the University of British Columbia (1994).

Juan Garcés is the Academic Coordinator of the Göttingen Centre of Digital Humanities at Göttingen University (http://www.gcdh.de). After studying theology in Giessen and Marburg, Germany, he received a doctorate in Biblical Studies from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2003. He has since gained experience in the field of Digital Humanities as analyst, consultant, and adviser for digitally-based research projects, particular in the field of Greek texts. Before coming to Göttingen University, he worked for the ReScript Project at the Institute of Historical Studies, University of London, and as Project Manager of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Projects at the British Library. His grounding in Digital Humanities comes from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, which awarded him an MA in Digital Humanities. He is one of the founding members of the Digital Classicist (http://www.digitalclassicist.org/), the organiser of the Open Source Critical Editions workshop, and co-author of the forthcoming article 'Open Source Critical Editions: a Rationale' (in: Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World, eds. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, Ashgate Press, 2009).

Sarah Buchanan is a librarian and archivist at The Meadows School in Las Vegas, Nevada. She also serves as archivist at The Neon Museum (http://www.neonmuseum.org/). She received her M.L.I.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has teaching experience in Latin. She researches use and accessibility of archival materials, and information resources in the arts and humanities. Since 2010, she has been a contributor to a cooperative effort between the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication (http://library.nyu.edu/fclsc/) and the Library of Congress which links electronic classics texts to LC bibliographic records. Within the digital humanities, her research interests include pedagogy, professional activities, uses of language and epigraphy in public activities, and facilitating learning for all ages.

Jan Christoph Meister was born in Montreal, Canada to German parents and grew up in Canada, Germany and Turkey. After obtaining his Dr.phil. in German Literature at Hamburg University in 1985 he worked for ten years at the University of the Witwatersand in Johannesburg, South Africa which he left as an Associate Professor in 1995. From 1995 to 1998 he worked as project manager in a civil engineering firm in Germany and as a free-lance software and website developer. In 1998 he re-entered academic life, obtaining his Habilitation at Hamburg University in 2001 with a part narratological, part HC-based study on 'Computing Action' which analyses and computationally models readerly construction of action in fictional narratives. From 2001 to 2005 he participated in and eventually lead two major German Research Foundation funded projects on the logic of time constructs in narrative texts and Story Generator Algorithms. In 2006 he took up a position as Professor of German and Humanities Computing at Munich University, and from Fall of that year a Professorship in German Literature, Theory of Literature and Humanities Computing at his old alma mater Hamburg University. While Story Generators and Virtual Narratives continue to fascinate him his activites now also include eScience and eLearning. He is a co-opted member of the current ALLC executive.

Amy Johnson is a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at Brown University.