DM Board Elections 2020-2022

Voting closes: Friday 10th July 2020, 23:59 GMT.

To vote in the election you must be one of the subscribers to the Digital Medievalist mailing list. To vote, use the link and the voting token that have been sent to the email address that you have used to register to DM.
Board positions are for two year terms and incumbents may be re-elected. Members of the board are responsible for the overall direction of the organisation. This is a working board and candidates should be willing and able to commit time to Digital Medievalist. For more information about the election procedure, board roles and bylaws, see:

https://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/
https://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/board-roles/
https://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/election-procedures/
https://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/bylaws/

If you have not received your voting link and token, please, email James Harr at jbharr[AT]ncsu.edu

2020-2022 CANDIDATES

LUISE BOREK

My name is Luise Borek and I am a medievalist and digital philologist at TU Darmstadt, Germany. In my dissertation on Arthurian Horses (to be published as a supplement of the Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum, ZfdA) I combined medievalist content with Linked Open Data procedures.
Former research projects include an interdisciplinary collaboration on the Interaction between linguistic and bioinformatics procedures, methods and algorithms based at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities and several years of experience as a member of DARIAH-DE (part of the ESFRI-Project DARIAH-EU) where I coordinated a cluster on Digital Annotation. As a founding member of TaDiRAH (Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities), I have co-developed a taxonomy for the description and indexing of DH resources, which is widely used in the community and is currently being transferred as LOD to the Vocabs Service of DARIAH-EU.
My fields of research include Arthurian Romance, Literary Animal Studies, Digital Editions, Lexicography, Manuscript Studies, Digital Curation, Historical Linguistics as well as Digital Humanities in general. I support open science to help shape a sustainable foundation for the future, which not only connects the data, but also the researchers involved.
ORCID: 0000-0001-5849-374X
Homepage: https://www.luiseborek.de/
Twitter: @luiseborek

TOBIAS HODEL

Tobias Hodel is assistant professor (tenure track) in digital humanities at the University of Berne. He is a medievalist by training and received a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich [Schriftordnungen im Wandel, Konstanz 2020], where he was responsible for the digital edition of Königsfelden abbey as well as the e-learning environment “Ad fontes”, introducing students to paleography and further auxiliary sciences. He was part of the Horizon 2020 project READ (“Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents”) for the state archives of Zurich and responsible for handwritten text recognition models for documents of pre-modernity.
Statement
The use, care, and implementation of digital approaches to problems in the humanities require teamwork. It’s my goal to foster cooperation spanning scholars, scientists, and citizens. Within the study of the Middle Ages, computational approaches have been for decades honed and criticized: The experience, enthusiasm, and openness makes the Digital Medievalist one of the cornerstones of this movement, bringing together scholars from all over the world. It has always been an honor to be part of this undertaking. I would be delighted and motivated to devote time and resources to further our cause by exchanging ideas and best practices and by discussing approaches and solutions.

MIKE KESTEMONT

I enjoy research in computational text and image analysis for the Humanities, in particular for medieval European literature. Authorship attribution and stylistics are my main areas of expertise: in stylometry, we try to design intelligent algorithms which can automatically identify the authors of anonymous texts through the quantitative analysis of individual writing styles. I warmly recommend the documentary about this topic and which we published in the public domain: “Authorship and Stylometry: Hildegard of Bingen” (vimeo.com/70881172). I am an assistant professor (department of literature) at the University of Antwerp and regularly teach workshops on Digital Text Analysis and Programming for the Humanities. Currently, I am co-authoring a monograph on data science for humanists (with Princeton UP) and was involved in co-editing a recent special supplement of Speculum on digital medieval studies. I live in Brussels, code in Python (github.com/mikekestemont), and tweet in English (@Mike_Kestemont).

JOHN MCEWAN

John McEwan is the associate director of the Walter J. Ong S.J. Center for Digital Humanities at Saint Louis University, where his research focuses on charters, seals, and digital imaging technology. He has a Ph.D. in history from Royal Holloway (University of London), where his research explored the charters of thirteenth-century London. He worked on the UK Arts and Humanities Seals in Medieval Wales project, for which he designed an information management system; was a CENDARI fellow at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities; and is currently an editor of the Medieval Londoners Database (https://medievallondoners.ace.fordham.edu/), a prosopographical linked open data project. John launched the Digisig project (www.digisig.org) for medieval seals, which brings together materials from archival and museum collections, and is currently working on applications of reflectance transformation imaging in sigillography.

LAURA MORREALE

Laura Morreale (Ph.D. Fordham University, 2004) is an Independent Scholar and Cultural Historian of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian peninsula, with particular interest in medieval French-language writings outside of the kingdom of France. She is the creator of the French of Italy and French of Outremer websites and a Lead Scholar on their associated web-based studies, including the Oxford Outremer Map, Exploring Place in theFrench of Italy, and the French of Outremer Legal Texts Translation Project. Laura is a co-editor of Middle Ages for Educators, an online resource for medievalists as they integrate digital approaches into their pedagogical practice. She is also the Project Lead on the Digital Documentation Process, a standardized citation and cataloguing system for born-digital projects, and Co-PI of the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME) project based at Harvard University. Recent digital initiatives include the La Sfera International Challenge and the Deiphira Translation Project. Laura is currently the Chair of the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Committee for the Medieval Academy of America (AY 2020-2021), where she also serves as a member of the CARA Executive Committee and one of the organization’s Councillors.
Statement
This is a critical moment for how we as medievalists approach digital work. Whether we are able to capitalize on the collective, although largely involuntary, turn towards the increased reliance upon computer-based scholarly activities will depend on how we present digital scholarship to our fellow medievalists. The work or the Digital Medievalist organization will be crucial to that success. On the one hand, a gentle introduction to how traditional and digital methodologies work together will be an important strategy to welcome medievalist colleagues who have been thrust suddenly into virtual classrooms and research spaces where they feel they do not belong. On the other hand, we must support and foster the work of those who are already well-versed in computational methodologies and whose analytically rigorous digital scholarship sets the standard for the field. Additionally, medievalist scholars working with digital methodologies must also attend to the employment concerns of the scholars we train, to articulate how and why skills gained through digital scholarly efforts can transfer to the workplace. I would be pleased to work with the DM board to welcome new digital medievalists to the field through training projects and programs, to support journal and conferences spaces for the exchange of ideas and research findings, and to communicate with employers and those in the workforce to ensure that future digital medievalists have enough financial stability that allows them to continue to contribute to the field.

NICOLAS PERREAUX

Nicolas Perreaux is a research engineer at LaMOP (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). He defended his thesis in 2014, the initial objective of which was to jointly analyze a set of 550,000 European charters and 8,600 Romanesque buildings, in order to identifying the links between these two documentary corpora. In addition to this approach mixing texts and archeological evidences, it developed various semantic investigations on the links between world perception and socio-spatial transformation in medieval Europe, from the 7th to the 14th century. This experience allowed Nicolas Perreaux to acquire different skills in data and text mining, which led him to obtain three successive postdoctorates, in France (Paris), Germany (Frankfurt) and Belgium (Namur). Between 2008 and today, he has also participated in numerous research programs involving digital methods in medieval history (ANR Espachar, Charcis, Pocram and Omnia, COST WORCK project, CBMA, Dictionnaires topographiques de la France, etc.).  An insatiable collector of ancient texts, he created the corpus of the Cartae Europae Medii Aevi (CEMA), which now includes nearly all the European diplomatic texts previously digitized in text mode – more than 250,000 documents for about 75 million of words. The whole corpus is due to be published online very soon. He has published some 20 articles on subjects relating to medieval history, philology and archaeology. His fields of expertise are digital diplomatics, semantic modeling of medieval Latin, spatial data mining and more generally text mining (authorship attribution, machine learning, keyword extraction). For several years, he also taught at the University of Burgundy, focusing in particular on the analysis of medieval corpora using digital technology – while delivering various seminars on this topic in Europe (France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, etc.).
Statement
As a candidate for election to the board of Digital Medievalist, I would like to see the links between the digital world and medieval history deepened. Epistemological debates about the nature of the digital humanities are certainly important, but we need results that will definitively establish these methods among every historian. At a time when the scarcity of academic job is critical in many countries, digital methods need to be better heard and defended. To do this, it seems to me that we must work in three directions: 1) the dissemination and improvement of corpora, in Open and Fair formats, so that all medievalists can benefit from them; 2) research into the generation by AI of data and metadata, which appears to be a central imperative for the exploitation of larger corpora; 3) the improvement of interoperability between corpora, which must no longer remain isolated, but must integrate platforms where benchmarks and replacements become possible. By focusing on these three axes, I believe that we can hope for a favorable development of digital methods in medieval history in the coming years – and of course Digital Medievalist – as well as a better integration of digital-medieval-humanists into medieval studies as a whole.

LYNN RANSOM

Lynn Ransom is the Curator of Programs at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscripts Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Since 2008 she has directed the Schoenberg Database for Manuscripts, an online, user-driven, community-maintained tool and database for the study of the movement of manuscripts across time and geography. She has also been the primary organizer for the Annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age since 2008. Prior to coming to Penn, Dr. Ransom has held curatorial and research positions at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in 13th-century French manuscript illumination in 2001. She has published on the role of imagery in devotional practice from the 13th to the 16th century.

CLAUDIA SOJER

Claudia Sojer, born in Kitzbühel, Tirol (Austria), studied at the University of Bologna, where in 2009 she received her master’s degree in archive, library, and information sciences with a focus on manuscripts and old books. Upon completing her studies in Bologna, Sojer moved to Rome, where in 2014 she received her doctoral degree in a sub-area of history and historical auxiliary sciences on medieval and byzantine Vatican manuscripts and their later inclusion in 17th century publications by the Vatican’s Propaganda-Fide press. Sojer has contributed to numerous manuscript projects at home and abroad, and is the recipient of several local and international stipends and prizes. She was most recently awarded a Scholarship for Transnational Access to Special Collections and Transnational Access to Archival Documents ReIReS (Research Infrastructure on Religious Studies) at the Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII (FSCIRE) at the Biblioteca Giuseppe Dossetti in Bologna, Italy, as well as a Harvard-Research-Award at the Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Collection in Washington DC, U.S.A.
Since October 2018, Sojer has been working on a Digital Humanities cooperation project at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität, Innsbruck between the Institute for History (Midde Ages) and the University and Provincial Library Tyrol in Innsbruck: https://www.uibk.ac.at/ulb/sondersammlungen/projekt-abgeloeste-fragmente.html. The project, which is funded by the Jubiläumsfonds der Österreichischen Nationalbank, aims to catalog and digitalize all detached manuscript fragments from the ULB Tyrol according to the latest scientific standards, and to make the data available on Fragmentarium (www.fragmentarium.ms), an international platform that was especially designed for fragments.