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 Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University, where she is also a Professor of the Practice in the English Department and the Director of the Women Writers Project. 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.

A user and programmer of digital machines since the 1970s, Wendell Piez is a graduate of the American School in Japan and of Yale College (MC 1984), where he received a BA in Classics (Ancient Greek) and studied language, linguistics, philosophy and literature. From 1985 to 1998 he studied and taught at Rutgers University, where he specialized in English literature, critical theory, poetics and rhetoric. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1991 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). In 1998, he joined Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a leading consultancy in the domain of documentary text encoding, where he built tools, participated in design and development initiatives, and provided technical support for operations including the annual conference series Extreme Markup Languages (2001-2007) and Balisage: The Markup Conference (since 2008). In 2012, he set out to work as an independent consultant; during this time he also developed demonstrations and open-source, commodity tooling including Luminescent (a LMNL processing platform), JATSKit for oXygen XML Editor (a JATS editing and publishing environment), and XSweet (a docx-to-html document converter). He has held academic appointments at Rutgers and UIUC (LIS).

Since 2018 Wendell has been employed by the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) of the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). There he is helping to develop specifications and tooling to support the electronic processing of documentary and structured data in the systems security domain. He maintains code repositories and demonstrations on Github (wendellpiez) and gitlab.coko.foundation (wendell).

Melissa Terras is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh‘s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, leading digital aspects of CAHSS research as Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society, and is Director of Research in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts, humanities, and wider cultural heritage and information environment that would otherwise be impossible. She is an Honorary Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL Department of Information Studies, where she was employed from 2003-2017. Books include “Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts” (2006, Oxford University Press), “Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader” (Ashgate 2013), and “Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature" (Cambridge University Press 2018). She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and Trustee of the National Library of Scotland. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras.

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.

John A. Walsh is an associate 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.

John Unsworth is the Dean of Libraries, University Librarian, and Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Prior to coming to Virginia, he served as Vice Provost, University Librarian, and Chief Information Officer at Brandeis University, and before that as 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. 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 and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University and directs SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative. She is the author of Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford UP, 2014), co-author, with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistocope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa UP, 2015), and co-editor, with N. Katherine Hayles, of Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era (Minnesota UP, 2013). She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Her full CV can be found at http://www.jessicapressman.com.

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. He edits book series on publishing and scholarly communication, and is the author of Changing our textual minds: Towards a digital order of knowledge (Manchester UP, 2011).

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).

Sarah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool at the University of Missouri. Her teaching and research interests within digital classics and digital humanities include pedagogy, professional activities, and resources for classical archaeology and epigraphy. As a member of the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication, she contributes to the FCLSC's ongoing projects to enhance catalog records and promote serendipitous discovery of classical scholars' archival papers. http://faculty.missouri.edu/buchanans/

Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History Division at Columbia University, and one of the founders of the Studio@Butler, a technology atelier for faculty, students and librarians. He has published in journals across the Atlantic and the Americas, while sustaining an open and robust online research presence. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars' Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia. He now serves as vice-chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative, and is actively engaged in digital humanities projects at Columbia University and around the world.