Welcoming Ammon Shepherd and Scott Bailey

We are thrilled to announce two new additions to the Scholars’ Lab team. Scott Bailey will join our R&D; group later this month and Ammon Shepherd will join us in July, both in the roles of Digital Humanities Software Developer.

Ammon Shepherd joins us from the fabulous Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media where he is currently Associate Director of Technology, responsible for overseeing CHNM’s vast server infrastructure. He is finishing his PhD in history at George Mason University and has taught courses in Western Civ and Public History at Mason and Arizona State. Ammon’s dissertation is entitled “Nazi Tunnels: German Factory Dispersal Projects of World War II.”

In his new role at the Scholars’ Lab, Ammon will be working at the nexus of software development and server infrastructure. He will be contributing not only to the numerous open source projects the R&D; group maintains, but also helping with our ongoing work on GIS data discovery, the development of workflows for a geospatial “head” for the Hydra Project, in collaboration with Stanford University, and helping to support the server infrastructure that houses these projects and our collaborations with UVa faculty.

We’re equally excited that Scott Bailey will be joining us shortly. Scott was one of our 2013-2014 Praxis Program Fellows, who pushed a lot of excellent code to the source of the program’s recently released Ivanhoe WordPress theme, meant to enable collaborative criticism through role play. Scott is finishing his Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology at UVa with a dissertation that examines “vulnerability as a locus of dogmatic reflection” through lenses of continental philosophy and neuroscience. Scott has taught in the Engineering School and been heavily involved in instructional technology support at UVa.

In Scott’s new role as a DH Developer, he will be helping maintain and develop our numerous plugins for Omeka (many Neatline-related) as well as collaborating with scholars and Library staff on maintaining and updating numerous UVa faculty projects.

Both Ammon and Scott will be contributing to the other missions of the Scholars’ Lab, including graduate student mentoring in our DH Fellows and Praxis programs, as well as participating in other experimental humanities initiatives and pursuing independent research.

We are really excited to welcome Ammon Shepherd, his wife Jessica, and their entire family, and Scott Bailey and his partner Karen to the Scholars’ Lab family.