Who Am I?

Good question. By day, I am the Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University. By night, I'm not all that different.

Through a combination of formal training and curiosity I am an Early American historian, a database designer, and a photographer. I'm also sleep-deprived, but that probably isn't related . . .

I am the daughter of a computer scientist (Evan Bauer) and a novelist (Joan Bauer), so I grew up in a house full of computers and stories. I was bitten by the history bug at the tender age of eight, which eventually took me to the PhD program in Early American history at the University of Virginia, to study with Peter S. Onuf and J.C.A. Stagg. While at UVA I was pulled into the University of Virginia Library's Scholars' Lab orbit and in 2008-2009 was fortunate to be chosen as one of their earliest Graduate Fellows.

My dissertation, "Revolution-Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825," exists symbiotically with The Early American Foreign Service Database (EAFSD to its friends), an open source, open-access secondary source on the diplomats, consuls, and special agents sent out by the various early American governments. "Revolution-Mongers" will be finished by May 2012; the EAFSD has been live since October 2010.

I am the lead developer of Project Quincy, an open source Ruby on Rails application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space. The EAFSD serves as the flagship (read guinea pig) application for Project Quincy. I am also the lead developer of DAVILA, an open source database schema visualization and annotation tool.

I have transcribed, translated, and decrypted letters for The Papers of James Madison, designed a database for The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and served as Design Researcher for Documents Compass, a digital consulting organization for documentary editors and a service provider of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

I joined the Brown University Library as their first Digital Humanities Librarian in August 2011.

And the photography? That is harder to discuss because everything else in my life is expressed in words. I recommend looking at my photographs and drawing your own conclusions. I will say, though, that being a photographer has dramatically influenced how I design interfaces. For (a trivial) example, this whole website was designed around the photo "Looking Up" from a show I exhibited in August of 2009 called "Looking at Flowers: A Photographer's Tribute."