Words and Code

About Tom Scheinfeldt, and Ryan Shaw

Tom Scheinfeldt is Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media and Research Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Tom has lectured and written extensively on the history of popular science, the history of museums, history and new media, and the changing role of history in society. He has worked on traditional exhibitions and digital projects at the Colorado Historical Society, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, The Louisiana State Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress. In addition to managing general operations at the Center for History and New Media, Tom directs several of its online history projects, including Omeka, THATCamp, One Week | One Tool, the September 11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800, and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives.

Ryan Shaw is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recently received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, where he wrote a dissertation on how events and periods function as concepts for organizing historical knowledge. He is also the author of the LODE (Linking Open Descriptions of Events) ontology, recently adopted by the UK Archives Hub for their Linked Data effort. He has been involved in a number of digital humanities projects through his work with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, including Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context (2006-2009), Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies (2007-2010), and Editorial Practices and the Web (2010-ongoing). In a previous life, he worked as a software developer in Tokyo, Japan.