People

The staff of the Forum for Digital Culture engage in both teaching and research support, drawing on their education as scholars and their training in computational methods, and working with a faculty advisory board that represents every discipline in the arts and humanities.

The staff of the Forum for Digital Culture are engaged in both research and teaching. They are not only experts in the computational methods used in the humanities but also well versed in humanities scholarship and understand how scholars work based on their own academic training and research experience. They support faculty research projects and teach the core courses required for the programs in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History. By working closely with both faculty and students, they are well placed to provide training and day-to-day supervision for student research assistants employed on faculty projects.

To contact the staff of the Forum, please send email to digitalculture@uchicago.edu.

David Schloen

David Schloen

Faculty Director

Brooke Luetgert

Brooke Luetgert

Director of Curriculum and Instruction

Miller Prosser

Miller Prosser

Director of Online Publications

Sandra Schloen

Sandra Schloen

Director of Technology

Jeffrey Tharsen

Jeffrey Tharsen

Associate Director of Technology

Firat Ciftci

Firat Ciftci

Software Engineer

Carmen Caswell

Carmen Caswell

Senior Research Analyst

Andrew Wright

Andrew Wright

Senior Research Analyst

ARTFL Project and Textual Optics Lab

The staff of the long-running ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) and associated Textual Optics Lab are affiliated with the Forum for Digital Culture and are co-located in the same building. They teach courses in Digital Studies and provide computational research support for faculty projects using the PhiloLogic platform.

Robert Morrissey

Robert Morrissey

Benjamin Franklin Professor of French Literature and Director of the ARTFL Project

Hoyt Long

Hoyt Long

Professor of Japanese Literature and Director of the Textual Optics Lab

Clovis Gladstone

Clovis Gladstone

Senior Research Associate and Associate Director of the ARTFL Project

Charles Cooney

Charles Cooney

Senior Project Coordinator for the ARTFL Project

MADD Center

The staff of the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center (MADD) in the John Crerar Library are also affiliated with the Forum for Digital Culture and collaborate with it. Two primary components of the MADD Center are the Weston Game Lab and the Hack Arts Lab.

Patrick Jagoda

Patrick Jagoda

William Rainey Harper Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies and Director, Weston Game Lab

Ashlyn Sparrow

Ashlyn Sparrow

Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab

Faculty Advisory Board

A broadly based faculty advisory board oversees the Forum for Digital Culture and its Digital Studies curriculum. The members of this board are drawn from seventeen different departments in the University of Chicago, representing a wide range of disciplines in the arts and humanities, as well as computer science. They are interested in the impact of digital technology on thought and culture and they have experience in using or creating software for research and teaching.

Niall Atkinson

Niall Atkinson

Associate Professor of Art History and Romance Languages & Literatures

Helma Dik

Helma Dik

Associate Professor of Classics

Allyson Ettinger

Allyson Ettinger

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Lenore Grenoble

Lenore Grenoble

John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages & Literatures

Travis Jackson

Travis Jackson

Associate Professor of Music

Patrick Jagoda

Patrick Jagoda

William Rainey Harper Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies

Emily Kern

Emily Kern

Assistant Professor of History (History of Science)

Hoyt Long

Hoyt Long

Professor of Japanese Literature

Ellen MacKay

Ellen MacKay

Associate Professor of English and Theater & Performance Studies

Robert Morrissey

Robert Morrissey

Benjamin Franklin Professor of French Literature

Ken Nakagaki

Ken Nakagaki

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Constantine Nakassis

Constantine Nakassis

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Haun Saussy

Haun Saussy

University Professor in East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought

David Schloen

David Schloen

Professor of Archaeology; Faculty Director of the Forum for Digital Culture

Adam Shaw

Adam Shaw

Associate Senior Instructional Professor of Computer Science

Mehrnoush Soroush

Mehrnoush Soroush

Assistant Professor of Landscape Archaeology

Jeffrey Stackert

Jeffrey Stackert

Professor of Hebrew Bible

Ulrike Stark

Ulrike Stark

Professor of South Asian Languages & Civilizations

Malte Willer

Malte Willer

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Faculty Director

The Faculty Director of the Forum for Digital Culture is David Schloen. He is a Professor of Archaeology in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1994. He specializes in the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages and directs excavations at archaeological sites in TurkeyIsrael, and Spain. He holds a doctorate in archaeology and ancient Semitic languages from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and psychology from the University of Toronto.

David Schloen has extensive experience in applying computational methods to textual and archaeological research. He teaches the Digital Studies core course entitled “Introduction to Digital Humanities” (DIGS 30007). He is particularly interested in the digital representation of scholarly knowledge and the philosophical issues raised by this endeavor. Scholarly practices in the humanities highlight the degree to which such knowledge is contingent and perspectival, consisting of potentially conflicting or uncertain predications about subjects of interest that have been made at different times by different authors and observers according to their own conceptual ontologies.

This line of research has resulted in a comprehensive top-level or foundational ontology called CHOIR that subsumes heterogeneous local ontologies and enables data integration across projects while faithfully representing the diversity of conceptual schemes and individual voices that is characteristic of the humanities. The CHOIR ontology was designed by David Schloen in collaboration with Sandra Schloen, a software engineer and the Director of Technology in the Forum for Digital Culture, who has implemented it in the OCHRE computational platform. This platform is used to support research projects in a wide range of fields, showing how a professionally engineered shared system enables economies of scale that ensure the long-term sustainability of digital materials.

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