Workshop Participants
Project Directors
Andrew J. Torget is the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he leads development of a number of digital projects focusing on visualizations of historical processes. A historian, Torget is director of Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2004, the Texas Slavery Project, and the History Engine: Tools for Collaborative Education and Research, as well as the co-editor of two books on the American Civil War.
James W. Wilson is an assistant professor of geographic science at James Madison University, specializing in historical geography, Internet GIS, and cartography. Wilson is on the Advisory Board of the Virginia Geographic Information Network (the state GIS coordinating body), and the secretary of the Historical Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. His article "Historical and Computational Analysis of Long-Term Environmental Change: Forests in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia" appeared in a special issue of Historical Geography devoted to Historical GIS (Vol. 33, 2005).
Project Advisory Board
David Arctur is President and Chief Technology Officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium Interoperability Institute (OGCii), a non-profit scientific and educational organization dedicated to continued improvements in worldwide application of interoperable geoprocessing technologies and spatial data. Arctur has previously been a Data Architect, Product Engineer, and Interoperability Engineer at ESRI; was the Chief Scientist at Laser-Scan, Inc.; and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Florida. He is the co-author of Designing Geodatabases: Case Studies in GIS Data Modeling (ESRI Press, 2004).
Edward L. Ayers is the president of the University of Richmond and a historian of the American South. Ayers has been involved in numerous digital humanities projects, most notably as the director of the award-winning digital archive The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. He also co-authored a born-digital article, "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," which used GIS mapping to examine the role slavery played in the outbreak of the American Civil War, and appeared in the December 2003 issue of the American Historical Review.
Peter K. Bol is the director of Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Bol led Harvard's university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research, and directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history.
David Schell serves as Chairman of the Board of the Open Geospatial Consortium Inc., which he founded in 1994 with both public and private sector support to evolve "OpenGIS" into a global standard for interoperable geoprocessing. Schell is primarily responsible for directing OGC's Board of Directors operations and since 2004 he has served as Chairman and CEO of the OGC.
Terry A. Slocum is Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Kansas. Slocum is lead author of Thematic Cartography and Geovisualization (now in its third edition) and has published on geography and visualizations in numerous journals, including Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Cartographica, Journal of Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, and The British Cartographic Journal. From 1999 to 2002, he served as editor of Cartography and Geographic Information Science.
Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, where he directs Stanford's Spatial History Lab and its effort to create new tools for visualizing historical development. His current digital humanities project, How the West Was Shaped, is developing a large database and computer graphics tools to study and represent visually how people's experience of space and time was dramatically shaped by railroads in the North American West during the nineteenth century.
Workshop Participants:
Rafael Alvarado is the principle information architect for House Divided Project, a comprehensive archive of primary and secondary sources relating to the years leading up to the American Civil War. He has been active in the digital humanities since early 1990s when he created the Mayan Epigraphic Database Project at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). In 1997 he traveled to Princeton University to become Coordinator of Humanities and Social Sciences Computing, where he established the Consortium for the Development of Digital Collections, the Educational Technologies Center, and the Humanities Computing Research Support group. Currently at Dickinson College, Rafael has also developed software for numerous digital humanities projects.
Nathaniel Ayers is the Digital Scholarship Lab's programmer analyst at the University of Richmond, serving as the head of the Lab's historical visualization work on projects such as Voting America. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Nate has done programming and visualization work for the University of Virginia.
David J. Bodenhamer is professor of history and founding executive director of the Polis Center at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis. During his tenure, the center has developed over 600 projects, with grant and contract funding of over $55 million. In addition, Polis has expanded its programmatic focus from Indianapolis and Central Indiana to state, regional, national, and international partnerships and projects. An active researcher, Bodenhamer is author or editor of eight books, with two books on the spatial humanities forthcoming in 2009 and 2010. He has made over 65 presentations to audiences on four continents on topics ranging from legal and constitutional history to the use of GIS and advanced information technologies in academic and community-based research. He also has served as strategic and organizational consultant to universities, government agencies, and not-for-profit and faith-based organizations across the U.S. and in Europe.
Jon Christensen is a Ph.D.candidate in the Department of History and an associate director of the Spatial History Project of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. He is a Distinguished Departmental Scholar for Academic Year 2008-2009, supported by a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and was honored with a Prize for Excellence in First-Time Teaching in 2005-2006. Department of History, Stanford University. He is coordinating "Tooling Up for Digital Histories," a collaboration between the Spatial History Lab, the Computer Graphics Lab, and Stanford Humanities Center, supported by grants from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities at Stanford. Visualizing the past through digital historical sources and spatial analysis has been the key to his own dissertation, "Critical Habitat," a history of ideas, narratives, science, land use, and practices of conservation and extinction of a species in time and space. Web sites: http://stanford.edu/~jonallan/ and http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu.
Alan Craig has focused his career on the interface between humans and machines. He has been involved in many different capacities related to scientific visualization, virtual reality, data mining, multi-modal representation of information, and collaborative systems during his career at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where he has worked for the past twenty years. Craig is co-author of the book Understanding Virtual Reality, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishing, and author of the forthcoming book, Using Virtual Reality.
Phillip C. Dibner is the Director of Research Programs for the OGC Interoperability Institute (OGCii), the research and educational affiliate of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Dibner has been involved with the OGC since its inception, where he has managed technical integration and coordinated demonstrations for testbeds, interoperability experiments, and pilot implementations, in remote collaboration with participants throughout Europe, North America, and Australia. He also established and continues to chair the OGC Earth Systems Science Domain Working Group (ESS DWG). Trained as an ecologist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Dibner has had field experience throughout the continental United States. Prior to his involvement with the OGC, he joined the Silicon Valley technology boom of the 1980s and '90s, where he worked on operating systems and network protocols, while pursuing his interest in environmental and ecological data acquisition and analysis.
Max Edelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, examines agriculture, economy, and environment in the making of the Carolina Lowcountry's early plantation landscape. His current research investigates cartography and empire in eighteenth-century British America. In collaboration with the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois, he received an NEH Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to create the Cartography of American Colonization Database (CACD).
Bill Ferster is senior scientist at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment with the Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the Curry School and the Virginia Center for Digital History in the College of Arts and Sciences. He has founded numerous companies including West End Film, developer of the first PC-based 3D animation system, EMC, developer of the first digital nonlinear editing system which received an EMMY Award in 1993, and StageTools, the leading developer of image animation tools.
Charles van den Heuvel is senior researcher for the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he leads the research project "Paper and Virtual Cities. New methodologies for the use of historical sources in virtual urban cartography," with the Department of Information Science at Groningen University. (1956) finished his study Art History and Archeology at Groningen University with a specialization in the history of architecture, town planning and planning sciences in 1982. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen in 1991, writing his dissertation on the dissemination of knowledge of Italian engineers in the Netherlands and their role in the introduction of the "renaissance" culture in the Netherlands. Since then he worked as a senior-researcher for the universities of Groningen, Utrecht, Maastricht and research institutes, such as the Maastricht McLuhan Institute.
Matthew Koeppe is Director of GIScience Programs at the Association of American Geographers, where he coordinates many of the AAG's GIS-related activities in the areas of education, outreach, international programs, and public policy. Matthew received his PhD in geography from the University of Kansas in 2005. His research background and interests include environment and development in the Brazilian Amazon, tropical frontier expansion, the social and political aspects of land cover classification, and the geography of food production and consumption.
Sorin Adam Matei is known for applying, from a cross-analytical perspective, traditional statistical, GIS, and spatial methodologies to the study of information technology and social integration. He has conducted a number of studies on the social and cognitive impact of location aware systems deployed in real or virtual environments. His current research is particularly focused on the role of spatial indexing on learning in location aware situations and on the role of physical affordances in structuring location aware communication experiences. The experimental work he conducted at Purdue University's Envision lab indicates that there are some benefits for information acquisition in location aware situations. In addition, he has conducted large-scale multidisciplinary surveys of communication technology use in local communities both in the United States and in Europe. His research was funded by Motorola, Kettering Foundation, University of Kentucky, and Purdue University and was recognized by various professional organizations with paper and research awards. His teaching makes use of a number of software platforms he has codeveloped, such as Mindmeld.
Mano Marks is a Developer Advocate with Google, helping people place their content in Google Earth and Maps. He has a Masters in History from Columbia and a Masters in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley. He is very interested in the intersection between data, visualization, and communication.
Worthy N. Martin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas-Austin in 1981. He then joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as a professor of Computer Science. He is the author or co-author of 55 papers. His primary research interest is dynamic scene analysis, i.e., computer vision in the context of time-varying imagery, as well as the fundamental concepts involved in machine perception systems composed of independent processes operating in distributed computing environments and cooperating to form interpretations of image sequences.
Robert K. Nelson is the Digital Scholarship Lab's associate director, overseeing historical visualization work on the History Engine and the Text-Mapping projects. A graduate of William and Mary's American Studies Ph.D. program, Rob is a historian of nineteenth-century America.
Scott Nesbit is a Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Virginia. His dissertation examines the politicization of the idea of forgiveness in the American Civil War era. He is co-creator and an associate director of the History Engine and has managed for several other online projects at the Virginia Center for Digital History.
J. B. Owens is Professor of History and Director of the Geographically-Integrated History Laboratory at Idaho State University. He currently serves as co-Project Leader of a multidisciplinary, multinational research project he created for the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme's program "The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading" (TECT). The title of his project is "Dynamic Complexity of Self-Organizing Cooperation-Based Commercial Networks in the First Global Age" (acronym: DynCoopNet), and the work involves researchers from sixteen countries on five continents (including co-authors of his position paper for the "Visualizing the Past" workshop). Before creating the DynCoopNet Project, Owens held consecutive fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Owens' research has focused on the cultural, economic, and social contexts shaping the exercise of political authority in the Kingdom of Castile during the period 1400-1700.
Peter Pulsifer is a research associate at the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Department of Geography, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Pulsifer's research is focused on creating new knowledge, methods and tools in support of integrating geographic data, information and knowledge for education and decision support. His research incorporates several major, current themes in Geomatics research including Web-based mapping for education and decision support, modeling and integration of geographic information, and the ontological foundations of visualization and representation of geographic phenomena. Peter has been very active in research related to information management and the development of on-line atlases for the polar regions. He applies an collaborative. interdisciplinary to research and has worked closely with human and physical geographers, cartographers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, anthropologists and cultural theorists.
Carsten Roensdorf is an expert geographic data management and currently holds the position of Corporate Data Manager at Ordnance Survey, Great Britain's National Mapping Agency. In this role he is responsible for the integrity of the National Geographic Database, the repository for consistent, high detailed geographic base data in Great Britain. Carsten is a trained geodesist and has created, managed and utilised geographic uses in central and local government, utilities, mobile telecoms as well as land management. He is an active participant in the development of geographic information standards in the Open Geospatial Consortium and led the standardisation of CityGML, a standard to represent cities in multiple dimensions, in 2008.
Kurt Rohloff is a Scientist in its Information and Knowledge Technologies department at BBN Technologies, where his areas of technical expertise include computational modeling, control and decision systems, distributed resource management, and software reliability. Kurt's recent research focus has been developing automated methods to identify quantifiable patterns in highly multi-dimensional data with a particular focus on patterns that precede nation-state instability as part of the externally-funded ICEWS program. Kurt's other research focuses at BBN have been in applying notions of control theory for the increased performance and reliability of interacting, distributed computational modeling systems. Kurt was previously affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Center for Mathematics and Computation (CWI) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA.
Erik Steiner is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he is the director of the Spatial History Lab. A recognized leader in the design of dynamic mapping applications, he has most notably led the development of the Atlas of Oregon CD-ROM and the Interactive Nolli and Vasi Websites of Rome. Erik has a permanent appointment in the InfoGraphics Lab in the Geography Department at the University of Oregon.
Christopher Tucker recently stepped down as Senior Vice President for the Americas and National Programs at ERDAS, a leading technology provider for geospatial exploitation, analysis, data management/dissemination, information sharing and collaboration across the defense, intelligence, civilian federal, state/local, and commercial sectors - worldwide. Tucker came to ERDAS by way of the acquisition of IONIC, the world leader in interoperable web-mapping, location based services, imagery management and distributed geoprocessing, where Tucker served as President/CEO. While commercial technology companies, IONIC/ERDAS's core businesses have always been defense and intelligence. Tucker is on the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium (www.opengeospatial.org).
Josh Wall is a managing consultant for Information Strategies (www.infostrat.com) a Washington DC based Microsoft Gold Partner. Information Strategies was chosen by Microsoft to be one of a select group of partners to build solutions for Microsoft Surface, their innovative new multi-touch device. Josh and his team have worked closely with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team to build the next generation of GIS solutions that leverage the multi-touch technology in Microsoft Surface.
Chris Weaver is Associate Director of the Center for Spatial Analysis and Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma. Weaver holds a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Michigan State and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wisconsin. Chris' grand tour of academic research so far includes analytical chemistry, cognitive psychology, operating systems, databases, human-computer interaction, and geographic information systems. He was recently a Research Associate with the GeoVISTA Center in the Department of Geography at Penn State, where he was also a founding member and core investigator with the North-East Visualization and Analytics Center.
Hadley Wickham is an assistant professor of Statistics at Rice University. He is interested the use of graphics to reveal interesting and unexpected features of data, as well as practical tools to make dealing with real-life data easier. He won the John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing for his work on the ggplot and reshape R packages.
May Yuan is Brandt Professor, Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor and Associate Dean of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences and the director of Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma. May's research interest is in temporal GIS, geographic representation, spatiotemporal information modeling, and applications of geographic information technologies to dynamic systems. Her research projects center on representation models, algorithms for spatiotemporal analysis, and understanding of dynamics in geographic phenomena, such as wildfires, rainstorms, air-pollution plumes, and behavior and activities in complex social systems. She explores multiple perspectives of dynamics, analyzes the drivers and outcomes of geographic dynamics, extracts spatiotemporal patterns and behavioral structures of dynamic systems, and draws insights into the system development and evolution to derive an integrated understanding, interpretation, and prediction of activities, events, and processes in dynamic geographic systems.
Jeanette Zerneke is the Technical Director for the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). In that role Jeanette works with a diverse group of technology experts to develop tools and methodologies that support ECAI's mission. ECAI is a global collaboration among humanities scholars, librarians, cultural heritage managers, and information technology researchers. ECAI's mission is to enhance scholarship by promoting greater attention to time and place. Jeanette's work involves developing infrastructure, programs, methodologies, working groups, and training workshops to support ECAI affiliates in project development and integration. Jeanette works directly with project teams to develop web sites and ePublications highlighting the growing use of new technologies to present cultural information in innovative ways.
