Patrick Burns joins the ISAW Library

Patrick Burns joins the ISAW Library team this month as its first Assistant Research Scholar for Digital and Special Projects.

Patrick comes to ISAW from Fordham University, where he recently earned his Ph.D. in Classics, but he has been deeply involved with the emerging landscape of digital humanities and ancient studies for much of his graduate career and currently serves as a steering committee member of both the Digital Classical Association and the NYC Digital Humanities Group. 

As Assistant Research Scholar in the ISAW Library, Patrick will collaborate with ISAW faculty, researchers, and students to incorporate digital resources into their research and teaching of antiquity. He will also work with ISAW staff both to advance our current initiatives, including the Ancient World Digital Library and ISAW’s born-digital publications, as well as to help develop new projects with colleagues at other institutions and the Society for Classical Studies.

Patrick’s current academic research deals with defining genre in Latin literature through computational approaches to diction (the research for which he presented at last year's LAWDNY event at ISAW) and developing natural language processing tools for historical languages in the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK), having recently participated as a CLTK fellow in Google's Summer of Code (please see his blog post about this fascinating work).

The Assistant Research Scholar for Digital and Special Projects is a new position in the ISAW Library. This two-year position will help the ISAW Library to fulfill a key component of its broader mission, namely to provide access to and support for new forms of digital scholarship, scholarly communication, and pedagogy in ancient studies. As a full member of the ISAW Library team, the Digital and Special Projects Associate also has core responsibilities in library operations, bibliographic and grant research, and public services, as well as a central role in all special projects associated with ISAW’s print collection and public programming. For regular updates on the ISAW Library's progress and Patrick's projects in particular, please follow us on the ISAW Library Blog.