I’ve probably had a dozen or more failed blogging ventures over the past 20(!) years and I’m never really sure what to put here, so here’s a brief biographical index relating to things I’ll probably talk about on this page:
- I’m a former English-professor-turned-academic-librarian-turned-systems-administrator-in-an-academic-library
- I’m interested in using technology to support humanities research, especially in areas of my academic interest like Jewish studies, nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and text mining (mostly related to the former)
- Along these lines, I’m the co-creator of the Victorian Jewish Writers Project, a digital archive of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish writing
- I’m the systems administrator at an academic library where I oversee systems relating to search and discovery, user management, servers, web applications, etc.
- I work a lot with Python programming, especially Django
- I returned to school after my doctorate (and after being Assistant Professor of English) to get an masters in information science
- I occasionally teach courses in computer science and information technology, mostly on server administration, scripting, and the linux operating system
- I live in suburban New England with my family and two standard poodles
- Despite no longer teaching in the humanities as my day job, I still enjoy attending conferences (particularly national and regional conferences in nineteenth-century literature and culture) where I’ve recently presented on, among other things, Dickens in Yiddish translation and Victorian Jewish women’s lexicographical writing. I’m also working on an article at the moment about Victorian travel to the Middle East and West Asia