Web Presence of Benjamin Schmidt
Benjamin Schmidt is the Clinical Associate Professor of History and Director of Digital Humanities at New York University. He is a former Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University and Harvard University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research area is centralized on humanistic data analysis, Text Mining, and data visualization. He works on higher education (teaching evaluations and humanities policy), narrative anachronism, and political history. His current historical project, Creating Data, a digital monograph explores data collected by the 19th-century American state through archival research, data visualization, and interactive publication.
Benjamin is very active on Twitter as well as LinkedIn throughout his academic career. His recent tweets demonstrate the current scenario of Humanities mainly History and English disciplines in some prestigious American colleges such as Yale, and Princeton over the last 35 years. He engages the public on social media by creating a question poll regarding the history department’s ranking. His tweets are very up-to-date. During the Pandemic, he tweets regarding data analysis of tracking Coronavirus test positivity rates in Manhattan and the post-covid job market. Ben’s research is not restricted to academic areas, he has an equal interest in politics and international issues. He tweets several data analyses regarding the 2020 US election and India’s rapidly growing population. His earlier research is based on digital libraries, Dot-density population maps, and so on. Some of his earlier research shows his interest in technology – a short visual essay about a 1977 Apple II ad using some new features for ‘scholarship’.
Benjamin mostly uses his social media for sharing his research ideas, and projects from the very beginning of his carrier. He uses this platform to exchange ideas with other scholars and to connect with non-academic people. His online presence creates a network of collaboration and discussion.
