Greetings. I am an independent geographic researcher and Digital Humanities research developer working to develop novel models, data format standards, and semantically‑enabled software and systems supporting the emerging genre of digital historical atlases. Broadly, my research interests concern “computing place,” for which I have used geospatial, natural language processing, and ontology engineering methodologies.
For the past decade I have been an active member of the global and trans-disciplinary GeoHumanities, Spatial Humanities, and Linked Open Data communities. Since 2017 I have served as Technical Director of the World Historical Gazetteer project at the University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center.
After earning my Ph.D. in Geography at Santa Barbara in 2010, I worked for five years as a digital humanities research developer at Stanford University Libraries, building several interactive scholarly web applications in partnership with faculty members. Side projects since that time included GeoJSON‑T, a temporal extension to the GeoJSON standard, and “Linked Paths,” experimental web software for representing, sharing, and analyzing data about historical geographic movement, including journeys, flows, and named routes.
Prior to entering academia in 2005, I was a designer/developer of web software and instructional material, with a professional background in databases, networks, architectural design and drafting, and photography.
My official residence is Denver, Colorado but I travel quite a bit…at least until recently.