The eMOP Team
Laura Mandell
Principal Investigator
Director, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture
Professor, Department of English
Laura Mandell is the author of Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), a Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Ortanto and Man of Feeling, and numerous articles primarily about eighteenth-century women writers. Her article in New Literary History, “What Is the Matter? What Literary History Neither Hears Nor Sees,” describes how digital work can be used to conduct research into conceptions informing the writing and printing of eighteenth-century poetry. She is Editor of the Poetess Archive, on online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900 ( http://poetessarchive.org), Director of 18thConnect (http://www.18thConnect.org), and Director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. Her current research involves developing new methods for visualizing poetry, developing software that will allow all scholars to deep-code documents for data-mining, and improving OCR software for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing.
Richard Furuta
Co-Principal Investigator
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Richard Furuta is a faculty member at Texas A&M University where he is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, and Director of the Hypermedia Research Laboratory. Dr. Furuta’s current areas of research include digital libraries, digital humanities, hypermedia systems and models, structured documents, and document engineering. He also has studied applications in computer supported cooperative work, software engineering, visual programming, document structure recognition from bitmapped sources, and management systems for three-dimensional-gesture-based user interfaces. In the area of Digital Libraries, he was one of the founders of the 1994 and 1995 Digital Libraries Conferences, which subsequently became the ACM Digital Libraries series, and later merged with the IEEE-CS series to form the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). Many of Dr. Furuta’s current research projects are highly interdisciplinary, especially those in the area of Digital Humanities. These current projects include the Cervantes Project, centered on the iconic author of Don Quixote, the Picasso Project, which is creating a digital reasoned catalog that already contains more than 10,000 of Picasso’s art works, and the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library, in conjunction with the campus’ Institute for Nautical Archaeology.
Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
Co-Principal Investigator
Director, PSI lab
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna is Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Perception, Sensing and Instrumentation Laboratory (http://psi.cse.tamu.edu). His current research interests include machine learning, pattern recognition, speech processing, face and speech perception, wearable sensors, affective videogames, and active sensing. He has also worked on probabilistic navigation for mobile robotics, biologically-inspired signal processing algorithms for chemical sensors, and speech-driven animation of three-dimensional faces. Dr. Gutierrez-Osuna received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2000 for his work on sensor-based machine olfaction. He is an associate editor at the IEEE Sensors Journal.
Matthew Christy
eMOP Co-Project Manager for Year Two, and Lead Software Applications Developer, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.
Matt Christy received an BS in Computer Science (1994), a BA in History (1995), and a MS in Library Science (2005) from the University of North Texas. He worked as a programmer in the Telecommunications industry for 9 years, and as an Electronic Resources/Systems Librarian at a Medical Sciences Library for 7 years before joining the IDHMC.
Liz Grumbach
eMOP Co-Project Manager for Year Two, and Project Manager for ARC and 18thConnect, IDHMC Research Assistant
Liz Grumbach received an MA in English from Texas A&M University in 2012. She is currently working as staff research assistant for the IDHMC, supporting and managing aspects of various IDHMC projects, including ARC, 18thConnect, and eMOP. Her digital humanities interests include the future of digital scholarly aggregation, chronological and representational visualizations of geospatial events, project management, and the #altac movement.
Jacob Heil
eMOP Project Manager for Year One, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, IDHMC, 2012-2013
He received his doctorate from Texas A&M University. His research and teaching interests include material textuality and the history of the book, networks in early modern print culture, early modern drama, constructions of authorship, the digital forms of scholarship, and hybrid pedagogy. Dr. Heil may still be contacted for eMOP information, but he is currently employed by the Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium as Mellon Digital Scholar.
Anton duPlessis
Anton duPlessis is Curator of the Mexican Colonial Collection at the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives of Texas A&M University and Director of the Primeros Libros de las Américas Project, an international collaborative effort to create a digital collection of the first books printed in the Americas during the 16th Century. He has advanced degrees in Spanish and Political Science, experience in IT, as well as being a Certified Archivist.
Todd Samuelson
Curator, Cushing Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Assistant Professor
Bryan Tarpley
Graduate Research Assistant, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture
Bryan Tarpley is a PhD candidate in English at Texas A&M. His area of study is in contemporary American literature. He received a BA in Computer Science from Harding University, and an MA in English from Stephen F. Austin State University. In his work with the Digital Humanities, Bryan seeks to leverage his expertise in computer science to facilitate research in the humanities, and to make available new ways to approach texts.
Kathy Torabi
Kathy is a first year PhD student in the English department at Texas A&M University. She received her MA from the California State University-Northridge. Kathy will be working as a graduate research assistant for the eMOP project and collaborating with our participating institutions to train OCR engines to recognize early modern fonts.
Shawn Moore
Grant Proposal Development Team
Shawn Moore is a doctoral candidate in the program at Texas A&M and a current IDHMC fellow. Past projects as part of his fellowship have included working on 18th Connect, testing its TypeWright tool, and testing the Aletheia segmentation tool; both of which tools are in further development for the Project.
