Santa has arrived early this year at MITH and gifted us with four wonderful new hires. I’m delighted to be able to introduce them now to the greater MITH Community:

  • Travis Brown (@travisbrown), who is joining us as an R&D developer, holds an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is beginning a dissertation on the use of digital tools and methods in literary studies. While at the University of Texas he worked as an editor for the Walt Whitman Archive and was the lead developer of eComma, a web application for collaborative textual annotation. He also participated in a range of projects in UT’s Computational Linguistics Lab, where he developed tools for dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and toponym resolution. He is particularly interested in using techniques from computational linguistics to aid in the exploration and visualization of large collections of literary and historical texts.
  • Seth Denbo (@seth_denbo) joins us as a Project Coordinator. Seth is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century England with an interest in digital sources for the study of history. His first experience of digital humanities was the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project “Pockets of History.” As Research Fellow he was responsible for the project website (vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/pockets), which gathers images and information about vernacular objects and texts from across the UK. For the past few years he has been Research Associate in the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London where he has been engaged in strategic planning for the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH –www.dariah.eu) , an EU project to build a large-scale international infrastructure for digital humanities research.
  • Kirsten Keister (@lamppostdesign), who joins us as a half-time Web Designer, holds a Bachelor of Art in Graphic Design from Gordon College, where she acquired a strong background in fine art and photography. She also gained valuable professional experience by interning at Return Design, an entrepreneurial firm that serves non-profit and art-related clients. After graduation, Kirsten joined the Design Center at her alma mater. She worked with a small team to provide design support for college departments and administrative offices. In 2008, she founded Lamppost Creative, which specializes in identity and branding, print design, and web design and development.
  • Jim Smith (@jgsmith), our new Software Architect, holds a M.A. in English as well as an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Physics. Before joining MITH, he was the Digital Humanities Lead Developer for the Digital Humanities Program in the Texas A&M University College of Liberal Arts where he was responsible for building and deploying infrastructure to support the digital humanities. As part of his work at Texas A&M University, Jim developed a digital humanities platform that is serving as a foundational element in a course he will be teaching at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2011 on “Data Discovery, Management, and Presentation.”

They are a wonderful group, and we very much look forward to working with them all! Stay tuned for even more MITH job news to follow, including a search to replace the irreplaceable Doug Reside, who is leaving MITH to become the first ever Digital Curator for the Performing Arts at the New York Public Library.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working on a new holiday algorithm to sort out who has been naughty or nice. We’ll let you know how that turns out and wish you all very happy holidays!

Neil