Biography
While perhaps not as famous as other historians on the internet, Dr. Ben Schmidt certainly is what one would picture when you’d hear the words “Digital Historian” or “Digital Humanities Expert.” Graduating magna cum laude with a A.B. in social studies from Harvard in 2003, Schmidt would go on to earn both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton in 2007 and in 2013, respectively. For many years, Schmidt worked as a member of the history departments at Northeastern University and NYU where he aided the digital humanities faculties in the employment of new approaches to data analysis and visualization in order to help people interpret historical data. Currently, Schmidt serves as the Vice President of Information Design at Nomic, where he works to develop new interfaces for the interpretation and visualization of embedding models.
Research
Visualizations and Data Bases
Schmidt has since contributed to many of these “visualizations” including “The landscape of biomedical research” in which up to 21 million biomedical papers are kept within the PubMed database, which are subsequently grouped and categorized in a way that makes it easy to visually digest. He is also the creator of “All of US: a density dot map of the United States” which graphs the population of the US in the form of dots every ten years since 2010.
He has also been involved in multiple research projects such as “Creating Data: online traces” which charts the origins of modern US computational culture from its start in the US Naval Observatory, the Census Bureau, and the Library of Congress in the late 19th century; additionally, he has long been co-director of “Bookworm” a platform that allows its users to take advantage of the metadata of a text, and allows for the extraction and framing of textual data across disciplines. Currently, Schmidt serves as the Vice President of Information Design at Nomic, where he works to develop new interfaces for the interpretation and visualization of embedding models.
Online Presence
Ben Schmidt has an extensive digital library. Each of his research projects and visualizations are situated within a digital database. In addition to his work, Schmidt himself has a personal portfolio where all his accomplishments, work, and qualifications can be found. He also maintains an active blog on the site where he last posted in April this year. He also has a twitter account, which he is somewhat active on, with his last post being in March 2023.
My personal favorite of Dr. Schmidt’s twitter posts
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