It is our pleasure to welcome Jean Bauer as our new Digital Humanities Librarian. Jean Bauer is a historian, database designer, and photographer. She holds degrees in history from the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, where she is completing her doctoral dissertation, “Revolution Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.”
Jean has worked for the Archives of the New York Philharmonic and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library and has held research fellowships at the University of Virginia Library’s Digital Scholars’ Lab and NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). She has also transcribed, translated, and decrypted letters for The Papers of James Madison, designed a database for The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and served as Design Researcher for Documents Compass, a digital consulting organization for documentary editors.
Jean is the lead developer of two open source projects: DAVILA, a relational database schema visualization and annotation tool, and Project Quincy, a Ruby on Rails application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space. The flagship application for Project Quincy is The Early American Foreign Service Database, which allows researchers to trace Early American diplomats, consuls, special agents, and their clerks all over the globe.