Benjamin Charles Germain Lee


Publications			Benjamin Charles Germain Lee	CV
Essays				Talks
Contact				Honors
			Newspaper Navigator

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington's Information School, where I am starting the Lab for Computing Cultural Heritage. I am also a faculty member in the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and a Data Science Affiliate of the eScience Institute. Last academic year, I was a Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress. I completed my Ph.D. in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, which was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in machine learning. Previously, I was a 2020 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. You can read more about my project, Newspaper Navigator, here.

I am a co-editor of the forthcoming "Debates in DH" volume Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, Labor, a general editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly, a member of the Digital Public Library of America’s Cultural Heritage Steering Committee, an advisory board member of the Research Society of American Periodicals, an editorial board member of the Nineteenth-century Data Collective, and a founding affiliate of the University of Washington’s Center for the Advancement of Libraries, Museums, and Archives.

I also write essays, which have appeared in The New Republic, WIRED, Current Affairs, Jacobin, Gawker, Real Life, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Protean Magazine, and GoldFlakePaint, and is forthcoming in the Bennington Review. I maintain a semi-regular newsletter to share my writing as it is published.

Before beginning my Ph.D., I was the inaugural Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard's History Department. I graduated from Harvard College in 2017 with a double major in Astrophysics & Mathematics and a minor in Physics.

This website design is inspired by Space Jam's Website, which has remained untouched since 1996. The tiled background is a 100x100 pixel cutout of a Sloan Digital Sky Survey r-band image of the Globular Cluster M2 (SDSS run 2583, field 136, camcol 2). I studied this patch of sky for my undergraduate thesis with Professor Douglas Finkbeiner and Stephen Portillo.