The nominees
Bios of candidates
Hugh Cayless
Hugh Cayless is the Head of the Research and Development group in the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at UNC Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics and a Master’s in Information Science, both from UNC. He has been involved in Digital Humanities work for nearly 10 years, including development of the EpiDoc standard and related tools which are in use by institutions like Perseus and the University of Chicago. He teaches XML for the UNC School of Information and Library Science and is Past Chair of the Carolinas Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, Hugh would work to increase the visibility of the ACH and its sister organizations by opening up new channels for outreach, perhaps including the creation of local chapters and DH meetups. The success of events like THATCamp suggests there is scope for such expansion, and it would invite participation by people who may not be able to travel to the annual DH meetings.
David Dubin
David Dubin is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where his research interests are in the foundations of information expression and encoding. David has been involved in a number of humanities computing projects, including the BECHAMEL markup semantics project. As co-chair of the 2007 Classification Society meeting in Urbana, David organized joint sessions with the overlapping Digital Humanities meeting, including a workshop on data analysis in the humanities, and a tutorial on cluster analysis and authorship attribution.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, David would work to strengthen ties with our colleagues working in the fields of classification, knowledge representation, and data analysis.
Dominic Forest
Dominic Forest est professeur à l’École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information de l’Université de Montréal. Il y mène des activités de recherche et d’enseignement dans les domaines de la fouille de textes (recherche, extraction, organisation et représentation de l’information) et de la diffusion de l’information numérique (technologies web, architecture de l’information, design et conception de sites Web, Web 2.0). Il est activement impliqué dans plusieurs projets de recherche dans le domaine des humanités numériques (digital humanities). Il est titulaire d’un baccalauréat et d’une maîtrise en philosophie, ainsi que d’un doctorat en informatique cognitive.
Dominic Forest is a faculty member at École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information at Université de Montréal. He is involved in teaching and research in the fields of text mining (information retrieval, extraction, organisation and visualization) and digital information analysis and diffusion (information architecture, web design, Web 2.0). He is actively involved in various national and international digital humanities research projects. Dominic Forest holds a BA and MA in philosophy and a Ph.D. in cognitive computer science.
Amanda Gailey
I am an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia, where I teach American literature and humanities computing. I co-edit a digital archive, Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age, which will go public later this academic year. I co-chair the TEI’s Manuscript Special Interest Group (with Malte Rehbein and Elena Pierazzo) and the Americanist Editorial Board of NINES (with Andrew Jewell) and am the Secretary/Treasurer of Digital Americanists. Formerly I was the associate director of the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis, where I managed the Spenser Archive and helped with long-term institutional planning for digital archives. I also worked on the Walt Whitman Archive for several years as a PhD student at the University of Nebraska, where I received my degree in 2006.
At the University of Georgia I am in charge of a three-course undergraduate and graduate sequence in humanities computing and serve on several master’s and doctoral committees. I am working on a book project that examines how editors working in both print and digital media have helped shape the canon of nineteenth-century American poetry.
If elected to ACH I would support ACH’s efforts to reach new members, especially students and early career scholars. I believe that humanities computing should occupy a more central place in the humanities curriculum, even at institutions without extensive infrastructural support for digital projects.
Matt Jockers
I was elected to the ACH council in 2007 to fill a one-year vacancy left by Melissa Terras when she moved into the Vice President’s position. Over the course of the year, I have gotten up to speed on ACH protocols, served as a Mentor, and signed on to several ACH committees. Most important among these committees is the Fortier Prize committee of which I am this year’s Chair. I jumped at the chance to serve on this committee and am enthusiastic about the role I will play in encouraging our young scholars.
By all accounts, times are good for the Digital Humanities: our work is being profiled in the mainstream press, resistance to computational methodologies is disappearing (even at the MLA!), and graduate students are more eager than ever to adopt computational approaches. I am excited by these trends and believe that this is an opportune time for ACH to continue its outreach to “new adopters.” I would be delighted to continue serving on the Executive Council and would like very much to help the organization nurture and motivate young scholars and old converts alike.
Playing such a role is not entirely foreign to me. I hold an unusual position at Stanford where I am both a Consulting Professor and an “embedded” Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) within the Department of English. In my capacity as ATS, I serve as a consultant and guide to English Department faculty and graduate students who are interested in employing technical approaches or methodologies in their literary research. At times I collaborate directly with my colleagues on projects that they have hatched; at other times I work in a missionary role, keeping my colleagues up to date on technological innovations and helping them to identify areas where their research might benefit from computational muscle.
As a professor, I teach courses in humanities computing and Irish literature, and I run the collaborative “Beyond Search: Literary Studies and the Digital Library” workshop at Stanford. My research is focused on large scale, corpus-oriented text analysis: data-mining, text-mining, stylistic analysis, authorship attribution, and literary georeferencing.
More info can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/~mjockers
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Matthew Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), an applied think-tank for the digital humanities. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He serves on the steering committee of centerNet, is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly, and a local co-organizer of the Digital Humanities 2009 conference.
Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature, virtual worlds, serious games and simulations, textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008. Much of his work now focuses on born-digital archiving and preservation: he is principal investigator for the NEH funded start-up “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use” and is also a co-investigator on an NDIIPP-funded project devoted to Preserving Virtual Worlds. He oversees work on the Deena Larsen collection at MITH, a vast personal archive of hardware and software furnishing a cross-section of the electronic writing community during its key formative years, roughly 1985–1995. He is a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
As a member of the ACH Executive Council, Matt would work to further strengthen ties to emerging neighbor communities such as electronic literature, game studies, and software studies. He also has a particular interest in advocacy for hiring, tenure, and promotion issues.
Elena Pierazzo
Elena Pierazzo is Research Associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. She works as part of the CCH Digital Texts Team and is involved in many different research projects, such as Hofmeister XIX, the Jane Austen Project (transcription and digital publication of autograph manuscripts), CRSBI (Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, LangScape, and many others. Her work mostly concerns project design, XML analysis and development (DTD, Schemas, encoding models), XSLT programming, XML-to-print technologies, pre-processing, teaching (Digital Publishing, both at BA and MA level), and training activities.
Elena graduated from the University of Venice in 1996 and completed her PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italian Philology in 2001. In 2002 she was awarded a one-year fellowship at Villa I Tatti (Florence, Italy), the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. In 2000 she started working for the Italian Department at the University of Pisa. Here her teaching activities included Italian Linguistics and Text Encoding, while her research interests were focused on scholarly digital and printed editions and digital humanities in general. She coordinated many research projects, including Opere Lemmatizzate di Dante, Epistolario di Giacomo Puccini, BaDaLi (Banca Dati Lingua Giovanile, and Opera Liber. Since then she has been involved in the TEI Special Interest Group for Manuscripts, of which she has recently become co-chair.
Allen Renear
Allen Renear is Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches courses in information modeling, formal ontology, and digital publishing. Prior to joining GSLIS he was Director of the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group. He has served on the Advisory Board and several working groups of the Text Encoding Initiative and as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. His current research focus is on data curation in the humanities and theoretical problems in the development of ontologies for cultural objects. He received a BA from Bowdoin College and an MA and PhD from Brown University, all in philosophy.
Katherine L. Walter
Katherine L. Walter, professor and department chair of Digital Initiatives & Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Libraries, is co-director of the innovative Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. A joint initiative of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the UNL College of Arts & Sciences, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is advancing collaborative, interdisciplinary research by creating unique digital content, developing open-source text analysis and visualization tools, and encouraging the use and refinement of international standards for metadata. In her role as co-director at UNL, Walter works closely with faculty in the center and with faculty in the departments of English, history, anthropology, libraries, religion, and modern languages and literatures. She has directed many humanities research projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, including several multi-institutional digital humanities research projects. Currently, Walter co-chairs centerNet’s steering committee and is a director-at-large for the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association.
As the member of the ACH Executive Council, Kay would serve as another liaison to centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers. Her significant fund-raising, organizational, and budgetary experience would strengthen the ACH Executive Council, as would her experience in promoting digital scholarship through programs and activities such as the annual Nebraska Digital Workshop, an international competition to identify and recognize the best early-career digital scholarship; Model Internships in Digital Humanities Centers, an IMLS-funded multiinstitutional grant to introduce graduate students in information science to the world of digital scholarship; CDRH’s development of “Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure,” which we hope will have broader implications for the field; and through her mentoring of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and pre-tenure faculty in digital humanities and librarianship.