Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti is Managing Director of the Scholars’ Lab. They hold a Literature Ph.D. from the University of Maryland focused on the digital humanities and textual scholarship, and an M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan focused on DH and human-computer interaction. They have also worked as a professional web developer for over a decade, with specialization in online knowledge-building communities, meaningful crowdsourcing websites, and reading/annotation interfaces.

Amanda currently contributes to the scholarship of experimental and digital humanities policy and practice, bringing both critical-practical approaches to infrastructure and community design underlying scholarly innovation. They are an enthusiastic blogger, both on their LiteratureGeek.com blog and on the Scholars’ Lab blog, as well as a popular speaker and advisor for institutions exploring digital and expermental scholarship initiatives.

They serve as an appointed officer (and previously an elected representative) of the Association for Computing and the Humanities (ACH) executive council, the founder and ongoing administrator of the 3k-member Digital Humanities Slack, Digital Ethnic Futures Mentor, and an appointed Technical Advisory Board member for Humanities Commons. They previously served as an appointed member of the Modern Languages Association (MLA) Information Technology Committee; and as an editor, technical board member, and then ombudsperson for The Programming Historian.

Amanda’s 2015 dissertation (Dr.AmandaVisconti.com) was the first humanities dissertation to fully acknowledge digital methods (code, design, user testing, blogging, no chapters) as scholarship by treating them as the dissertation instead of addenda to traditional written chapters. The focus of their dissertation was creating the participatory digital edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses InfiniteUlysses.com, which attracted over 12,000 unique visitors in its first few weeks of open beta and was cited in The New York Times in July 2016.