Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities 2018: Biographies

Simon Appleford

Biography

Appleford’s research focuses on the intersections of digital humanities, visual culture, and U.S. cultural and intellectual history. He is the co-author of DevDH.org, an online resource for digital humanities project development, and leads a collaboration between Creighton and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha to make accessible the Joslyn’s Maximilian-Bodmer collection. He is currently completing work on a book project that uses digital methodologies to explore how the political cartoonist Herbert Block used his cartoons to articulate and shape postwar liberalism.

Sarita Garcia

Biography

Garcia’s work focuses on societal, racial, and legal norms in the Texas borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. She examines surveillance, policing, and punishment practices that shaped and evolved federal immigration policies as well as their effect on marginalized communities. Comparing immigration hubs like Ellis Island and Laredo, her work examines how health policies served as a way for local, state, and federal governments to cast a "gaze" on populations marked as undesirable or unclean. Garcia also incorporates digital projects into her research, and is particularly interested in public outreach through digital scholarship.

Jason A. Heppler

Biography

Heppler is a Digital Engagement Librarian and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he leads initiatives in digital engagement and public history. He is a historian of the United States specializing in the North American West with particular interests in urban environmental politics and policy. He is working on his first book, Suburban by Nature: Silicon Valley and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics, under contract with the University of Oklahoma Press, which uses Silicon Valley’s history to illustrate the consequences of the post-war period’s uneven suburban growth in shaping 20th-century environmental politics, concerns over social justice, and ideas of sustainability. Prior to joining UNO, he served as the Academic Technology Specialist at Stanford University.

Luke Hollis

Biography

Hollis is the founder of Archimedes Digital, a digital humanities startup based in Cambridge, MA. Rather than creating software that further distracts and isolates users, the artists, developers, and archivists at Archimedes build applications that connect us to our shared traditions and cultures. Archimedes partners with libraries, museums, and archives as well as sponsors internationally to develop applications for information governance and education across platforms.

Grace Thomas

Biography

Thomas became a Digital Collections Specialist for the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team in August 2016. Currently, many of her tasks revolve around strategizing digital means through which to open up and understand the various formats and content within the Library's 1.3 petabyte web archive. Prior to beginning her current position, Thomas completed a dual master's degree program at Indiana University in Information Science and Library Science, specializing in Digital Libraries. During her master's degree program she spent significant time developing the Comic Book Readership Archive, as well as a summer managing digital film content at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She decided to pursue Digital Libraries after her undergraduate experiences in Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's CDRH, working on notable projects such as Aida, The Walt Whitman Archive, and various text analysis explorations.

Rebecca S. Wingo

Biography

Wingo is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Liberal Arts at Macalester College. A significant portion of her first co-authored book, Homesteading the Plains: Towards a New History, uses network analysis to understand fraud and ethnic community formation among homesteaders in Nebraska. Her next book, Housing the Crows: Adult Education and Cultural Conflict, examines the links between house-building policy and adult Indian education on the Crow Reservation during the assimilation era. She is also the lead editor on an open access volume called Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy that stems from her work in public history. In the Fall, she will join the faculty at the University of Cincinnati as Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public History.