Vitae

EDUCATION

  • PhD History, University of California, Berkeley, 2004-2008. Dissertation: The Road to Rule: The expansion of the British road network, 1740-1850. Primary field: British History, 1688-1950. Secondary fields: Urban History, Architecture. Advisor: Professor James Vernon, British History.

  • AB Literature, Magna cum Laude, Harvard College, 1996-2000.

APPOINTMENTS

  • Full Professor of Quantitative Methods, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (2023-)

  • Full Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2022-3)

  • Visiting Professor, University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2022)

  • Affiliated Faculty, Center for Spatial and Textual Analytics, Stanford (2020-)

  • External Faculty, Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago (2020-)

  • Associate Professor of Data Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2020-3)

  • Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2018-22)

  • Assistant Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2016–8)

  • Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Providence, RI (2014–6)

  • Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Providence, RI (2012–6)

  • Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, MA (2009–10, 2011–3)

  • Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History, Department of History, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2008–9, 2010–1)

DIGITAL PROJECTS

These projects are relics of a digital age that compare to books in terms of the grant-writing behind them, the multiple hands that shaped them, the weight of ideas and research that went into them, and their intended wide-ranging readership.

  • The Guldi Lab at SMU has been engaged in the development of a strategy for the "distant reading" of the history of parliamentary debates over housing, eviction, homelessness, and poverty. The Guldi Lab has concentrated on text mining the debates of the nineteenth century, where a deep historiography has already reviewed a bulk of the major turning points and arguments of the period, with the result that practicing historians today can collectively validate, with great precision, whether the results of text mining the parliamentary debates are meaningful and instructive.  The work of the lab is currently focused on three goals:

    • An unprecedented, long-term overview of the workings of parliament in the nineteenth century, exploiting the derivation of probability-based “topics” at different scales

    • Visualizations of raw data that abstract such historical claims and make explicit their quantitative basis; and

    • Methodological innovations in using Machine Learning methods to find evidence of historical change.

  • With Cora Johnson Roberson, Paper Machines, digital software for historians (2012)

    • Paper Machines is a free toolkit for historians who wish to perform a “distant reading” of large-scale textual corpora, particularly those associated with modern institutions like Parliament or the World Bank, by using algorithms to visualize how the official mind’s concerns change over time and space. I designed Paper Machines to help with my next monograph, The Long Land War, with funding from Harvard and Google in 2012. I have since used it constantly in teaching as an introduction to topic-modelling (measuring word and phrase frequency over time) and geoparsing (mapping the occurrence of place- names over time). The technology has been widely adopted and taught. Twitter searching gives a glimpse of its adoptation: here and here. There is also a review of the software in Digital Humanities Quarterly. 

  • What is the Spatial Turn? (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, Scholar’s Lab, 2012) – digital manuscript only at present (the manuscript has been requested for inclusion in the Harvard University Press book series MetaLABprojects)

    • For reasons of accessibility and relevance, we chose to put this manuscript online as a historiographical essay to accompany to the Scholars’ Lab website, which is an introduction to spatial methods and best practices in mapping and other spatial scholarship online. The piece was immediately assigned in graduate classrooms, including Alison Winter’s History of Science class (University of Chicago) and Peter Bol’s historiography course (Harvard). Partially as a result of its presence online, the manuscript has received fairly steady and international attention from digital humanists. For a trace of what is being said about it, a search of Twitter will do.

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: BOOKS

  • The War Over Rent: How Irish tenants fought their landlords and won (Dutton, April 2027).

  • The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

  • The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale University Press, scheduled for April 2022), Agrarian Studies Series

  • (with David Armitage) The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014; revised edition, 2015; Portuguese translation: Autentica Editora: in progress; Chinese translation, Truth & Wisdom Press: in progress; Japanese translation, Tōsui Shobō: in progress; Korean translation, Hanul Ak’ademi: in progress; Russian translation, Ab Imperio, 1–4/2015; Spanish translation, Alianza Editorial: 2016; Turkish translation, Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları: 2016), x + 165 pp. [New Statesman Book of the Year, 2014; El País book of the week, Sep. 2016]

  • Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard University Press, 2012). Reviews in The Wall Street Journal, Technology and Culture, Journal of British Studies, Victorian Studies, The American Historical Review, etc.

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: BOOK CHAPTERS

  • (with Diane Colman) “Activism : Digital Humanities as a Tool in Global Politics,” in Simon Burrows, ed., Building the Digital Humanities (Radboud University Press, forthcoming).

  • “The Digital Turn: Historians as critical arbiters in the flood of data that surrounds us,” Turning Points: ‘Turns’ in Recent Historiography (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, forthcoming)

  • “Working on a Deadline: Information Science and the Digital Humanities in an Age of Climate Change,” in Lauren Klein and Matt Gold, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2022 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022), accepted and in peer review.

  • “Big Data,” in C. M. Akker, The Routledge Companion to History and Theory (London: Routledge, forthcoming), accepted and forthcoming.

  • “Can Historians Be Replaced by Algorithms?” in Zoltan Simon and Lars Deile, Historical Understanding (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming), accepted and forthcoming.

  • “Conclusion: The Common Landscape of the Digital Humanities,” in Fridlund, Paju, and Oiva, eds., Digital, Computational, and Distant Readings of History (Helsinki University Press, 2020)

  • “Time Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twenty-First Century Toolkit: The History and Politics of Longue-duree Thinking as a Prelude to the Digital Analysis of the Past,” chapter 19, pp. 253-266, in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015)

  • “Reinventing the Academic Journal,” in Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds., Hacking the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 25-7.

  • “Landscape and Place," in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 66-80.

  • “A Map of the Virtual Territory: Individual and society in the 21st 2          
    century,” in Voices of the Virtual World: Participative technology & the ecclesial revolution, eds. Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou (n.p.: Wikiklesia Press, 2007), winner of the Award of Merit from the Society for New Communications Research.

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: NON-REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES

BOOK PROJECTS

  • Near-term: with Stephanie Buongiorno, Text Mining for Historical Analysis, a methodological introduction to text mining for historical research. Final manuscript, book proposal, readers’ reports, and response are complete. A contract was signed in 2025 and submission of the final manuscript is expected by December 2027.

  • Medium-term: A Distant Reading of Property, a data-driven analysis of how the discourse of property changed in the debates of the British parliament.  It exists in manuscript. Book proposal under preparation. Expected submission by January 2027.

    With Peter Kastor, A Distant Reading of Congress, is in proposal phase for the Cambridge Elements of History series with Daniel Woolf.  It exists in manuscript.

  • Long-term: Infrastructure, with Jennifer Wenzel, has been commissioned for the Literature and Politics series from Oxford University Press. It is in development.

    A Big History of the Commons is just an idea at this stage, but it’s the one I’ve spoken about with my literary agent and editor at Dutton. 

ARTICLES IN DEVELOPMENT OR REVIEW

  • With Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Stephanie Buongiorno, Gregory Palermo, Rosie Larson, and Samuel Jiang, “Multi-Scale Computational Analysis of Wikipedia’s Telling of Global History,” Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences (in review). 

  • With Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Stephanie Buongiorno, Gregory Palermo, Rosie Larson, and Samuel Jiang, “AI-Supported Analysis of Global Temporal Interrelations in Wikipedia’s Histories of Ideologies,” (in development)

  • With Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Stephanie Buongiorno, Gregory Palermo, Rosie Larson, and Samuel Jiang, “A Historian’s Guide to Clustering,”(in development)

  • “Toward a Theory of AI-Enabled Global History: From Function to Form,” (in development)

  • “Roundtable: The History Manifesto at 10,” American Historical Review (in preparation)

  • With Peter Kastor and Stephanie Buongiorno, “Word Embeddings as a Key to the Study of Bias in Congress, 1880-2010,” Journal of Digital History (in review)

GRANTS

  • Fox Center for the Humanities support for DH@Emory Initiative ($5000)

  • Emory College of Arts and Sciences, support for Data Science Initiative funding 3-year postdoctoral fellow ($288,000)

  • Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fellowship (2022-23) (deferred)

  • Emergent Ventures Fund, Cato Institute (2023-24) ($50,000)

  • PI NSF Grant, “The Unaffordable World,” Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) (2016-21) ($1,000,000)

  • Dean’s Research Council, SMU (2018) ($8,000)

  • “Think-Play-Hack: Trust,” Dedman College Interdisciplinary Initiative (2018-9) ($6,000)

  • Cogut Center for the Humanities research grant (2015) ($2,000)

  • Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Summer 2015) ($3,500)

  • Brown Salomon Grant for research (2014-6) ($15,000)

  • Brown University Public Humanities Center Fellowship (2014-5) ($2,500)

  • Watson Institute Collaborative Research Grant (2014-5) ($8,000)

  • Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Summer 2014) ($3,500)

  • Brown India Initiative Grant (Summer 2013) ($10,000)

  • Google Summer of Code Grant, Berkman Center/Metalab, Harvard University (Summer 2012)

  • William F. Milton Fund, Harvard University (2011-3) ($30,000)

PRESENTATIONS

  • “Toward an AI Attuned to Dissent and Consensus in Historical Events: Evidence from Wikipedia.” Leiden University (December 2025).

  • “Keynote Address.” HAICu Conference (Humanities, AI and Computing), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (December 2025).

  • “Rewriting the Past? AI, Interpretation, and the Future of History Education.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (January 2026).

  • “AHR Roundtable: The History Manifesto at 10.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (January 2026).

  • “Will AI Kill Democracy or Spur a Democratic Revival? The Role of Text Mining for Historical Analysis.” University of Glasgow (June 2025).

  • “The Crisis of Fact and Technology.” University of Warwick (June 2025).

  • “The Revolution in Text Mining for Historical Analysis and Why It Matters in an Age of Climate Change.” Keynote address, The Royal Netherlands Historical Society (Dutch: Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, or KNHG), Maastricht (August 2024).

  • “Irish Timelines for Revolution in the Nineteenth Century.” Keynote, Irish Studies Conference, New York University (June 2024).

  • “The Administration of Land, Water, and Atmosphere in the Longue Duree -- and How to Study It,” Shapiro Lecture, University of Chicago (April 2024).

  • “Emergent Practices.” Princeton University (March 2024).

  • “The Long Land War Continues.” Princeton University (March 2024).

  • “Launching a Digital History Lab for the Twenty-First Century: Concepts, Methods, and Institutions,” Princeton University (March, 2024).

  • “The Long Land War,” AHA Panel: What Is Global History Now?, American Historical Association, San Francisco, CA (January 2024).

  • “Mellon Sawyer Seminar: Centuries of Data.” Stanford University (February 2024).

  • “New Work on Environmental History / Roundtable on Digital History.” American Historical Association, San Francisco, CA (January 2024).

  • “The Digital Turn: Historians as Critical Arbiters of the Flood of Data That Surrounds Us,” Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy, (December 2023).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining.” Clemson University (October 2023).

  • “New Spatial Practices,” Seminar of the Center for Environment, Geography, and Urbanism, The University of Chicago (April 28, 2023).

  • “The Long Land War,” Agrarian Studies Seminar, University of Georgia (March 17, 2023). 

  • “Mapping Memory,” Matrix Seminar on Social Science, University of California, Berkeley (March 8, 2023)

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on British Studies, Stanford University (March 7, 2023).

  • “How Congress Talked About Environmentalism Since 1970,” Seminar for the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (March 6, 2023).

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on Dispossession, Law School, University of Victoria, Canada (February 16, 2023).

  • Keynote, “Activism,” Building the Digital Humanities Conference, University of New South Wales (November 22, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on Modern European History, Princeton University (November 3, 2022).

  • “Text Mining Memory,” Cultural Analytics Seminar, McGill University, Montreal (September 16, 2022). 

  • “Pseudo-History and Digital History: The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Turing Institute, London (July 8, 2022).

  • “Can Humanity Change its Destiny?” Turing Institute, London (July 8, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” National Library of Ireland, Dublin (May 31, 2022). 

  • “The Long Land War and International Governance,” Keynote, International Land Coalition, Amman, Jordan (May 24, 2022).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” History of Thought and Digital Methods Seminar, University of Pisa (May 20, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (May 13, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on Modern European History, Johns Hopkins University (April 21, 2022). 

  • “Digital History,” Seminar on Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (April 21, 2022). 

  • Panel on Land Movements in Irish History, New York University (April 6, 2022).

  • “Revisiting the Centennial of the Peak of Britain’s Territorial Empire,” Godbey Lecture, Southern Methodist University (March 22, 2022). 

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on the Digital Humanities, University of Texas (March 7, 2022).

  • Keynote, “The Fit Between Text Mining and History,” Conference on Digital History, University of Umeå (December 2021).

  • Panelist, Seminar on Peoples’ Atlases, Georgetown University (September 21, 2021).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on Digital Humanities, University of Indiana Urbana Champagne (May 21, 2021).

  • “Topic Modeling Parliament’s Debates About Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University (May 14, 2021).

  • “Digital Approaches to the Study of Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University (May 14, 2021).

  • “The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities (May 13, 2021). Video here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/cMiKw386_DU/edit

  • Roundtable, Digital Methods in Legal History, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt (March 1-5, 2021).

  • "The Dangerous Art of Text-Mining: Thinking About Monkeys, Violence, and Time in an Age of Automated Information Retrieval,” Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, the University of Chicago (January 8, 2021).

  • “A Distant Reading of Property,” Washington University, St. Louis (December 7, 2020).

  • “Jo Guldi in Conversation with Chris Kelty: The Participant in Troubled Times,” Yale Sawyer Seminar (October 29, 2020).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Conference, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (October 4, 2020).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Stanford Data Practices Conference, (October 2, 2020).

  • “Critical Search,” John Hopkins Workshop in Digital History, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (July 31, 2020).

  • "A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives," Sawyer Seminar Series on Information Ecosystems, Pitt University, Pittsburgh, PA (January, 2020).  

  • “Climate Change as a Security Question,” Community Action Federation conference on “The Era of Security,” Madrid, Spain (November 22-4, 2019).

  • “Participatory Mapping and the Scales of International Governance,” Yale Workshop on Usable Climate Science (November 6-8, 2019).

  •  “Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.

  • “Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Keynote, Computational Text Analysis and Historical Change, Umeå, Sweden, Sep. 4, 2019.

  • “Measuring World View,”  Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn, Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2019.

  • “On the Commons: Game Theory, New Theories of the Commons, and a Deep Historical Account of the Modern Commons,” Workshop on “The Role of Information in Complex Conflict,” Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, Feb 3-6, 2019.

  • “Frontiers of Text Mining,” Amazon Ideas Conference, Seattle, WA, Oct 16-18, 2018.

  • "From Critical Thinking to Critical Search: Working between microhistory and macrohistory with big data," Conference on Humanities and the Arts in the Age of Big Data, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, Oct. 4-5, 2018. 

  • “International Information,” Yale Agrarian Studies Seminar, New Haven, CT, Sep. 21, 2018.

  •  “Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.

  •  “Topic Modeling the History of Technology,” University of Oklahoma, April 13, 2018.

  • “The History of State Power in the City: Participatory, Liberal, and Neoliberal,” Workshop at Columbia University, March 3, 2018.

  • “Discussion of the History Manifesto,” University of Swansea, Wales, February 8, 2018.

  • “Computers Look at Text in 2025: What is Coming?,” The Download@Lyle Series, Southern Methodist University, February 7, 2018

  • “The Digital Humanities in 2025” and “An Introduction to Topic Modeling,” keynotes for the Digital Humanities Road Tour, various universities across Finland, January 27-February 3, 2018.

  • “The Missing Genres of Digital Argumentation in Historical Journals,” Panel on Argumentation in Digital History, American Historical Association, Washington, DC, January 6, 2018. 

  • “Infrastructure, Society, Economics, and Culture: Lessons from the History of Large Technological Systems,” Universite de los Andes, Bogota, Columbia, December 5-6, 2017.

  • “Participation and Democracy,” Old Red Museum (Dallas, Texas), October 27, 2017.

  • “Topic Modeling,” Talk at the Fondren Library Prism Panel, Southern Methodist University, October 23, 2017.

  • Talk, “Argumentation in Digital History,” George Mason University, September 15-6, 2017.

  • Plenary Talk, “Fastlanes and Potholes on the Road to the Future of Digital History,” Aalto University, Helsinki, June 2, 2017.

  • Keynote, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure History, NYU Paris, May 30, 2017.

  • “Comings and Goings,” Honors Convocation Plenary Keynote, Southern Methodist University, April 17, 2017.

  • Keynote, Stanford Literary Lab workshop, “Findings. Is computation changing the study of history and literature?” April 14, 2017

  • “Infrastructure in the Longue Duree,” Plenary Presentation, AAG Premeeting on Infrastructure, Boston, April 4, 2017.

  •  “The Paper War of Land Reform,” Legal History Series, Boston University, March 2, 2017.

  • “The Longue Duree of Land, the Longue Duree of Land Reform: Towards a Utopian History,” talk at Uppsala University, November 21-22, 2016.

  • “Methods Intensive: Towards a Method of Textmining for Historical Analysis,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, November 17-8, 2016.

  • "On the Interpretation of History by Squiggle: Visualizing Change Beyond the N-Gram," introductory talk at workshop,  "From Quantitative to Qualitative Analysis: New Perspectives on Historical Research in Political Economy," University of Chicago, October 14, 2016.

  • “Goldwin Smith and the Longue Duree of Reparations,” keynote panel, "The Public Work of Interpretation," MLA, January 9, 2016, https://apps.mla.org/program_details?prog_id=651A&year=2016

  • “The Long Land War,” presentation at the Hoover Institute, Stanford, June 24, 2015.

  • “Digital Workshop on Paper Machines,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 14, 2015.

  • “Seminar on the Long Land War,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 13, 2015.

  • “New Work in History, Examining the Longue Durée with Paper Machines” at the University of Chicago, Disciplines & Technologies conference, May 8, 2015.

  • “Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.

  • “The History Manifesto,” participation in dedicated roundtable hosted by the Washington History Seminar, Co-sponsored by the AHA, April 20, 2015.

  •  “The Long Land War,” presentation at the workshop on History, Culture, and Society, Harvard University, April 3, 2015.

  • Presentation, “Introducing Paper Machines,” Princeton University workshop on Digital History, March 27, 2015.

  •  “Sewers, Water, & Air,” Gilded Ages workshop, Brown University, February 26, 2015.

  • “The History Manifesto,” Annenberg Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, February 17, 2015.

  • “The History Manifesto,” presentation at the Kennedy School, comments by Sam Moyn, Harvard University, February 12, 2015.

  • “Paper Machines,” MIT World History Seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 13, 2015.

  • “Participatory Maps, A Global History,” Brown India Initiative, December 5, 2014.

  • “The Apocalyptic Anthropocene,” New England Critical Environmental Social Science Workshop, Brown University, November 21, 2014.

  •  “A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.

  • “History Looks at the Evidence,” talk at the British Library, October 9, 2014.

  •  “The History Manifesto,” talk in the British Government series, London School of Economics, October 8, 2014. 

  • “Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Institute of Historical Research, Digital Humanities Seminar, October 7, 2014.

  • “The History Manifesto,” talk at the History Department, University of California, Berkeley, September 29, 2014.

  • “Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance? Food, Land, and Water,” talk at the Stanford Center for Liberation Technology, January 9, 2014. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9HHWEpAVFU

  •  “The History of Participatory Mapping,” talk at Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.

  • “Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.

  • “Property Rights, the Post Office, and the Making of the Infrastructure State,” A Symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads, University College Cork, Ireland, May 3, 2013.

  • “Human Infrastructure: Participatory Mapping in Chicago,” Conference on the Built Environment, University of Chicago, April 26, 2013. Video online at:http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/23839?size=custom&custom_width=1000

  • “The Return of the Longue Durée,” Yale Legal History Forum, Yale Law School, April 23, 2013.

  • “How Digital Tools are Changing the Practice of History: A Report on the Longue Durée,” invited lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC, April 19, 2013.

  • “Human Infrastructure,” Infrastructure Monument Conference, MIT, April 8, 2013.

  • Roundtable on digital history, Harvard History Department, March 2013. 

  • “"Infrastructure for a revolution,” Media Places Conference, Umea University, Sweden, January 2013. http://mediaplaces2012.humlab.umu.se/program.html,http://storify.com/search?q=guldi+%40mediaplaces2012

  • "Digital Methods and the Long Land War," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://digihist.se/2012/12/13/jo-guldi-om-digital-historia/

  • Seminar, "Mapping Time, Mapping Space," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://storify.com/digihist/jo-guldi-in-gothenburg

  • “"The Long Land War: A Global History of Land Reform, c. 1860-Present" Harvard International & Global History Seminar, Harvard University November 28, 2012

  • Paper Machines Seminar, Rice University, Houston, November 19, 2012.http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/2012/11/17/paper-machines-debriefing, http://johngmarks.com/2012/11/19/paper-machines/

  • “International Finance and the Rise of Global Squatterdom,” Histories of Land, Economy, and Power Conference and Workshop,http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/ehppf/land/program.html Harvard University, November 10, 2012

  • “Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7rumSNPw8

  • Topic Modeling Workshop, MITH, University of Maryland, College Park, November 3, 2012http://vimeo.com/53078693

  • "Britain Invents the Infrastructure State," Harvard STS Circle, February 2011.

  • “A History of the Boundary Line,” in artists’ panel, “Natural Histories of the Boundary Line,” to accompany film work by Sarah Kanouse and Thomas Comerford, Mess Hall, Chicago, January 2011.

  • “Infrastructure and Social Connection,” Social Computing Seminar, New York (January 2011).

  • "Keywords for the Infrastructure State," Early Modern Reading Group, November 2010

  • "Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," DHCS Conference, Northwestern, November 2010

  • "The City Made of Words: Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," University of Virginia Library, September 2010

  • “The Invisibility of Scotland,” Mellon Conference on the Social Sciences, University of Chicago (March 2009).

  • Various talks to graduate students on digital methods, University of Chicago, 2008-11

  •  “Technology, State, and Society in the Building of the British Road Network, 1810-1850,” Technology, Politics, & Culture Seminar, the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois (April 4, 2008).

  • “Welcome: Interdisciplinary Institutes in a Longue-Durée Perspective,” Think-Play-Hack, SMU-Taos, New Mexico, July 2019.

  • “World View in a Longue-Durée Perspective,” Think-Play-Hack, SMU-Taos, New Mexico, July 2019. 

  •  “Front Lines: Early-Career Scholars Doing Digital History,” American Historical Association, January 4, 2013, http://aha.confex.com/aha/2013/webprogram/Session8898.html, http://storify.com/JohnOKDC/aha-2013-session-111-front-lines-early-career-scho

  • “Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," Society for Textual Scholarship, Penn State, March 2011.

  •  “Learning Not to Speak to Strangers,” Anglo-American Conference, Institute for Historical Research, London (July 2-3, 2009).

  • “Landscape History and Modern History” to the Social History Workshop in the Department of History at the University of Chicago (April 2009)

  •  “Citizenship and Connectivity: How Government Pioneered the Shape of Public Space in Modern Britain, 1803-1811”  Panel on Landscape, North American Conference on BritishStudies, Cincinnati, Ohio (October 2008).

  • “The Road to Rule: Technology, the State, and Britain’s interkingdom highways, 1740-1850,” in panel, Pathbreaking in the Nineteenth Century: Roads as a product of statecraft and representation, The American Society for Environmental History, Boise, Idaho (March 12-16, 2008).

  •  “The Fellowship of Travelers:  Migrant Communities on Britain’s Roads, 1740-1850,” California World History Association, Fullerton, California (November 11-12, 2007).

  •  “Scottish Technocrats, the Highway Commission, and Postcolonial Nationalism: The Administrative origins of the Transport Revolution, 1810-1840,” Western Conference on British Studies, Albuquerque, New Mexico (November 1-3, 2007)

  • “The Transport Revolution, Reimagined:  Visual technology, governmentality, and mobility on Britain’s Roads, 1740-1850,” Fifth Annual Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic & Mobility, Helmond, the Netherlands (October 25-28, 2007)

  • “Paving the Way to Nationhood: Parliament and the British Interkingdom Highway System,” Midwest Conference on British Studies at Wright State University , Dayton, Ohio (October 28, 2007).

  • “Learning Not to Talk to Strangers: Interactions in London’s Public Streets, 1810-1840” Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference (RMIHC), Boulder, Colorado (September 7-8, 2007).

  • “The Origins of Expert Rule: British Liberalism, the Engineer, and the Local Poor, 1808-1850,” Breslauer Graduate Student Symposium, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California (March 2007).

INVITED PAPERS

  • “New Spatial Practices,” Seminar of the Center for Environment, Geography, and Urbanism, The University of Chicago (April 28, 2023).

  • “The Long Land War,” Agrarian Studies Seminar, University of Georgia (March 17, 2023).

  • “Mapping Memory,” Matrix Seminar on Social Science, University of California, Berkeley (March 8, 2023)

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on British Studies, Stanford University (March 7, 2023).

  • “How Congress Talked About Environmentalism Since 1970,” Seminar for the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (March 6, 2023).

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on Dispossession, Law School, University of Victoria, Canada (February 16, 2023).

  • Keynote, “Activism,” Building the Digital Humanities Conference, University of New South Wales (November 22, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” Seminar on Modern European History, Princeton University (November 3, 2022).

  • “Text Mining Memory,” Cultural Analytics Seminar, McGill University, Montreal (September 16, 2022).

  • “Pseudo-History and Digital History: The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Turing Institute, London (July 8, 2022).

  • “Can Humanity Change its Destiny?” Turing Institute, London (July 8, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” National Library of Ireland, Dublin (May 31, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War and International Governance,” Keynote, International Land Coalition, Amman, Jordan (May 24, 2022).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” History of Thought and Digital Methods Seminar, University of Pisa (May 20, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,” Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (May 13, 2022).

  • “The Long Land War,”Seminar on Modern European History, Johns Hopkins University (April 21, 2022).

  • “Digital History,” Seminar on Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (April 21, 2022).

  • Panel on Land Movements in Irish History, New York University (April 6, 2022).

  • “Revisiting the Centennial of the Peak of Britain’s Territorial Empire,” Godbey Lecture, Southern Methodist University (March 22, 2022).

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on the Digital Humanities, University of Texas (March 7, 2022).

  • Title TBD, Turing Institute, July 2022. Keynote, “The Fit Between Text Mining and History,” Conference on Digital History, University of Umeå, December 2021.

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on Digital Humanities, University of Indiana Urbana Champagne, May 21, 2021

  • “Topic Modeling Parliament’s Debates About Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University, May 14, 2021

  • “Digital Approaches to the Study of Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University, May 14, 2021

  • “The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities, May 13, 2021. Video here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/cMiKw386_DU/edit

  • Roundtable, Digital Methods in Legal History, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt, March 1-5, 2021.

  • The Dangerous Art of Text-Mining: Thinking About Monkeys, Violence, and Time in an Age of Automated Information Retrieval,” Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, the University of Chicago, January 8, 2021.

  • “A Distant Reading of Property,” Washington University, St. Louis, December 7, 2020.

  • “Jo Guldi in Conversation with Chris Kelty: The Participant in Troubled Times,” Yale Sawyer Seminar, October 29, 2020

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Conference, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, October 4, 2020.

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Stanford Data Practices Conference, October 2, 2020.

  • “Critical Search,” John Hopkins Workshop in Digital History, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, July 31, 2020.

  • A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives, Sawyer Seminar Series on Information Ecosystems, Pitt University, Pittsburgh, PA, January, 2020.

  • “Climate Change as a Security Question,” Community Action Federation conference on “The Era of Security,” Madrid, Spain, November 22-4, 2019.

  • “Participatory Mapping and the Scales of International Governance,” Yale Workshop on Usable Climate Science, November 6-8, 2019.

  • “Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.

  • “Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Keynote, Computational Text Analysis and Historical Change, Umeå, Sweden, Sep. 4, 2019.

  • “Measuring World View,” Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn, Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2019.

  • “On the Commons: Game Theory, New Theories of the Commons, and a Deep Historical Account of the Modern Commons,” Workshop on “The Role of Information in Complex Conflict,” Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, Feb 3-6, 2019.

  • “Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.

  •  “Topic Modeling the History of Technology,” University of Oklahoma, April 13, 2018.

  • “The History of State Power in the City: Participatory, Liberal, and Neoliberal,” Workshop at Columbia University, March 3, 2018.

  • “Discussion of the History Manifesto,” University of Swansea, Wales, February 8, 2018.

  • “Infrastructure, Society, Economics, and Culture: Lessons from the History of Large Technological Systems,” Universite de los Andes, Bogota, Columbia, December 5-6, 2017.

  • Talk, “Argumentation in Digital History,” George Mason University, September 15-6, 2017.

  • Plenary Talk, “Fastlanes and Potholes on the Road to the Future of Digital History,” Aalto University, Helsinki, June 2, 2017.

  • Keynote, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure History, NYU Paris, May 30, 2017.

  • Keynote, Stanford Literary Lab workshop, “Findings. Is computation changing the study of history and literature?” April 14, 2017

  • “Infrastructure in the Longue Duree,” keynote presentation, AAG Premeeting on Infrastructure, Boston, April 4, 2017.

  • “The Paper War of Land Reform,” Legal History Series, Boston University, March 2, 2017.

  • “The Longue Duree of Land, the Longue Duree of Land Reform: Towards a Utopian History,” talk at Uppsala University, November 21-22, 2016.

  • “Methods Intensive: Towards a Method of Textmining for Historical Analysis,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, November 17-8, 2016.

  • “On the Interpretation of History by Squiggle: Visualizing Change Beyond the N-Gram,” introductory talk at workshop, “From Quantitative to Qualitative Analysis: New Perspectives on Historical Research in Political Economy,” University of Chicago, October 14, 2016.

  • “Goldwin Smith and the Longue Duree of Reparations,” keynote panel, “The Public Work of Interpretation,” MLA, January 9, 2016, Link

  • “The Long Land War,” presentation at the Hoover Institute, Stanford, June 24, 2015.

  • “Digital Workshop on Paper Machines,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 14, 2015.

  • “Seminar on the Long Land War,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 13, 2015.

  • “New Work in History, Examining the Longue Durée with Paper Machines” at the University of Chicago, Disciplines & Technologies conference, May 8, 2015.

  • “Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.

  • “The History Manifesto,” participation in dedicated roundtable hosted by the Washington History Seminar, Co-sponsored by the AHA, April 20, 2015.

  • “The Long Land War,” presentation at the workshop on History, Culture, and Society, Harvard University, April 3, 2015.

  • Presentation, “Introducing Paper Machines,” Princeton University workshop on Digital History, March 27, 2015.

  • “Sewers, Water, & Air,” Gilded Ages workshop, Brown University, February 26, 2015.

  • “The History Manifesto,” Annenberg Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, February 17, 2015.

  • “The History Manifesto,” presentation at the Kennedy School, comments by Sam Moyn, Harvard University, February 12, 2015.

  • “Paper Machines,” MIT World History Seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 13, 2015.

  • “Participatory Maps, A Global History,” Brown India Initiative, December 5, 2014.

  • “The Apocalyptic Anthropocene,” New England Critical Environmental Social Science Workshop, Brown University, November 21, 2014.

  • “A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.

  • “The Apocalyptic Anthropocene,” New England Critical Environmental Social Science Workshop, Brown University, November 21, 2014.

  • “A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.

  • “History Looks at the Evidence,” talk at the British Library, October 9, 2014.

  • “The History Manifesto,” talk in the British Government series, London School of Economics, October 8, 2014.

  • “Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Institute of Historical Research, Digital Humanities Seminar, October 7, 2014.

  • “The History Manifesto,” talk at the History Department, University of California, Berkeley, September 29, 2014.

  • “Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance? Food, Land, and Water,” talk at the Stanford Center for Liberation Technology, January 9, 2014. Video

  • “The History of Participatory Mapping,” talk at Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.

  • “Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.

  • “Property Rights, the Post Office, and the Making of the Infrastructure State,” A Symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads, University College Cork, Ireland, May 3, 2013.

  • “Human Infrastructure: Participatory Mapping in Chicago,” Conference on the Built Environment, University of Chicago, April 26, 2013. Video

  • “The Return of the Longue Durée,” Yale Legal History Forum, Yale Law School, April 23, 2013.

  • “How Digital Tools are Changing the Practice of History: A Report on the Longue Durée,” invited lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC, April 19, 2013.

  • “Human Infrastructure,” Infrastructure Monument Conference, MIT, April 8, 2013.

  • Roundtable on digital history, Harvard History Department, March 2013.

  • “Infrastructure for a revolution,” Media Places Conference, Umea University, Sweden, January 2013. Website, Storify

  • “Digital Methods and the Long Land War,” University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, Link

  • Sweden, 4 December 2012, Link

  • “The Long Land War: A Global History of Land Reform, c. 1860-Present” Harvard International & Global History Seminar, Harvard University November 28, 2012

  • Paper Machines Seminar, Rice University, Houston, November 19, 2012. Link, Link 2

  • “International Finance and the Rise of Global Squatterdom,” Histories of Land, Economy, and Power Conference and Workshop, Link

  • Harvard University, November 10, 2012 “Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video

  • Topic Modeling Workshop, MITH, University of Maryland, College Park, November 3, 2012 Link

  • “Britain Invents the Infrastructure State,” Harvard STS Circle, February 2011.

  • “A History of the Boundary Line,” in artists’ panel, “Natural Histories of the Boundary Line,” to accompany film work by Sarah Kanouse and Thomas Comerford, Mess Hall, Chicago, January 2011.

  • “Infrastructure and Social Connection,” Social Computing Seminar, New York (January 2011).

  • “Keywords for the Infrastructure State,” Early Modern Reading Group, November 2010

  • “Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History,” DHCS Conference, Northwestern, November 2010

  • “The City Made of Words: Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History,” University of Virginia Library, September 2010

  • “The Invisibility of Scotland,” Mellon Conference on the Social Sciences, University of Chicago (March 2009).

  • Various talks to graduate students on digital methods, University of Chicago, 2008-11

  • “Technology, State, and Society in the Building of the British Road Network, 1810-1850,” Technology, Politics, & Culture Seminar, the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois (April 4, 2008).

OTHER PAPERS READ

  • “Front Lines: Early-Career Scholars Doing Digital History,” American Historical Association, January 4, 2013, Link, Storify

  • “Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," Society for Textual Scholarship, Penn State, March 2011.

  • “Learning Not to Speak to Strangers,” Anglo-American Conference, Institute for Historical Research, London (July 2-3, 2009).

  • “Landscape History and Modern History” to the Social History Workshop in the Department of History at the University of Chicago (April 2009)

  • “Citizenship and Connectivity: How Government Pioneered the Shape of Public Space in Modern Britain, 1803-1811” Panel on Landscape, North American Conference on British Studies, Cincinnati, Ohio (October 2008).

  • “The Road to Rule: Technology, the State, and Britain’s interkingdom highways, 1740-1850,” in panel, Pathbreaking in the Nineteenth Century: Roads as a product of statecraft and representation, The American Society for Environmental History, Boise, Idaho (March 12-16, 2008).

  • “The Fellowship of Travelers: Migrant Communities on Britain’s Roads, 1740-1850,” California World History Association, Fullerton, California (November 11-12, 2007).

  • “Scottish Technocrats, the Highway Commission, and Postcolonial Nationalism: The Administrative origins of the Transport Revolution, 1810-1840,” Western Conference on British Studies, Albuquerque, New Mexico (November 1-3, 2007)

  • “The Transport Revolution, Reimagined: Visual technology, governmentality, and mobility on Britain’s Roads, 1740-1850,” Fifth Annual Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic & Mobility, Helmond, the Netherlands (October 25-28, 2007)

  • “Paving the Way to Nationhood: Parliament and the British Interkingdom Highway System,” Midwest Conference on British Studies at Wright State University , Dayton, Ohio (October 28, 2007).

  • “Learning Not to Talk to Strangers: Interactions in London’s Public Streets, 1810-1840” Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference (RMIHC), Boulder, Colorado (September 7-8, 2007).

  • “The Origins of Expert Rule: British Liberalism, the Engineer, and the Local Poor, 1808-1850,” Breslauer Graduate Student Symposium, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California (March 2007).

WORKS IN REVIEW

  • “What Kind of Information Infrastructure Does the Governance of Climate Change Need?,” Climatic Change, “Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” American Historical Review

  • “Should Historians Text Mine?” American Historical Review

  • “An Informed Panic,” Isis

  • “Imagine that AI Were a Tool of Democracy,” in review at Recerca, special issue on “Democracy and AI”

  • “A History of the Participatory Map” (submitted to Public Culture)

WORKS IN PROCESS

The Long Land War

The Long Land War tells the story of global struggles over land and water since the struggles kicked off by simultaneous land reform movements and land wars in Ireland, Scotland, and India in the 1880s. The story begins with a synthetic overview of land reform movements in the longue durée. which profiles three moments in the history of property: the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control, the ideology of “squatting” in post 1940 Britain, and the creation of the “participatory map” for contesting legal boundaries in Britain and India in the 1970s and 80s.

  • Portions already published:

    • Ch. 12, “Participatory Mapping,” was printed in January 2017 at Public Culture

    • Ch. 11, “Global Squatterdom,” is being scheduled for publication at Humanity

    • The second half of Chapter 11 has been requested for a special edition of New Global History (due January 2018)

    • Ch. 6, “Goldwin Smith and Land Restitution,” is in circulation (headed next to Victorian Studies)

    • A new chapter, “The Valuers’ Tale,” written in the summer of 2017 on the basis of work in the Dublin archives, is in preparation for circulation to The Journal of British Studies.

Other works in progress

  • The Peasant Origins of Global Government - In preparation for submission to the Journal of Peasant Studies  “The Indian Origins of Appropriate Technology” – in preparation for submission to Technology and Culture

  • “Contesting Imperial Economics: The Land Valuer’s Tale” – in preparation  With Seth Denbo, “Iteration and Transparency in Publishing Digital History”—in preparation for submission to Historical Methods

  • Book manuscript co-authored with Stephanie Buongiorno, Historical Text Mining With R (in preparation), a companion to The Dangerous Art of Text Mining, which recreates the data-driven exercises from that book in code, and introduces the “Hansard” package for working with Hansard’s Debates of Great Britain

  • How Not to Kill Your Landlord (book manuscript in preparation, under contract) presents the story of global struggles over land and water since the struggles kicked off by simultaneous land reform movements and land wars in Ireland, Scotland, and India in the 1880s. The story begins with a synthetic overview of land reform movements in the longue durée, culminating in the establishment of the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control as a means of protecting peasant holdings in land.

    • Portions already published:

      • The second half of Chapter 11 has been requested for a special edition of New Global History (due January 2018)

      • Ch. 6, “Goldwin Smith and Land Restitution,” is in circulation (headed next to Victorian Studies)

      • A new chapter, “The Valuers’ Tale,” written in the summer of 2017 on the basis of work in the Dublin archives, is in preparation for circulation to The Journal of British Studies.

Land & Water in the Longue Durée

An edited volume on Land & Water in the Longue Durée has been commissioned by Tom Summerhill for an edited series at Michigan State University Press, “Global Studies in Rural Peoples, Movements, and Sustainable Systems.” The book is based on a conference in Fall 2015. I will co-edit the book with a Brown graduate student in sociology, Michael Murphy, who helped with the conference.

  • Nine chapters have been solicited and abstracts were collected in July 2016.

  • We are presently working on an introduction and official proposal

Digital Text Mining Projects

Democracy Lab

  • With Stephanie Buongiorno, (https://shinyviz.smu.edu/shiny/public/hansard-shiny/), a public-facing portal for browsing the Hansard parliamentary debates of the nineteenth century using word embeddings and various statistical measures as profiled in The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (released 2021).

Digital Land Wars is an ongoing research project in collaboration with a data science team at Brown University, headed by Mark Howison. The project is designed to create: 

  • Ongoing opportunities for teaching textmining (for instance, the DCII graduate student seminar)

  • Occasional co-authored publications

    • Potentially, publications about the language of c19 property

    • Publications about methodology, including a digital history methods textbook

  • Opportunities to apply for institution-building grants to support graduate student research and institution- building on campus

  • A new software toolkit designed specifically for historians of nineteenth-century British parliament and similar longue-duree digital corpora

Thus far, I have prepared several journal articles:

  •  “Dissimilarity as Method” has received a request for revision and resubmission from the Journal of Cultural Analytics

  • “Text Mining Hansard for Technology” has been submitted to Technology and Culture

  • “Topic Modeling Hansard for Social History” is in preparation upon the request of the editors of Critical Inquiry (due October 2017)

CURRENT RESEARCH GRANTS

  • As PI NSF Grant, “The Unaffordable World,” Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) (2016-21) ($1,000,000)

  • With Neil Brenner and Matthew Desmond, NSF Grant, “The Unaffordable World,” Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) (2016-9)

  • Cogut Center for the Humanities research grant (2015)

  • Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Summer 2015)

  • Brown Salomon Grant for research (2014-6)

COMPLETED RESEARCH GRANTS

  • Brown University Public Humanities Center Fellowship (2014-5)

  • Watson Institute Collaborative Research Grant (2014-5)

  • Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Summer 2014)

  • Brown India Initiative Grant (Summer 2013)

  • Google Summer of Code Grant, Berkman Center/Metalab, Harvard University (Summer 2012) William F. Milton Fund, Harvard University (2011-3)

SERVICE TO THE DEPARTMENT/UNIVERSITY

  • Founding faculty, AI Center, SMU: Working with the chair of Computer Science and the dean of the engineering school, I drafted detailed proposals for a proposed AI Center, which is now moving forward under the direction of Fred Chang. (2019-22)

  • Organizer/Director/Originator, Digital Humanities Minor, SMU (2020-)

  • Originator/Organizer, with the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, creating interdisciplinary faculty reading groups on the digital humanities and text mining, sponsored by our “interdisciplinary institute.” (2019-21)

  • Co-director, along with the DGS of History and the DUS and Chair of Computer Science. Drafted possible coursework for a joint programs of studies, and proposed a series of courses open to both CS students and history-majors and other Dedman students, as well as interdisciplinary students at the graduate level. (2018-21)

  • Originator/Organizer, working with the dean of libraries and CIO of SMU, I led the creation of three faculty committees that oversaw the development of proposal materials for a “text mining consortium” which would prepare ready-to-use “clean” textual data for digital analysis, on demand, for university faculty (2018-20)

  • Organizer/Originator, not-for-credit program of instruction in the digital humanities for faculty and library staff, attended by two dozen members of the university. I taught the skills of text-mining over a 5-week “intensive” offered in tandem with my classes. (2018-20)

  • Member, Outreach Committee, Department of History, SMU, 2017-8.

  • Member, Provost’s committee on Creative and Interactive Technology (2017-18)

  • Member, Advisory Board to the Virtualization Center, Lyle School of Engineering, SMU, 2017-8.

  • Member, Faculty Search Committee, “Digital Humanities,” English Department, SMU, 2017-8.

  • Member, Provost’s Committee to Report on Technology on Campus, SMU, 2016-7.

  • Director, Fellows Program of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, 2016-7.

  • Organizer, speaker series, “Data is Made Up of Stories,” with talks by Kieran Healy, Jarrett Drake, David Eltis, Andrew and Anindita Basu Sempere, Simon Dedeo, and Ethan Zuckerman (sponsored by the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Initiative, Dedman College Dean’s Office, and History Department), SMU, Sep 26, Oct 3, Nov 7, Dec 5, Dec 15, Apr 14, and May 18, 2016-7.

  • Organizer, Conference, “Land and Water in a Long-Term Perspective,” (sponsored by the Watson Institute, History Department, S4, Taubman Center, and Humanities Initiative), Brown University, September 4-5, 2015.

  • Department advising, 2014-5

  • Advising Public Humanities masters students, 2014-5

  • Leader, Modern Europe Seminar, Fall 2014

  • Co-Organizer, Brown-RISD Critical Design Futures Conference, May 2014

  • Member, Brown-RISD Critical Design Futures Initiative, 2014-5.

  • Member, Brown Digital Humanities Initiative, 2012-5.

  • Various talks, Brown CS department, on historians and big data and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, 2012-4.

  • “Can Participatory Maps Save the World?” Talk at the Brown Library Digital Showcase, November 23, 2014. Video

SERVICE TO THE PROFESSION

  • Tenure reviewer for University of Pittsburgh (2023)

  • Board member, Current Research in Digital History, 2021-.

  • Seminar on the Digital Analysis of Parliaments and Congresses, an open research seminar of historians and data scientsts convened monthly over zoom with faculty of Umeå University, Jyvaskyla University, Cambridge University, and the Parliamentary Trust (UK), 2020-1

  • Various talks about the digital humanities in campuses around the world, 2012-7.

  • Chair, “People and Technology: Comparing Road Building across Three Continents,” Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, January 5, 2015.

  • Application reviews, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.

  • Reviewer, panel on Palladio software for early-modern epistolary studies, CESTA, Stanford, May 2014.

  • Various book manuscript reviews: Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Routledge, 2012-4.

  • NEH Digital Humanities grant reviewer, 2012

SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY

  • “The Long Land War,” This is Hell podcast, WNUR radio, Chicago, IL (June 14, 2023), https://thisishell.com/interviews/1605-jo-guldi

  • “A New Era of Democracy,” conversation with Audrey Tang, Minister of Information for Taiwan, A New Era of Democracy podcast, Oakland, CA (November 18, 2021), https://www.audacy.com/podcast/radicalxchanges-f9e3d/episodes/a-new-era-of-democracy-ep-1-audrey-tang-and-jo-guldi-with-rosa-ohara-8d604

  • 6th-7th-8th grade Sunday School, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Dallas, TX (2018-19, 2022-23)

  • Children’s Choir, Pianist, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Dallas, TX (2018-19, 2022-23)

  • Small group on Climate Justice, Unitarian Church, Dallas, TX, 2020

  • Three-part seminar series, “The History of Methodism,” Grace United Methodist Church, Dallas, TX, July 2017.

  • Development of a walking tour on foreclosure and eviction in Providence with the John Nicholson Brown Center for Public History, Brown, masters student Kate Diedrick

  • Various public conversations about present-day infrastructure activists and the history of technology, covered by Forbes

  • “A Brief History of Participatory Mapping,” invited talk at Transparent Chennai (a participatory mapping nonprofit), Chennai, India, May 14, 2013.

SELECTED AWARDS AND HONORS

  • External Affiliate, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (2020-)

  • Fellow, Radical Xchange Foundation (2020-)

  • Fellow, KnowledgeLab, University of Chicago and Santa Fe Institute (2020- )

  • Fellow, Text Optics Lab, Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago (2019-20)

  • Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University (2015-7, deferred)

  • Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University (2015-6)

  • Named appointment, Hans Rothfels Assistant Professorship (2014-6)

  • Fellow, John Nicholas Brown Public Humanities Center (2014-5)

  • Fellow, Harvard Metalab (2012-3)

  • Short-term Fellowship, Huntington Library (January 2009)

  • University DNT Fellowship, 2007-2008. Departmental fellowship (2006- 2007)

  • Anglo-California Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Center for British Studies, UC Berkeley and Pembroke College, Cambridge (2005)

  • Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (2005)

  • Fellow, Yale Center for British Art (2005) Fellow, Institute for Humane Studies (2004-2008)

  • Fellow, Center for Landscape at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, (2004)

  • John Scholes Prize for Best Essay in Transportation History (2004)

  • Kostof Fellowship in Architectural History at Berkeley (2002-2003)

  • Gates Fellowship at Cambridge (2001-2002)

  • Eben Fiske Fellowship at Trinity College (2001-2002)

TEACHING

Teaching Competencies

Teaching Competencies: Natural Language Processing, Text as Data, Text Mining for Historical Analysis; Digital History; Text Mining in R and Python; Information Theory and Semantic Theory; British History, 1540-1982; Landscape History; History of Technology; European History since 1688; History of the State; History of Cities; Political Economy; Land Reform and Land Use in History; Comparative Approaches to Infrastructure.

Courses Taught

  • DSci 340, “Text as Data,” Emory College (Fall 2026)

  • DSci/Hist 240, “Introduction to Text as Data,” Emory College (Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2026)

  • QTM 490R, “Text Mining the Discourse of Climate Change,” Emory (Spring 2024).

  • Hist 3368, “Text Mining as a Historical Method,” SMU (Fall 2017, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023).

  • Hist 2343, “Britain and the World Part I: The Birth of Capitalism, 1350-1851” (Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023)

  • Hist 4300, “British Empire in Nineteenth-Century India (Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022)

  • Hist 6306, “Graduate Seminar on Text Mining for Historical Analysis,” SMU (Spring 2022)

  • Hist 2344, “Britain and the World Part II: A World Connecting, 1852-2001” (Fall 2020)

  • Hist 6386, “Britain in the Nineteenth Century” (Spring 2019)

  • Hist 5392/5340, “Intellectual History of Capitalism,” SMU (Fall 2017)

  • Hist 7398-1172, “Interdisciplinary Digital Humanities Seminar for Graduate Students,” SMU (Spring 2017)

  • Hist 3366-002, “Landscapes of Capitalism, 1870-2017,” SMU (Spring 2017)

  • Hist 7398-1167, “Interdisciplinary Digital Humanities Seminar for Graduate Students,” SMU (Fall 2017)

  • Hist 3366-001, “Landscapes of Capitalism, 1350-1870,” SMU (Fall 2017)

  • Hist 4300, Junior Seminar in History, SMU (Fall 2016)

  • Brown University, Undergraduate Theses: 1 (2014-5); 3 (2014-5)

  • Brown University, undergraduate advising: 30 students, 2014-5

  • Hman 1971, “Advanced Research Seminar on the History and Theory of Property,” Cogut Seminar, Brown University (Fall 2015).

  • Hist 1301, “Nineteenth-Century Cities: Reform and Reformers in Paris, London, and Chicago,” undergraduate lecture course, Brown University (Spring 2014, Spring 2015)

  • Hist 1970u, “Digital History,” undergraduate seminar, Brown University (Spring 2015). 

  • Hist 1311, “Land Use and Capitalism, 1350-the present,” undergraduate lecture course, Brown University (Fall 2013, Fall 2014)

  • Hist 1970u, “Radical Peasants, Rent Strikes, Squatters, and Land Reform: A Global Story, 1870-1980,” undergraduate seminar, Brown University (Fall 2014)

  • Hist 1970u, “Utopias,” undergraduate seminar, Brown University (Spring 2014)

  • Hist 2981h, “Property, Markets, and the State,” graduate seminar (Fall 2013).

  • Hist 62303, “Digital History” University of Chicago (Winter 2011) (new syllabus, co-taught as a lab with researchers from IBM and Google Books, emphasis on visualizing and text-mining historiography).

  • Hist 28904, “Modern History and the Landscape: Land use and the political imagination, 1350 to the present,” University of Chicago (Fall 2010)

  • Hist 62303, “Digital History: Information Revolutions Since Gutenberg and New Methodologies in the Digital Archives,” University of Chicago (Spring 2009)

  • Hist 28903, “The Birth of the Modern City: Paris, London, and Chicago in the Nineteenth Century,” University of Chicago (Spring 2009)

  • Graduate Student Instructor experience: History 7b, American History, 1865-2000, Leon Litwack, Instructor (Spring 2007); Architecture 170, Architecture History, 2000 B. C. E.  to 1300 A. D.,  Stephen Tobriner, Instructor (2003-2004); Environmental Design 169a and 169b, The History of the Built Environment in America, 1600-1900 and 1900-the present; Paul Groth, Instructor (2002-2003)

  • Various readerships in post-1865 American History (2004-2007)

Online Teaching Resources

  • Digital History, A series of Jupyter notebooks designed to teach students of history the skills of text mining for historical research using the Python computer language: http://github.com/joguldi/digital-history

  • With Stephanie Buongiorno, Hansard Viewer (https://shinyviz.smu.edu/shiny/public/hansard-shiny/), a public-facing portal for browsing the Hansard parliamentary debates of the nineteenth century using word embeddings and various statistical measures as profiled in The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (released 2021).

  • With Brown Data Science and Poom Chiarawongse, HaTORI (HAnsard TOpic Relevance Identifier), https://eight1911.github.io/hansard/, digital software for browsing the Hansard parliamentary debates of the nineteenth century by “topic model” (released 2018).  HaTORI is an open-source pipeline-based tool for identifying a cohort of thematically-linked passages in the nineteenth-century debates of Britain's parliament. In our pipeline, a series of algorithms move through the steps of cleaning a corpus, organizing them into topics, and selecting particular topics that are used to extract a sub-corpus that matches the user’s interests. While not every portion of the pipeline is interchangeable, users have the option of searching based on multiple topics rather than merely keywords or a single topic at a time, allowing iterative searches to build upon each other. The pipeline thus presents an example of Guldi’s concept of “Critical Search” in action, allowing the scholar to follow an inquiry based on matching parliamentary reports with material from the Hansard British Parliamentary Debates. Using the pipeline, the user is able to identify multiple common topics of interest, and from these topics, extract a sub-corpus specific to land use and rent in the 19th century British Empire.  See Ashley S. Lee, Poom Chiarawongse, Jo Guldi, Andras Zsom, “The Role of Critical Thinking in Humanities Infrastructure: The Pipeline Concept with a Study of HaToRI (Hansard Topic Relevance Identifier),” Digital Humanities Quarterly (October 2020) http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000481/000481.html

  • With Cora Johnson Roberson, Paper Machines, digital software for historians (released 2012), http://www.papermachines.orgPaper Machines (no longer maintained) was a free toolkit for historians who wish to perform a “distant reading” of large-scale textual corpora, particularly those associated with modern institutions like Parliament or the World Bank, by using algorithms to visualize how the official mind’s concerns change over time and space.  I designed Paper Machines to help with my next monograph, The Long Land War, with funding from Harvard and Google in 2012.  I have since used it constantly in teaching as an introduction to topic-modelling (measuring word and phrase frequency over time) and geoparsing (mapping the occurrence of place-names over time).  The technology has been widely adopted and taught.  Twitter searching gives a glimpse of its adoption: https://twitter.com/search?q=%22paper%20machines%22&src=typd; https://twitter.com/search?q=papermachines&src=typd; There is also a review of the software in Digital Humanities Quarterly: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/review-papermachines-by-adam-crymble/

Student Supervision

Undergraduate Mentorship

  • Mentor, Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE), Litong Wang (2026). Support for Wang’s conference research proposal. 

  • Senior thesis committee, Daniel Bell, History (2025-26).

  • Senior thesis direction, Sohan Bellam, Data and Decisions Sciences + Environmental Sciences (2025-26)

  • Independent Study, Sohan Bellam, Data and Decisions Sciences + Environmental Sciences (Fall 2025)

  • Lab supervision of Sohan Bellam, Rosie Larson, Yang Lyu, Garang Kiariga, Daniel Bell, Litong Wang, Sarah Shao, Samuel Jiang, Wenzhuo Ma, Steven Hu,  Malia Yap, Wayne Huang, Kelsey Oleson, Alyson Granchi, Peter Goldstein, Katherine Mombo, Cabot Postol, Maggie Stearns (2025-26).

  • Lab supervision of Sohan Bellam, Rosie Larson, Samuel Jiang, Maggie Stearns, Wenzhuo Ma, (2024-25).

  • Minh-Thy Tyler, Senior thesis committee (2023-24).

  • Mentoring 8 fellows, QTM fellowship program, Fall 2024. 

  • Hailey Hazen, Senior thesis project, “A Taxonomy of Lies: How Misinformation Shaped the 1943 Bengal Famine” (Spring 2023)

  • Ryan Schaeffer, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Spring 2023-Spring 2024)

  • Wes Anderson, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Spring 2023)

  • Matt Swigert, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Spring 2023)

  • Chris Miller, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Spring 2023)

  • Alexander Cerpa, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2020- Spring 2023)

  • Jackson Powell, undergraduate internship, Center for Presidential History (Spring 2023)

  • Sarah Mende, undergraduate internship, Clean Up Garland (Spring 2023)

  • Palmer Bradshaw, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Fall 2022)

  • Justin Patty, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2022)

  • Hailey Hazen, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Fall 2022)

  • Ryan Schaeffer, undergraduate internship, Democracy Lab (Fall 2022)

  • Justin Patty, prize-winning paper, “Arthur Cotton and the Development of Public Works” (Weil Award, SMU Library, Spring 2022)

  • Dima Balut, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2021, Spring 2021)

  • Wardah Alvi, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2021)

  • Carson MacDonald, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2021)

  • Valeria Reynosa, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2021)

  • Phuoc Le, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Spring 2021)

  • Julian DiBona, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Spring 2021)

  • Noah Meyer, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Spring 2021)

  • Morgan Vandenberg, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Spring 2020)

  • Lauren Richardson, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Spring 2020)

  • Calkins Hamilton, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2019)

  • John Marshall Calkins, Hamilton Research Scholarship as internship in Demcoracy Lab (Fall 2019)

  • Zachary Miller, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2019)

  • Eric Hudkins, undergraduate research assistant, Democracy Lab (Fall 2019)

  • Anna Rotman, Senior thesis, “’Democratic Tyranny’: Rhode Island’s 1786 Land Bank in the History of Atlantic World Monetary Reform” (Spring 2015), winner of the Gaspee Prize for the best thesis in the History Department.

Graduate Mentorship

  • Committee Chair

    • Stephanie Buongiorno, PhD, Lyle School of Engineering, Southern Methodist University (co-chair, dissertation, 2023; chair, exam, 2021)

  • Committee member

    • Ruben Ros, PhD, History, Leiden University (2026)

    • Jessie Zarazaga, PhD, Lyle School of Engineering, Southern Methodist University (2022)

  • Lab Work

    • Robert Morabita, Brock University; Sangmitra Madhusudan, Brock University; Asya Azkin, Computer Science, Emory University (2025) 

  • Informal Mentorship

    • Jacob Bruggeman, PhD Student (History), Johns Hopkins University (2023-25).

    • Ruben Ros, PhD, History, Leiden University (2024-25)

Postdoctoral Mentorship

  • Stephanie Buongiorno, PhD, Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow, Emory University (2025-28).

COMMITTEE SERVICE

Department-level Service

  • Graduate Committee, Data and Decision Sciences (2024-25, 2025-26)

  • Chair, colleague promotion committee (2024-25)

  • Director of the History Department’s internship program (2019, 2022-23)

  • Working with faculty and chairs in six other departments to develop a “Digital Humanities Minor” housed in History. 

  • Creating and approving new courses in digital history

  • Designing and teaching new service classes – including junior seminars, graduate classes, and other courses -- tailored to requests made by department administration as well as other figures in the university (the DCII director, the DUS and chair of Computer Science)

  • Creating and passing approval for 12 new history classes with tags through the university administration and modernizing the track of teaching for Britain and its empire

  • Member, Outreach Committee, Department of History, SMU, 2017-9.

  • Co-Organizer, Brown-RISD Critical Design Futures Conference, May 2014

  • Member, Brown-RISD Critical Design Futures Initiative, 2014-5.

  • Member, Brown Digital Humanities Initiative, 2012-5.

  • Various talks, Brown CS department, on historians and big data and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, 2012-4.

  • “Can Participatory Maps Save the World?” Talk at the Brown Library Digital Showcase, November 23, 2014. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYL4pVUW7Lg&list=PLTiEffrOcz_7MwEs7L79ocdSIVhuLXM22&index=11

  • Leader, Modern Europe Seminar, History Department, Brown University (Fall 2014).

  • Department advising, History Department (2014-5).

College-level Service

  • Search Committee for Computer Science Chair (2025-26)

  • Development of DH@Emory major and minor (in development, 2025-)

  • Founding Co-Chair, DH@Emory Initiative at Fox Center for the Humanities (2025-)

  • Report, Faculty Governance Committee for Computing in the College (2025)

  • Founding Chair, Faculty Governance Committee for Computing in the College, Emory University (2024-)

  • Director, Digital Humanities Minor, 2019-23, Southern Methodist University

  • College curriculum committee, Southern Methodist University (2021-22)

  • Committee Member, Dedman College Undergraduate Council (2021-22)

  • Member, Faculty Search Committee, “Digital Humanities,” English Department, SMU, 2017-8.

  • Organizer, speaker series, “Data is Made Up of Stories,” with talks by Kieran Healy, Jarrett Drake, David Eltis, Andrew and Anindita Basu Sempere, Simon Dedeo, and Ethan Zuckerman (sponsored by the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Initiative, Dedman College Dean’s Office, and History Department), SMU, Sep 26, Oct 3, Nov 7, Dec 5, Dec 15, Apr 14, and May 18, 2016-7.

  • Director, Fellows Program of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, 2016-7.

  • Advising Public Humanities masters students, Public Humanities Center, Brown University (2014-5).

University-level Service

  • Provost committee on Research (2025-26)

  • Provost’s committee on Creative and Interactive Technology (2017-18)

  • Working with the dean of libraries and CIO of SMU, I led the creation of three faculty committees that oversaw the development of proposal materials for a “text mining consortium” which would prepare ready-to-use “clean” textual data for digital analysis, on demand, for university faculty (2018-20)

  • Working with the chair of Computer Science and the dean of the engineering school, I drafted detailed proposals for a proposed AI Center, which is now moving forward under the direction of Fred Chang. (2019-22)

  • Working with the DGS of History and the DUS and Chair of Computer Science, I drafted several versions of proposed coursework for a joint program of studies. I proposed a series of courses open to both CS students as well as history-majors and other Dedman students, and even interdisciplinary at the graduate level. (2018-21)

  •  I led the creation of a not-for-credit program of instruction in the digital humanities for faculty and library staff, attended by two dozen members of the university. I personally taught the basic skills of text-mining over a 5-week “intensive” offered in tandem with my classes. (2018-20)

  • Working with the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, created an interdisciplinary faculty reading groups on the digital humanities and text mining, as sponsored by our “interdisciplinary institute.” (2019-21)

  • Member, Advisory Board to the Virtualization Center, Lyle School of Engineering, SMU, 2017-8. 

  • Organizer, Think-Play-Hack series of interdisciplinary hackathons, Southern Methodist University, 2017-19.

  • Member, Provost’s Committee to Report on Technology on Campus, SMU, 2016-7.

  • Organizer, Conference, “Land and Water in a Long-Term Perspective,” (sponsored by the Watson Institute, History Department, S4, Taubman Center, and Humanities Initiative), Brown University, September 4-5, 2015.

Editorial Roles

  • Board member, Current Research in Digital History, 2021-; Digital History, 2023-.

SERICE AS A REVIEWER

  • Tenure and promotion reviewer

    • Promotion reviewer for the University of Arizona (2025)

    • Tenure reviewer for Oxford University (2023)

    • Tenure reviewer for University of Pittsburgh (2023)

  • Manuscript reviewer

    • Reviews for Journal of Environmental History, Historical methods, Isis, Journal of Contemporary History, Technology and Culture, Agrarian History, The Journal of Cultural Analytics, Current Research in Digital History, Digital Humanities Quarterly, The American Historical Review.

    • Book manuscripts from Princeton, Studia Fennica (2025-26)

    • Reviewer, panel on Palladio software for early-modern epistolary studies, CESTA, Stanford, May 2014.

    • Various book manuscript reviews: Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Polity, Cambridge, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Routledge, 2012-

    • NEH Digital Humanities grant reviewer, 2012.

    • NSF grant reviewer 2013.

COMMUNITY OUTREACH

  • “Historians Use Data Science to Mine the Past.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122:18 (2025), e2508428122.https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2508428122Overview of digital history methods including NLP and network analysis, with discussion of Guldi’s contributions to large-scale analysis of political discourse and historical datasets.

  • “Where Tradition Meets High-Tech Scholarship.” Emory Magazine (Summer 2025). https://news.emory.edu/features/2025/07/emag_digital_humanities_02-07-2025/index.htmlFeature on digital humanities at Emory University, foregrounding Guldi’s work in AI, text mining, and the development of interdisciplinary research infrastructure.

  • “Building Better AI.” Emory University News Center (2025).https://together.emory.edu/walk-and-talk-josh-newton/building-better-aiProfile of Guldi’s work on AI and historical reasoning, emphasizing the role of historians in developing more transparent, accountable, and evidence-based AI systems.

  • “New Learning Lab Will Use AI to Gain Insight into Climate Change Governance and More.” Emory University News Center (2025). https://news.emory.edu/stories/2025/02/er_new_learning_lab_ai_climate_governance/index.htmlCoverage of Guldi’s leadership in establishing a new interdisciplinary lab focused on AI, climate governance, and large-scale analysis of historical and policy data.

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” New Books in History podcast (May 2024)

  • “The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Open Books Podcast  (May 2024).  Mae Velloso-Lyons interviewed me about The Dangerous Art of Text Mining, the writing and publishing process, and how the book reflects current conversations in the community of historians.”

  • “The Long Land War,” This is Hell! Radio from WNUR-FM in Evanston, Illinois, (October 2023): “Historian Jo Guldi joins us to discuss her Boston Review article, "The Earth for Man: Redistributing land was once central to global development efforts---and it should be today." This article is adapted from her 2022 book from Yale University Press.” 

  • “The Earth for Humanity: A How-To Text,” Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast (November 2023): “The 19th and 20th century systems of control of the earth have failed; there’s a connection between famines and empire. Especially in the face of climate change, we have a lot to learn from indigenous and peasant systems; the idea of the commons works for a sustainable future. On this show Professor Jo Guldi, whose new book is The Long Land War, explains little known UN efforts and how planning for land use can address the global threat.

  • “Jo Guldi on the Long Land War,” The Dig Podcast (September 2023), “Featuring Jo Guldi on the global history of the long land war—a war over everything from agrarian reform to tenant rights, from India and China to England and Ireland, from the late 19th century through the present—and into the future.”

  • “A New Era of Democracy,” conversation with Audrey Tang, Minister of Information for Taiwan, A New Era of Democracy podcast, Oakland, CA (November 18, 2021), https://www.audacy.com/podcast/radicalxchanges-f9e3d/episodes/a-new-era-of-democracy-ep-1-audrey-tang-and-jo-guldi-with-rosa-ohara-8d604

  • 6th-7th-8th grade Sunday School, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Dallas, TX (2018-19, 2022-23) 

  • Children’s Choir, Pianist, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Dallas, TX (2018-19, 2022-23) 

  • Small group on Climate Justice, Unitarian Church, Dallas, TX, 2020

  • Three-part seminar series, “The History of Methodism,” Grace United Methodist Church, Dallas, TX, July 2017.

  • Development of a walking tour on foreclosure and eviction in Providence with the John Nicholson Brown Center for Public History, Brown, masters student Kate Diedrick

  • Various public conversations about present-day infrastructure activists and the history of technology, covered by Forbes:http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasperhamill/2014/01/28/could-google-maps-help-end-poverty/

  •  “A Brief History of Participatory Mapping,” invited talk at Transparent Chennai (a participatory mapping nonprofit), Chennai, India, May 14, 2013.

SERVICE TO THE PROFESSION

  • Founding Co-chair, Committee of Historians for AI and Research (CHAIR), an international consortium of historians, data scientists, and institutional partners addressing the role of historical knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence. CHAIR works in coordination with the American Historical Association to define research priorities, professional standards, and public infrastructure for historically grounded AI. Activities include organizing national and international convenings; coordinating a multi-institutional white paper on the future of historical research infrastructure (“The Long Future of the Past”); and building partnerships among universities, archives, and technology organizations. The initiative focuses on core challenges including provenance and traceability of AI-generated knowledge, benchmarks for historical reasoning, and the representation of dissent and plural interpretation in large-scale corpora.

  • Member, AHA Ad-hoc Committee on AI and Research  (AACAIR) The American Historical Association Committee on AI and Research examines how artificial intelligence is transforming the production, circulation, and authority of historical knowledge. At a moment when large language models increasingly mediate public understanding of the past, the committee brings together historians, data scientists, and institutional partners to articulate standards for responsible use, evaluation, and governance of AI in historical scholarship. 

  • Seminar on the Digital Analysis of Parliaments and Congresses, an open research seminar of historians and data scientists convened monthly over zoom with faculty of Umeå University, Jyvaskyla University, Cambridge University, and the Parliamentary Trust (UK), 2020-23.

  • Chair, “People and Technology: Comparing Road Building across Three Continents,” Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, January 5, 2015.

  • Application reviews, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.

SELECTED AWARDS AND HONORS

  • Humanities Book Prize for The Long Land War, Arizona State University (2024)

  • External Affiliate, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (2020-23)

  • Fellow, Radical Xchange Foundation (2020-21)

  • Fellow, KnowledgeLab, University of Chicago and Santa Fe Institute (2020-21)

  • Fellow, Text Optics Lab, Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago (2019-20)

  • Fellow, Center for Creative Computation, Southern Methodist University (2017-2018)

  • Fellow, Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute (2016-7)

  • Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2015-7, deferred)

  • Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University (2015-6)

  • Named appointment, Hans Rothfels Assistant Professorship (2014-6)

  • Fellow, John Nicholas Brown Public Humanities Center (2014-5)

  • Fellow, Harvard Metalab (2012-3)

  • Short-term Fellowship, Huntington Library (January 2009)

  • University DNT Fellowship, 2007-2008.  Departmental fellowship (2006-2007)

  • Anglo-California Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Center for British Studies, UC Berkeley and Pembroke College, Cambridge (2005)

  • Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (2005)

  • Fellow, Yale Center for British Art (2005)

  • Fellow, Institute for Humane Studies (2004-2008)

  • Fellow, Center for Landscape at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, (2004)

  • John Scholes Prize for Best Essay in Transportation History (2004)

  • Kostof Fellowship in Architectural History at Berkeley (2002-2003)

  • Gates Fellowship at Cambridge (2001-2002)

  • Eben Fiske Fellowship at Trinity College (2001-2002)

LANGUAGES

French, German, Latin, Ancient Greek (reading)

COMPUTER LANGUAGES

Basic, Python (teaching), R (fluent)