nlp4arc 2017 Speaker Biographies

Christopher (Cal) Lee (PI), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Additional Info)

Christopher (Cal) Lee is Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He teaches archival administration; records management; digital curation; understanding information technology for managing digital collections; and digital forensics. He is a lead organizer and instructor for the DigCCurr Professional Institute, and he teaches professional workshops on the application of digital forensics methods and principles.

Cal’s primary area of research is curation of digital collections. He is particularly interested in the professionalization of this work and the diffusion of existing tools and methods into professional practice. Cal developed “A Framework for Contextual Information in Digital Collections,” and edited and provided several chapters to I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era published by the Society of American Archivists.

Cal is Principal Investigator of BitCurator Access and was Principal Investigator of BitCurator; both projects have developed and disseminated open-source digital forensics tools for use by archivists and librarians. He was also Principal Investigator of the Digital Acquisition Learning Laboratory (DALL) project and is Senior Personnel on the DataNet Federation Consortium funded by the National Science Foundation. Cal has served as Co-PI on several projects focused on digital curation education: Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr), DigCCurr II: Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to Doctoral Students and Practitioners; Educating Stewards of Public Information for the 21st Century (ESOPI-21), Educating Stewards of the Public Information Infrastructure (ESOPI2), and Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG).

Kam Woods (Co-PI, Technical Lead), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill @kamwoods (Additional Info)

Kam Woods is a Research Scientist in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on long-term preservation of born-digital materials.

Mary Elings, University of California, Berkeley @maryelings (Additional Info)

Mary W. Elings is the Interim Head of Technical Services and Principal Archivist for Digital Collections at The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She leads the acquisitions, cataloging, and processing units and is responsible for all aspects of the digital collections, including digital initiatives and the born digital archives program. Prior to coming to the Bancroft, Ms. Elings worked in museums focusing on art conservation, collection documentation, conservation imaging, information and asset management, and digitization initiatives. Her current work concentrates on issues surrounding born-digital materials, supporting digital humanities and digital social sciences, and research data management. Ms. Elings has taught as an adjunct professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, New York and the School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University, Washington, DC, and is a regular guest-lecturer in the John F. Kennedy University Museum Studies program.

Don Mennerich, New York University @mennerich (Additional Info)

Don Mennerich joined DLTS in January 2014 as a Digital Archivist, working primarily with forensic tools and their relationship to managing born-digital archives. Prior to working at NYU, he held positions at The New York Public Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Yale University Library. Don holds an MS in Information Systems from Pace University and an MLS from Simmons College. Don is a member of both DLTS and the Archival Collections Management unit.

Daniel Pitti, University of Virginia (Additional Info)

Daniel Pitti is Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Pitti currently serves as the chair/président of the International Council on Archives Experts Group on Archival Description, charged with developing an archival description conceptual model called Records in Contexts (RiC). From 1993-2010, Pitti served as the chief technical architect of Encoded Archival Description (EAD, an international standard for encoding archival guides, and Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), an international standard for encoding archival descriptions of persons, organizations, and families. Pitti is project director of the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC). At IATH, Pitti collaborates with faculty fellows and other scholars in humanities research projects that employ innovative methods based on computer and network technologies. Among the many humanities projects are the William Blake Archive; the Walt Whitman Archive; Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting; Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive; and Collective Biographies of Women.

Josh Schneider, Stanford University (Additional Info)

Josh Schneider is Assistant University Archivist at Stanford University, where he acquires and supports researcher use of Stanford University records, faculty papers, and materials documenting campus and student life. His case study on appraisal of electronic records appeared in the latest volume of the Society of American Archivists’ Trends in Archival Practice series. Josh is also Community Manager for ePADD, an open-source software package that uses named entity recognition and other NLP-driven processes to support the appraisal, processing, discovery, and delivery of email archives. Josh serves on the editorial boards of The American Archivist, Journal of Western Archives, and the blog of SAA’s Electronic Records Section (BloggERS!). He received an MLIS from Simmons College and a BA in Philosophy from Brown University.

Ryan Shaw, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill @rybesh (Additional Info)

Ryan Shaw received his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, where he wrote his dissertation on how events and periods function as concepts for organizing historical knowledge. He is also the author of the LODE (Linking Open Descriptions of Events) ontology, recently adopted by the UK Archives Hub for their Linked Data effort. In 2012 he received a three-year Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to invent new tools for applying computational text processing techniques to organize large collections of civil rights histories. He is also a co-PI of the Editors’ Notes project, a Mellon Foundation-funded effort to develop open, collaborative notebooks for humanists, and the PeriodO project, an NEH-funded gazetteer of scholarly assertions about the extents of historical, art-historical, and archaeological periods. In the past he has been involved in a number of digital humanities projects through his work with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. In a previous life, he worked as a software engineer in Tokyo, Japan.

Carl Wilson, Open Preservation Foundation @carlscode (Additional Info)

Carl is the Technical Lead for the Open Preservation Foundation, overseeing all of OPF’s technical activities. He is an experienced software engineer with a focus on software quality through testing. He is an open source enthusiast, both as a user and developer. His professional interest is using virtualisation, automation and continuous delivery techniques to improve the software development process. Carl is leading the development team for veraPDF and is responsible for the software quality, website development and continuous integration / delivery. Before this he was responsible for OPF’s technical contribution to the SCAPE project. Prior to joining OPF Carl worked for The British Library’s Digital Preservation Team on internal and external projects.

Hugh Cayless, Duke University Libraries @hcayless

Hugh has over a decade of software engineering expertise in both academic and industrial settings. He also holds a Ph.D. in Classics and a Master’s in Information Science. He is one of the founders of the EpiDoc collaborative and currently serves on the Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Jeremy Gibson, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources

Jeremy Gibson is the Systems Integration Librarian at the State Archives of North Carolina. His responsibilities include supporting the technological initiatives of the State Archives of North Carolina; general systems support; writing purpose built tools; and managing system wide projects.