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 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 hales 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 an Associate Professor of Humanities Computing and Multimedia in the Department of Communication Studies and Multmedia at McMaster University, Ontario, 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. With colleagues at McMaster University he set up an undergraduate Multimedia programme. He is currently the project leader for the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) funded project TAPoR, a Text Analysis Portal for Research, which is developing a text tool portal for researchers who work with electronic texts. 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. He is now the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Humanities and Social Science Computing.

John A. Walsh is the Associate Director for Projects and Services of the Indiana University Digital Library Program, where he coordinates the activities of the program and manages select projects and initiatives. He has been working with digital text and image collections and other digital library content creation and delivery for over ten years. His main area of expertise is in the development of XML full-text literary and humanities digital collections. Current projects include The Swinburne Project, a digital collection of the works of nineteenth-century British poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; the Chymistry of Isaac Newton, a digital edition of Isaac Newton's alchemical writings; and CBML, or Comic Book Markup Language, a TEI-based XML vocabulary for encoding comic books and graphic novels. He has a Ph.D. in English literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century British poetry, from Indiana University. John is active in the digital humanities field, researching the application of XML-related technologies to the preservation, presentation, and analysis of literary texts and pop culture media.

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.

Matthew Kirschenbaum is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Acting Associate Director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). A long-time member of the digital humanities scene, he works in both theoretical and applied contexts. His book Mechanisms--about the erasure, survivability, and variability of electronic texts--should be out from the MIT Press in early 2007; he is also a lead developer on the nora project, a multi-institutional initiative to bring text mining and visualization to bear on digital library collections. His other projects include the Virtual Lightbox, a repository system for archiving creative versions of contemporary literary drafts in progress, and, long ago, the William Blake Archive. He is a blogger and an avid board gamer (where he unwinds by manipulating formal systems with paper, plastic, and cardboard).

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 of Multimedia at McMaster 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).

Richard Giordano is a lecturer in the Department of Management at Birkbeck College. He is not British, but was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, as were Philip Roth, Stephen Crane, Jerry Lewis and many other notable Americans. Before coming to Birkbeck in 2004, he was Manager of Applied Research at the Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University. From 1997 through 2001 he was a lecturer at the Center for Innovation in Product Development (CIPD) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1990 through 1998, he was a lecturer in information systems at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He is now an external lecturer at Manchester, teaching e-Commerce Technologies to postgraduates. He began his career at Columbia University, where he was a librarian systems analyst at the Columbia University Libraries, and researcher at the Center for the Social Sciences. During the 1990's, he was a member of the TEI Text Documentation Committee, and was chiefly responsible for the P3 version of the TEI Structured Header. His research and teaching interests are in participatory design and the application of social theory to the process of design, particularly the design, use, and evaluation of web-based distributed knowledge environments.

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.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University. Her dissertation--Out of the Closet? The Discourse of Visibility, Sexuality, and Queer Representation in American Film, Television, and New Media, 1969-Present--includes a discussion of topics reaching from the similarities of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and of Ellen DeGeneres' coming out in the late 1990s to the relationship between queerness, violence, and the myth of the American West in films such as Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain. She also researches the history and theory of New Media, especially regarding new possibilities of social and erotic identifications arising out of online social networks. Before coming to Brown, Melanie received a Master's in English Language and Literatures from Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet in Duesseldorf, Germany.