Principal Investigator

William Mattingly

Dr. William Mattingly, PhD. is a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Data Science Lab and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he is developing machine learning methods for cataloging Holocaust images and the natural language processing methods and models for handling Holocaust textual data.  Originally trained as a medievalist, he specialized in applying deep learning to historical documents. In his capacity as lead developer on the Bitter Aloe Project he is responsible for training ML models, extracting structured datasets, building out our web backend, and workshop program development. He is also developing the Classical Language Toolkit’s named entity recognition pipeline and lead developer for the Digital Alcuin Project, which stems from his dissertation. The Digital Alcuin Project uses custom machine learning named entity recognition methods for extracting entities from unstructured and orthographically varied medieval Latin texts to then identify and extract epistolary social networks in the letters of Alcuin (730-804).  Dr. Mattingly also maintains www.PythonHumanities.com and the YouTube channels: Python Tutorials for Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities, and R Tutorials for Digital Humanities, all of which makes coding accessible to humanists with or without a coding or mathematical background.  He received a doctorate in History from the University of Kentucky and a MA in History from Florida Gulf Coast University.