I am a historian of eighteenth-century France and a specialist in the spatial digital humanities. I work across multiple temporal and geographical fields as I develop new methods for analysing digitized collections of historical maps as data.

My first monograph, Public Work: Making Roads and Citizens in Eighteenth-Century France, will examine a particularly unsuccessful socio-economic reform related to infrastructure development in pre-Revolutionary France. Public Work tells the history of the corvée, e.g. the forced labour regime used on highway construction sites ca. 1730 to 1790, as seen from the perspective of the peasants, engineers, and administrators building highways in Brittany. I argue that Breton peasants and some elites used different information technologies to contest the coercive corvée and reimagine provincial government in terms of democratic public utility, all while centralized solutions to the injustice of the corvée failed across the kingdom.

My digital work has focused on re-imagining how researchers past and present identify, analyse, and interpret spatial information. Most recently, I have focused on developing new techniques to examine the spatial information in two types of sources: encyclopedias and maps. With colleagues in France (on the GEODE project), I am working to understand Enlightenment approaches to writing about place. My work with maps has led to the creation of a new software library: MapReader. MapReader makes it possible for historians to ask questions of thousands of maps. It was awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History in 2023, and is the only software to have ever been honoured. MapReader first emerged as a collaborative output from the Living with Machines project (check out this video from our docuseries), and it also now builds on work completed in the Machines Reading Maps project. Machines Reading Maps focused on testing state-of-the-art methods for detecting and recognizing text on maps. A highlight of the project is the dataset of 110 million words found on 57,000 maps in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: you can search this dataset and view results at https://www.davidrumsey.com/.

Since 2023, I have continued to work on the legacy of Living with Machines on the new AHRC-funded Data/Culture: Building sustainable communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and tools project at the Turing, in particular on community building around MapReader and historical British newspaper datasets.

I welcome proposals from PhD students:

• with a focus on eighteenth-century French history, especially those with interests in rural topics, information/infrastructure and the environment, archival histories, and taxation;
• interested in the history of French or British early modern and modern maps and mapping practices;
• interested in using digital methods to study any aspect of French history in the long eighteenth century
• from fields and disciplines outside of History who wish to use of computer vision, text analysis, or other computational methods to examine historical documents.

I am also happy to hear from potential MA students who wish to learn more about opportunities at Lancaster.

I joined Lancaster University in 2023 after teaching and being a member of research teams in the US, Australia, and elsewhere in the UK. Most recently, I spent almost 5 years at The Alan Turing Institute working on two Digital Humanities projects: Living with Machines and Machines Reading Maps. Since joining Lancaster, I was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at the Turing.

I completed my PhD in Early Modern French History at Stanford University in 2013. Following time teaching in an experimental History of Science curriculum at Stanford, I taught at Bates College in Maine (2015-16) and then took up a postdoctoral research role at Western Sydney University. During this time in Australia, I developed my digital skills and have since continued to work across both French History and the Digital Humanities. I completed my undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University (2006) in History and French Literature, and I have also spent time studying at the Université de Haute Bretagne-Rennes II as an undergraduate and at the École normale Supérieure in Paris as a visiting PhD student.

• Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, especially Brittany
• History of roads and other infrastructure
• History of information (including archives, libraries, digital collections, and born-digital knowledge bases)
• Maps and mapping practices
• Computer Vision and Text Analysis in History

Currently I am a Co-I on Data/Culture: Building Sustainable Communities for Tools and Data in the Arts and Humanities, based at The Alan Turing Institute. Previously I have been the UK PI on jointly-funded AHRC-NEH Machines Reading Maps project and was also a Senior Research Associate on Living with Machines, also at the Turing.

I am a member of the GEODE team, based in Lyon, which focuses on developing digital approaches to analysing geographical discourse in French encyclopedias.

Other grant-funded projects I have been involved with in the past include Early Modern Mobility (Stanford University) and the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (Western Sydney University).

I am developing new undergraduate courses on eighteenth-century French history, the history of maps, and digital methods for historians.

At the MA level, I teach courses on text and spatial analysis (HIST 426 and HIST 429) and I am developing a new course on using collections as data in historical research.

I am a Senior Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London.