Month: July 2014

A Digital Archivist, Peter Gorman is the Head of Digital Collections for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries where he manages the program for digital collections. The libraries contain 70 collections comprising more than 2.5 million digital objects. Gorman holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, with an emphasis on information systems technologies, and has shared his research through numerous publications and conference presentations, including a paper on digital collections infrastructure at the 2010 Council of University of Wisconsin Libraries Conference. Gorman serves a pivotal role as the Head of Digital Collections. He designs technical architecture for digital repositories, workflow, resource discovery, preservation, and associated infrastructure; manages software development for digital collection infrastructure and access; assists in developing and coordinating IT strategies for university libraries; and represents UW-Madison and the University of Wisconsin System on consortial and international committees concerned with digital library services and technologies. A leading figure in digital archives and text encoding, in Project Arclight Gorman will collaborate with PhD student Derek Long on data preservation.

Michele Hilmes is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and current Department Chair. She was the Director of Graduate Studies from 2009 to 2011 and the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research from 2003 to 2010. A historian of broadcasting, she has taught classes on various aspects of broadcast texts, industry, and representation for over twenty years. Hilmes was the recipient of a Fullbright Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham in 2013-2014 and was previously awarded the Resident Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison (2010), the Helm Fellowship at Indiana University (2010), and Grant-in-Aid at the Rockefeller Archive Center (2009). Publishing extensively, she has written book chapters (e.g., “The New Vehicle of Nationalism: Radio Goes to War” in Russ Castronova and Jonathan Auerback’s Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (2013)), articles for referred journals (e.g., “‘The North Atlantic Triangle’: Britain, the US, and Canada in 1950s Television” in Media History (2010)), and authored several books, notably Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011), Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922 to 1952 (1997), and Hollywood Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (1999). Hilmes also edited the anthology NBC: America’s Network (2007) and coedited (with Jason Loviglio) a new collection of essays, Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era (2013). Most recently, the 4th edition of her textbook Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States was published (2014). As a team member of Project Arclight, Hilmes will serve as broadcasting history domain expert in the US.

Lea Jacobs is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in film history. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2010-2011), the Kellett Mid-Career Award from the Graduate School at the UW-Madison (2009), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2003). In addition to the forthcoming Trapped in Time: Film Rhythm After Sound, Jacobs is the author of Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film (1991) and The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (2008). She has also written several book chapters (e.g., “Hollywood’s Conception of its Audience in the 1920s” (with Andrea Cominskey) in Steve Neale’s Classical Hollywood Reader (2012)) as well as articles in refereed journals (e.g., “The Innovation of Re-recording in the Hollywood Studios” published in Film History (2012)), and edited special journal issues (e.g., “Before Screwball,” a special issue of Film History (2001)). As a team member of Project Arclight, Jacobs will serve as film history domain expert. Alongside Michele Hilmes, she will investigate historical questions using Arclight, advise on the user experience, and publish journal articles based on the findings.

A computer scientist, Kevin Ponto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Design Studies and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After receiving his PhD in Computer Science Engineering from the University of California-San Diego in 2010, Ponto received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (2010-2012). This research appointment was supported in part by the National Library of Medicine Award. In 2011, he was also an instructor in the Department of Computer Sciences. Through journal articles, book chapters, invited speaking engagements, and conference presentations Ponto has demonstrated and shared his expertise in visualization. This includes, for example, his presentation “Rethinking 3D” at the Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine Seminar in 2012 and a recent co-authored (with M. Gleicher, R. Radwin, and H.J. Shin) journal article, “Perception Calibration for Immersive Display Environments,” published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2013). As a team member of Project Arclight, Ponto will lend his expertise to help design and program data visualization alongside Carrie Roy at the UW-Madison.