2016 Summer Institute Presenters

Miriam Posner

I coordinate and teach in the Digital Humanities program at UCLA. I also serve on the executive committee of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and I welcome your suggestions for issues you’d like me to take up. A media scholar who’s interested in science and technology, I’m finishing up a book, Depth Perception, on American medical filmmaking (under contract with UNC Press) and working on a new project related to supply-chain capitalism.

Shawn Averkamp

As Manager of Metadata Services, NYPL Labs at New York Public Library, Shawn Averkamp oversees metadata production and directs the development of metadata infrastructure for NYPL’s unique digital resources. Prior to joining NYPL, she supported metadata management, digital humanities, digital preservation, and data curation at the University of Iowa Libraries as Data Services Librarian and Interim Head of Digital Research & Publishing and as a Metadata Librarian at the University of Alabama Libraries. She earned her MLIS from the University of Iowa and holds a BA in Music from Luther College.

Ben Schmidt

Benjamin Schmidt is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty at the NuLab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research interests are in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His digital humanities research focuses on large-scale text analysis, humanities data visualization, and the challenges and opportunities of reading data itself as a historical source. His current project focuses on re-analyzing the data collected by the 19th-century American state. He also contributes to popular conversations on topics including higher education in the United States, computational detection of anachronisms in historical fiction, and the “crisis” of the humanities.

He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Princeton University, and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University. Further information is available at benschmidt.org.