Benjamin Schmidt is historian and digital humanist in Manhattan. His research interests are in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His digital humanities research focuses on large-scale text analysis, humanities data visualization, and the challenges and opportunities of reading data itself as a historical source. His current project, Creating Data, explores practices of data collection in the 19th century American state through archival research, visualization, and re-analysis of historical data. He also contributes to popular conversations on topics including higher education in the United States, computational detection of anachronisms in historical fiction, and the “crisis” of the humanities.
He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Princeton University, and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University. Further information is available at benschmidt.org.
