The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is pleased to announce the appointment of Travis Brown as Assistant Director of Research and Development. Travis previously served as R&D Software Developer at MITH. As Assistant Director, Travis will lead MITH’s research and development initiatives, as part of our focus on innovative research agendas in text and image analytics for cultural heritage corpora, and in order to support MITH’s overall commitment to further development of the digital humanities.
Director Neil Fraistat says, “Travis has become an intellectual leader at MITH, a role formally recognized by this well deserved promotion. We are delighted that he will help chart MITH’s future course long into his future.”
Travis holds an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is in the midst of 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. Travis 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.