Dickinson is very pleased to welcome Matthew Kochis as the new Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities. Matt comes to us from the University of Tulsa, where he is finishing up his PhD in English. While at Tulsa, he has been a digital editor for the Modernist Versions Project and project manager for the Modernist Journals Project.

In addition to his more traditional work in the field of British and Irish modernist novels, Matt has developed various kinds of expertise in the digital humanities, with a focus on textual editing. At the DH Summer Institute in Victoria BC in 2011 he produced an annotated version of the “Nausicaa” episode from Joyce’s Ulysses, work he continued at a five week NEH seminar in Dublin in 2013. As digital editor of the Modernist Versions Project he uploaded high-quality scans of the first (1922) edition of Ulysses, a resource which became a key part of the “Year of Ulysses” initiative, a digital project that hosts various version of Joyce’s work online. While managing the staff of the Modernist Journals Project Matt used ABBYY FineReader 9.0, an optical-character-recognition software, to convert scanned images of early twentieth century magazines, like Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and Ezra Pound’s The Egoist, into searchable PDF files. He also improved MJP’s archive by performing TEI, XML, and MODS record encoding for the magazines.

At Dickinson, in addition to pursuing his own projects, Matt will work as a catalyst for faculty innovation by planning, promoting, and implementing strategies to encourage faculty discourse about pedagogy, e-learning tools, and the integration of digital media into teaching and scholarship. Matt’s gregarious and engaging personality should help a great deal in that task, and we are delighted to have his help in forwarding the already vigorous DH initiatives at the College.