John A. Walsh, associate professor of information and library science at Indiana University and director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for the 2018-2020 academic years. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. During the period of their appointments, fellows give at least one public lecture.
Walsh's research involves the application of computational methods to the study of literary and historical documents. His projects include the Petrarchive, a digital edition of Petrarch's songbook; Algernon Charles Swinburne Project, a digital collection devoted to the life and work of Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; and Chymistry of Isaac Newton, a digital edition of the alchemical writings of Isaac Newton. He has developed Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) for scholarly encoding of comics and graphic novels. He also created TEI Boilerplate, a system for publishing documents encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
Walsh is the technical editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open-access online journal published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. Prior to becoming a faculty member in the School of Informatics and Computing, he worked for ten years as a technologist and librarian in Indiana University's Digital Library Program. He holds a PhD in English literature from Indiana.
"My collaborations with Illinois' iSchool faculty are among the highlights of my career," Walsh said. "I work with Professors Kathryn La Barre and Carol Tilley to study comic book readership and fandom. As director of the HTRC, I work closely with Associate Dean for Research Stephen Downie, HTRC co-director. As an iSchool research fellow, I look forward to building upon these strong collaborations and engaging with other faculty and students at Illinois."