I am an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty in the NuLab for Texts, Maps and Networks.

My intellectual interest, broadly speaking, is the relation between history and data. As a digital humanist, much of my work explores the way historians (and anyone else who wants to tell a story) can use massive digital archives to communicate in new and old ways through data analysis, visualization, and algorithmic transformations. As an intellectual and cultural historian of the United States, I’m interested both in using these resources to address historical questions and in situating contemporary conversations about data and statistics in their longer historical context. My dissertation, Paying Attention, studied the emergence of modern concepts of attention in the early twentieth century United States, focusing on actors in psychology, advertising, and pedagogy and on large-scale changes in language.

At Northeastern, I teach classes in the history department and honors college on US history, digital history and the history of “big data” at the graduate and undergraduate level.

I’ve made a number of data visualizations (usually, though not always, related to history or higher education); most of those are collected on this site. I write about text mining and digital humanities on my blog Sapping Attention. One unexpected outcome of that is that I’ve been become a sort of expert on computationally finding anachronisms in historical fiction, and have consulted for a couple television shows: you can read some of that anachronism-hunting at my other blog–Prochronisms.

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts.

You can e-mail me at {b.schmidt (at) neu -dot- edu}. I have other web presences at Twitter, Github, and Northeastern.