Zoe LeBlanc Joins the Project

We are pleased to share that Zoe LeBlanc has joined the editorial board of The Programming Historian.

Zoe is a digital humanities developer at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. In this position she regularly works on building large data pipelines for humanities text data, web apps for mapping and data visualization, and statistical modeling for text and image analysis projects in addition to teaching and mentoring students and faculty.

She is also entering her final year as a doctoral candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation, “Circulating Anti-Colonial Cairo”, is about Cairo’s role as a hub for international anti-colonial movements and anti-colonial media production. She explores how the establishment of the Middle East News Agency in Cairo in 1955 was a vehicle for the UAR to present a counter narrative to the perceived biased coverage from Western press agencies. Ultimately, she argues that anti-colonialism was both locally constructed and deeply enmeshed in international debates over the future of decolonization. Zoe works primarily in print newspapers and periodicals from Cairo and other Third World capitals, as well as diplomatic cables from Western embassies in Cairo and Western newspapers. Under the hood of the project, Zoe relies on a web app she built to manage her data, and extract text and images from her archival research. She also utilizes statistical models, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision algorithms to understand how discourses and symbolism in these sources changed over time.

Zoe will be an invaluable contributor to the technical development of the site in addition to her work as an editor.

We are excited to work with her!