2017 Fellows
Hannah Alpert-Abrams (University of Texas at Austin) received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation and Latin American Studies, she will help to develop post-custodial archiving practices at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. This will include working to redesign and improve ingestion workflows for the digital Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, and to help develop best practices for transnational, post-custodial digitization projects with the Latin American Digital Initiatives. In addition, she will continue to support access and discoverability for the Primeros Libros collection of digital facsimiles of early colonial American printed books.
Crystal Andrea Felima (University of Florida) earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies Data Curation, she will serve as a team member of the UF’s Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) to facilitate campus-wide data curation activities and to forge new collaborations to extend the George A. Smathers Libraries’ capacity to support research and technology initiatives at the university. She will work with experts in Caribbean Studies to identify needs for data curation and extend support and content within dLOC. She will also consult with researchers and scholars on emerging trends and best practices in digital humanities, data curation, and e-scholarship in Caribbean Studies.
Jeanine Finn (Claremont Colleges) received her Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. As Data Services Postdoctoral Fellow, she will work collaboratively with librarians to develop a robust suite of data services to support student and faculty research across the seven Claremont Colleges. Her work will include a needs assessment with recommendations for a scalable and sustainable set of data services and programs. She will also develop and implement a scaffolded training program for librarians and researchers across all disciplines and work with faculty on integrating data literacy into their courses.
Alex Galarza (Haverford College) earned his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, he will collaborate with the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) in Guatemala City, Guatemala to create a digital archive of materials relevant to human rights and historical memory. He will provide training and expert technical assistance with the digitization and data maintenance process, advising on best practices for the digital archiving of materials and provision of access to a local and global community. As project manager, he will work with the library’s digital scholarship team as well as faculty and students.
Lorena Gauthereau (University of Houston) received her Ph.D. in English from Rice University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, she will work with the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project (Recovery Project) to locate, preserve and disseminate the written legacy of Latinas and Latinos produced in the United States from colonial times until 1960. At the Recovery Project, she will help establish a Digital Humanities Center for Latina/o Studies. During her two-year fellowship, she will also work with Arte Público Press to implement services in data curation to create enhanced digital publications of historical and contemporary materials relevant to Latina/o Studies. She will serve as the Recovery Project’s digital humanities liaison and help develop and present workshops for the University of Houston community.
Eric Kaltman (Carnegie Mellon University) received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has worked as a project manager for the Game Citation and Metadata Project, a multi-year Institute of Museum and Library Services project devoted to the development of metadata and citation practices for games and software for research institutions, libraries, and scholars. As a former software archivist for Stanford University, his research is devoted to supporting archival and collections practices that serve game studies, software studies, and historians of science and technology, including work with the National Endowment for the Humanities on cultural software appraisal and preservation practices. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for the Sciences, he will collaborate with faculty, students, library staff, and technologists to advance CMU’s research data management strategy, with a specific focus on the physical and life sciences.
Jessica Linker (Bryn Mawr College) received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Connecticut. As Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Digital Scholarship, she will promote the use of digital technologies and resources for humanities research, teaching, and intellectual engagement. She will work closely with a team of Library & Information Technology Services staff, faculty, and students to support the College’s vision for incorporating digital technologies in innovative, collaborative research, teaching, and learning. She will also promote collaborative projects in the humanities and connect digital humanities projects with the College’s digital competencies framework for students.
Mario H. Ramirez (Indiana University) received his Ph.D. in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, he will initially focus on the data migration of the Archivo Mesoamericano, a digital archive of annotated historical and ethnographic video materials created in collaboration with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico, the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America (IHNCA) in Nicaragua, and the Museum of the Word and the Image (MUPI) in El Salvador, each of which hold the source materials. He will also work to further knowledge in data curation across various disciplines and departments, identifying best practices and defining workflows.
Emma Slayton (Carnegie Mellon University) earned her Ph.D. in Archaeology at Leiden University. As Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Visualization and Curation, she will work with faculty, library staff, technologists, and students to advance data visualization strategies at CMU’s Library. Along with university partners, she will develop and promote a sustainable approach to data visualization tools for use by stakeholders across the university. She will lead a wide-ranging search into the current scope of data visualization research on campus, including the kinds of tools and practices currently being used. She will also collaborate with students, faculty, and staff to devise and execute a data visualization resource and service packet for the Library to support teaching and learning.
Neil Weijer (Johns Hopkins University) received his Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. As Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Premodern and Early Modern Studies, he will work on the Mellon-funded research project The Archaeology of Reading, which seeks to make the annotations in early modern books accessible for scholars and students alike. His research for the project will focus on a series of books owned by the late Elizabethan scholar and polymath John Dee. He will design a collaborative project on the reading and annotating of medieval manuscript histories. He will also work closely with the collections of rare books and manuscripts in the Hopkins Libraries, programming exhibitions from the collections, assisting faculty in research and teaching, and cataloguing the Libraries’ medieval holdings.
Alex Wermer-Colan (Temple University) received his Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. As Digital Scholarship and Content Area Specialist, he will collaborate with faculty and students, librarians and digital scholars, to define projects and help shape programs that will establish the Digital Scholarship Center’s role in the wide-ranging academic and research environments at Temple University. While consulting with faculty, organizing training workshops, mentoring students, and building networks for research and pedagogy across the university, he will work in the areas of textual analysis, data mining and visualization, network analysis, archival digitization, media production, and project scoping and management.
Chris J. Young (University of Toronto) received his Ph.D. in Information from the University of Toronto. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, he will assist in building the University of Toronto’s Digital Humanities Network by developing scholarly events and creating networking opportunities for faculty, librarians, and students. In addition, he will be researching the gendered and racialized features programmed into the default settings of predominantly used game engines by the video game industry.Continuing Current Fellows
Yasmin AlNoamany (University of California, Berkeley) received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University. During her two-year fellowship, she will lead original research and engage in outreach in the areas of software curation, data science, and digital research methods. Drawing on the expertise of colleagues across UC Berkeley, including the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) research unit, and the UC system she will contribute to library services including outreach, program development, and technical efforts related to digital and data-focused research as well as research data management.
John Borghi (California Digital Library) earned his Ph.D. in Integrative Neuroscience from Stony Brook University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, he will explore issues around preservation and publication of non-traditional scholarly outputs, notably software and data. He will work with library and information technology staff; faculty and students; researchers affiliated with museums; organized research centers such as the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Long Term Ecological Research sites (e.g., the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER and the Moorea Coral Reef LTER); the UC Natural Reserve System; and various field stations and extension centers.
Paul Broyles (North Carolina State University) received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. During his Postdoctoral Fellowship in Data Curation for Medieval Studies, he will serve as a liaison among academic departments, faculty researchers, and the Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) Department working on three NCSU-based projects: the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET); the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA); and the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC). He will also serve as a liaison between NCSU and partners at other universities participating in the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), a meta-federation comprising MESA, the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn), 18thConnect, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), and Modernist Networks (ModNets).
Alberto Campagnolo (Library of Congress) received his Ph.D. in Digital Humanities from the University of the Arts London. Based in the Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD), he will work in a collaborative environment with leaders in preservation science techniques to render, capture and link previously unknown material and content data from Medieval collections, linking digitally rendered data and information with the original object through an integrated approach to data and software management and preservation. In addition to working with preservation chemists and special collections curators, he will work with Dr. Emiliano Degl’Innocenti, the lead researcher on CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure), a broad collaboration between historians, research infrastructures and technical experts working together towards the consolidation of e-humanities infrastructures in the context of DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities).
Alexandra Chassanoff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) earned her Ph.D. in Information and Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As Software Curation Fellow, she will lead a comprehensive exploration of the scope and current practice of software curation to inform potential investments in library collections and services. The primary focus of her fellowship will be to contribute to the development of a software curation model for the MIT Libraries built on representative use cases. She will work with collaborators in the digital curation community and in MIT’s departments, labs, and centers, such as the Composite Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and the Media Lab.
Erin Connelly (University of Pennsylvania) received her Ph.D. in Medieval English from the University of Nottingham. She will work in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) on several overlapping initiatives that explore both the materiality of medieval manuscripts as within a digital context and the possibilities of analyzing texts that the codices contain. These initiatives include Collation Visualization, a developing set of tools that enable scholars to virtually model and visualize the physical construction of manuscripts, relating the models to digital images and content; Digital Editions, a project to create image-based editions of medieval manuscripts from Penn’s and other collections and publish them online; and Manuscript Ebooks, an ongoing project to create ebooks (in epub format) from manuscripts in OPenn and other open source repositories.
Jennifer Grayburn (Temple University) received her Ph.D. in Art and Architecture from the University of Virginia. As Digital Scholarship and Content Area Specialist, she will work in close collaboration with the team supporting operations and services for the libraries’ recently established Digital Scholarship Center, applying both technical and content area expertise to define projects and shape the programs that will establish the Center’s role in the academic and research environment at the university. She will also work in the areas of textual analysis, geocoding and GIS applications embracing a variety of data and digital object types, data visualization, data analysis, and data mining, linked data and metadata scheme development, digitization, media authoring and production, and project scoping and project management.
Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati (Vanderbilt University) received her Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Virginia. During her two-year fellowship, she will work with faculty, graduate students, researchers, and librarians in the collaborative process of developing the library’s support for data curation services and assisting researchers with understanding and following best practices for data management and preservation. She will help to develop the library’s emerging data services program by serving as a representative of and advocate for the social scientific community. She will also research best practices in mark-up languages, metadata standards, digital preservation, and computational analysis of datasets and will have regular opportunities to lead workshops on topics of personal interest.
Jacob Levernier (University of Pennsylvania) received his Ph.D in Psychology from the University of Oregon. Based in Penn’s Library Technology Services Division, he will collaborate with collection curators, metadata specialists, business analysts, information technology developers, and a computer scientist to study fundamental challenges in discovery, content delivery, assessment, and information presentation. As Bollinger Fellow in Library Innovation, he will work with library systems, users, and troves of data to explore and help design new forms of data-driven support for research and learning that may influence catalogs and cataloging practice, researcher profiling systems, human interface design, repository tools, and the use of social media in understanding information seeking behavior and the use of data. In addition, he will have input into cooperative initiatives of the Penn Libraries and its peers as they work to unlock the benefits of linked data and shared discovery networks.
Zack Lischer-Katz (University of Oklahoma) received his Ph.D. in Communication and Information from Rutgers University. As Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Virtual Reality Preservation and Archiving for the Sciences, he will work in a team-based environment to conduct advanced research and work in digital archiving and preservation of virtual reality (VR) technologies used in visualizing research data in the sciences. He will be responsible for teaching and training students, staff and faculty in how to use VR technologies to visualize research data. He will also work with the University of Oklahoma Libraries team to prepare, package and help archive the VR technologies (hardware, software, techniques, tools, and methodologies) used in this work.
Jacqueline Quinless (University of Victoria) received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Victoria. During her two-year fellowship, she will work with digital scholars, researchers, and librarians to build data curation capacity in the University Libraries by helping researchers to prepare their data for compliance with funding agency mandates and assisting with faculty deposits to the Libraries’ Dataverse repository. She will also advise on issues related to data preparation and publication, including format migrations, data description standards, and publishing standards. Additional responsibilities include helping to develop toolsets for data manipulation and visualization, providing learning support in the Digital Scholarship Commons, and helping students understand and use tools for data analysis and visualization.
Mara Sedlins (Duke University) earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Washington. Jointly appointed by the Duke University Libraries and Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), she will develop best practices for managing a wide variety of research data in the social sciences including administrative data, health data, survey data, and web based data among other data types. During her two-year fellowship, she will also evaluate tools and platforms for data management, write documentation, and aid in dissemination of best practices to the wider campus community. In addition, she will partner with libraries staff and technologists to translate data curation requirements into a sustainable approach to curating social science research data and to help train graduate students and faculty in data curation. Her work will culminate in defining, modeling, and testing workflows and capacities necessary for the sustainable curation and long-term management and re-use of social science data materials.
Mason Scott Thompson (U.S. Agency for International Development) received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Arizona State University. As Postdoctoral Research Associate, he will serve as the primary subject matter expert for ensuring that USAID’s official data repository, the Development Data Library (DDL), meets the research needs of internal and external stakeholders, fulfills standards established among academics and other communities of experts, and observes best practices in library and data curation sciences. He will consult regularly with internal and external stakeholders in the development data community and provide USAID with action plans and draft guidance on shaping standard processes and procedures, articulating and developing instructional training materials, and applying findings to USAID’s data curation efforts.
Katherine Thornton (Yale University) received her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. During her two-year fellowship, she will establish best practices and prototype standards for identifying and documenting software, disk images, and emulator configurations. Her work will enable the preservation and continued use of older software for activities such as accessing software-dependent content, validating research results that depend on software, and reproducing software-dependent scientific research. She will use science and social science software as the initial examples for testing documentation approaches and will work with partners across Yale and within the wider community to validate the approaches they have developed. She will also teach or co-teach a course on software curation or a related topic in the computer science department.
Heather Wacha (University of Wisconsin-Madison) earned her Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Iowa. Based in the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, she will help develop and implement long-term data sustainability plans for the DM: Tools for Digital Annotation and Linking and Virtual Mappa projects as digital entities. She will identify resources in UW-Madison’s special collections medieval holdings, create cross-walkable digital surrogates and metadata, and curate these items within DM and Virtual Mappa for researchers, teachers, and students. She will also play a vital role in discussions surrounding the final stages of backend development and long-term data sustainability within both projects, including publishing publicly accessible versions of the content.
Jeffrey Wayno (Columbia University) received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. During his two-year fellowship, he will work principally on developing ChartEx (Chart Excavator), a tool for the analysis of large data sets of medieval legal documents. He will help the ChartEx team identify key collections for use in the next phase of the project and explore existing and new automated techniques for data preparation while also assisting in the identification and preparation of at least three additional corpora of documents appropriate for use with the project. He will continue work underway in the Digital Humanities Center on curating digitized collections of medieval sources, particularly legal documents and canon law treatises and will also contribute to the History in Action program, Columbia’s portion of the Mellon Foundation/American Historical Association Career Diversity Initiative by developing workshops on digital data curation for students in History and other departments.
Former Fellows
Jessica Aberle (Lehigh University)
Laura Aydelotte (University of Pennsylvania)
Katherine Akers (University of Michigan)
Marlene Allen (University of California, Los Angeles)
Ali Anooshahr (University of California, Los Angeles)
Erin Aspenlieder (McMaster University)
Andrew Asher (Bucknell University)
Michael Bales (Weill Cornell Medical College)
Sayan Bhattacharyya (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/HathiTrust Research Center)
Reid Boehm (University of Notre Dame)
Alexandra Bolintineanu (University of Toronto)
Tamar Boyadjian (University of California, Los Angeles)
Meaghan Brown (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Benjamin Dewayne Branch (Purdue University)
Peter Broadwell (UCLA)
Jason Brodeur (McMaster University)
Anne Bruder (Bryn Mawr College)
Marta Brunner (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jonathan Cachat (University of California, Davis)
Scout Calvert (UCLA)
Gloria Chacon (University of California, Los Angeles)
Daniel Chamberlain (Occidental College)
Amy Chen (University of Alabama)
Jacquelyn Clements (University of Toronto)
Lauren Coats (Lehigh University)
Arica Coleman (Johns Hopkins University)
Thomas Cook (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City)
Sigrid Anderson Cordell (Princeton University)
Margarita Corral (Brandeis University)
Brian Croxall (Emory University)
Danielle Culpepper (Johns Hopkins University)
Morgan Daniels (Vanderbilt University)
Matthew Davis (North Carolina State University)
Gabrielle Dean (Johns Hopkins University)
Rachel Deblinger (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Melissa Dinsman (University of Notre Dame)
Erica Doerhoff (Pepperdine University)
Anne Donlon (Emory University)
Vessela Ensberg (University of California Los Angeles)
Jodi Flores (Arizona State University)
Nikolaus Fogle (Villanova University)
Arthur (Mitch) Fraas (University of Pennsylvania)
Amanda French (North Carolina State University)
Kristy Golubiewski-Davis (Middlebury College)
Melissa Grafe (Lehigh University)
Patricia Hswe (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Ben Huang (University of Southern California)
Korey Jackson (University of Michigan)
Timothy F. Jackson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Lori Jahnke (The College of Physicians of Philadelphia)
Annie Johnson (Lehigh University)
Carrie Johnston (Bucknell University)
Janet Kaaya (University of California, Los Angeles)
Michaela Kelly (Lafayette College)
Caroline E. Kelley (University of California, Los Angeles)
Spencer Keralis (University of North Texas)
Bommae Kim (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City)
Inna Kouper (Indiana University)
John Kratz (California Digital Library)
Dimitros Latsis (Internet Archive)
Matthew J. Lavin (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
John Maclachlan (McMaster University)
Cecily Marcus (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Emily McGinn (Layfayette College)
Monica Mercado (Bryn Mawr College)
Chreston Miller (Virginia Tech)
Kelly Miller (University of Virginia)
Lori Miller (Appalachian College Association)
Paige Morgan (McMaster University)
Michelle Morton (University of California, Berkeley)
Alice Motes (University of Minnesota)
Anjum Najmi (University of North Texas)
Ekaterina Neklyudova (McMaster University)
Natsuko Hayashi Nicholls (University of Michigan)
Meg Norcia (Lehigh University)
Tim Norris (University of Miami)
Charlotte Nunes (Southwestern University)
Julia Osman (Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records)
Jessica Otis (Carnegie Mellon University)
Philip Palmer (UCLA)
Elizabeth Parke (University of Toronto)
Jennifer Parrott (Bucknell University)
Kyle Parry (University of Rochester)
Alicia Peaker (Middlebury College)
Sarah Pickle (Pennsylvania State University)
Allyson Polsky-McCabe (Johns Hopkins University)
Wesley Raabe (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Hannah Rasmussen (Harvard Business School)
Katie Rawson (University of Pennsylvania)
Andrew Rechnitz (Southwestern University)
Jennifer Redmond (Bryn Mawr College)
Daphnée Rentfrow (Yale University)
Fernando Rios (Johns Hopkins University)
Kendall Roark (University of Alberta)
Elizabeth Rodrigues (Temple University)
Tamsyn Rose-Steel (Johns Hopkins University)
Christopher Sawula (University of Alabama)
Meridith Beck Sayre (Indiana University)
Justin Schell (University of Minnesota)
Dawn Schmitz (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Donald Sells (McMaster University)
Fe Consolacion Sferdean (University of Michigan)
Yi Shen (Johns Hopkins University)
Noah Shenker (McMaster University)
Emily Sherwood (Bucknell University)
Rachel E. Shuttlesworth (University of Alabama)
Stephanie Simms (UCLA)
Matthew Sisk (University of Notre Dame)
Plato Smith (University of New Mexico)
Mike Snowdon (McMaster University)
Timothy Stinson (Johns Hopkins University)
Colleen Strawhacker (University of Colorado at Boulder/National Snow and Ice Data Center)
Todd Suomela (University of Alberta)
Yun Tai (University of Virginia) (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Christopher Teeter (McMaster University)
Edward Triplett (Duke University)
Martin Tsang (University of Miami)
Ece Turnator (University of Texas-Austin)
Loren Valterza (University of Notre Dame)
Ana Van Gulick (Carnegie Mellon University)
Mary Lindsay Van Tine (Swarthmore College and University of Pennsylvania)
Christa Vogelius (University of Alabama)
Leila Walker (St. Lawrence University)
Nicole Wagner (McMaster University)
Heather Waldroup (Claremont University Consortium)
Ting Wang (Lehigh University)
Elizabeth Waraksa (University of California, Los Angeles)
Amanda Watson (University of Virginia)
Bridget Whearty (Stanford University)
Susan L. Wiesner (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), (University of Virginia)
Christa Williford (Bryn Mawr College)
Tracie L. Wilson (Bryn Mawr College)
Donna Wrublewski (California Institute of Technology)
Wei Yang (McMaster University)
Qian Zhang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Iskandar Zulkarnain (University of Rochester)