I am a Digital Historian and Assistant Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Previously I was assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. There I was the founding director of the Director of the REL Digital Lab, a digital humanities lab supporting research and teaching within the Religious Studies department.

I focus on data curation, machine learning, and natural language processing with historical sources. I consider issues of AI ethics and the intersection of historical methods, focused on context and complexity, and the building of large-scale models.

current projects

• The Tie that Binds. A book project offering a media history of print in the development of Seventh-day Adventism.
• A Digital Scholarly Edition of Seventh-day Adventist Periodicals. A digital project that offers an experiment in curating, describing, and creating in interactive browser for my research corpus.
• Scarcity in Abundance. Research papers evaluating the effect of OCR errors of historical documents on natural language processing tasks.
• Versions and Values (with Zoe LeBlanc). A computational study of the DH community on Github.

education

I received my PhD in History from George Mason University in 2019 for my digital dissertation, A Gospel of Health and Salvation: Modeling the Religious Culture of Seventh-day Adventism, 1843 - 1920. Built on a topic model of Seventh-day Adventist periodicals, the project both considers the use of computational methods for historical scholarship and uses it to explore the role of end-times expection in the development of the denomination.

MAR | History of Christianity | Yale Divinity School, 2011 summa cum laude
BA | Philosophy, English | Calvin University, 2008