Website:

https://people.stanford.edu/widner/

Profile:

Michael Widner is the Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. His role is to work with faculty and their research assistants as a consultant, collaborator, and innovator in DLCL-based digital humanities and instructional technology projects. He also organizes and presents workshops and lectures on practices and theories in these fields. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he expects to receive his degree in spring 2014. In his dissertation, "Genre Trouble: Embodied Cognition in Fabliaux, Gawain, and Bury St Edmunds," he uses cognitive science to argue for genre and embodiment as hermeneutic primitives. He traces variations in the representation of characters’ bodies in fabliau, romance, and chronicle, three of the most important and characteristic genres of medieval literature. While at UT, Widner was part of the Digital Writing and Research Lab, where he studied and taught new media, digital rhetorics and writing, and began mastering Drupal. He received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to pursue work on Bibliopedia (http://www.bibliopedia.org), a Drupal-based system for the cross-referencing of humanities scholarship and the conversion of metadata into linked data. This system has been used by multiple groups at Stanford, including the Chinese Railroad Workers Project. Prior to entering graduate school, Widner was a UNIX Systems Administrator for SBC (now AT&T), where he was responsible for a large range of servers, including those used to authenticate users connecting to the ISP. He programs in Python, Perl, PHP, shell, javascript, and C++. Other technologies he uses include Drupal, TEI, Gephi, d3, HTML/CSS, databases, Apache, Solr, and numerous others.

Posts by Michael Widner:

• Innovation, Skunkworks, and the ATS Program
• Experimedia
• Networks of the DLCL
• Digital Humanities Focal Group
• Performing Trobar
• Bibliopedia
• Lacuna Stories
• Alt-Ac Notes: Building Towards the Fall and Winter Quarters
• Networks of Faculty in the DLCL
• HOWTO: Get Free Servers for Your Websites, Development Environments, and Other Digital Endeavors