Vitae

APPOINTMENTS

Full Professor of Quantitative Methods, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (2023-)
Full Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2022-3)
Visiting Professor, University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2022)
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Spatial and Textual Analytics, Stanford (2020-)
External Faculty, Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago (2020-)
Associate Professor of Data Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2020-3)
Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2018-22)
Assistant Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (2016–8)
Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Providence, RI (2014–6)
Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Providence, RI (2012–6)
Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, MA (2009–10, 2011–3)
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History, Department of History, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2008–9, 2010–1)

EDUCATION

PhD History, University of California, Berkeley, 2004-2008. Dissertation: The Road to Rule: The expansion of the British road network, 1740-1850. Primary field: British History, 1688-1950. Secondary fields: Urban History, Architecture. Advisor: Professor James Vernon, British History.
AB Literature, Magna cum Laude, Harvard College, 1996-2000.

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: BOOKS

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale University Press, scheduled for April 2022), Agrarian Studies Series
(with David Armitage) The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014; revised edition, 2015; Portuguese translation: Autentica Editora: in progress; Chinese translation, Truth & Wisdom Press: in progress; Japanese translation, Tōsui Shobō: in progress; Korean translation, Hanul Ak’ademi: in progress; Russian translation, Ab Imperio, 1–4/2015; Spanish translation, Alianza Editorial: 2016; Turkish translation, Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları: 2016), x + 165 pp. [New Statesman Book of the Year, 2014; El País book of the week, Sep. 2016]
Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard University Press, 2012).
- Reviews in The Wall Street Journal, Technology and Culture, Journal of British Studies, Victorian Studies, The American Historical Review, etc.

DIGITAL PROJECTS

These projects are relics of a digital age that compare to books in terms of the grant-writing behind them, the multiple hands that shaped them, the weight of ideas and research that went into them, and their intended wide-ranging readership.

The Guldi Lab at SMU has been engaged in the development of a strategy for the "distant reading" of the history of parliamentary debates over housing, eviction, homelessness, and poverty. The Guldi Lab has concentrated on text mining the debates of the nineteenth century, where a deep historiography has already reviewed a bulk of the major turning points and arguments of the period, with the result that practicing historians today can collectively validate, with great precision, whether the results of text mining the parliamentary debates are meaningful and instructive. The work of the lab is currently focused on three goals:
- An unprecedented, long-term overview of the workings of parliament in the nineteenth century, exploiting the derivation of probability-based “topics” at different scales
- Visualizations of raw data that abstract such historical claims and make explicit their quantitative basis; and
- Methodological innovations in using Machine Learning methods to find evidence of historical change.
With Cora Johnson Roberson, Paper Machines, digital software for historians (2012)
- Paper Machines is a free toolkit for historians who wish to perform a “distant reading” of large-scale textual corpora, particularly those associated with modern institutions like Parliament or the World Bank, by using algorithms to visualize how the official mind’s concerns change over time and space. I designed Paper Machines to help with my next monograph, The Long Land War, with funding from Harvard and Google in 2012. I have since used it constantly in teaching as an introduction to topic-modelling (measuring word and phrase frequency over time) and geoparsing (mapping the occurrence of place- names over time). The technology has been widely adopted and taught. Twitter searching gives a glimpse of its adoptation: here and here. There is also a review of the software in Digital Humanities Quarterly.
What is the Spatial Turn? (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, Scholar’s Lab, 2012) – digital manuscript only at present (the manuscript has been requested for inclusion in the Harvard University Press book series MetaLABprojects)
- For reasons of accessibility and relevance, we chose to put this manuscript online as a historiographical essay to accompany to the Scholars’ Lab website, which is an introduction to spatial methods and best practices in mapping and other spatial scholarship online. The piece was immediately assigned in graduate classrooms, including Alison Winter’s History of Science class (University of Chicago) and Peter Bol’s historiography course (Harvard). Partially as a result of its presence online, the manuscript has received fairly steady and international attention from digital humanists. For a trace of what is being said about it, a search of Twitter will do.

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: BOOK CHAPTERS

“Working on a Deadline: Information Science and the Digital Humanities in an Age of Climate Change,” in Lauren Klein and Matt Gold, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities 2022 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022), accepted and in peer review.
“Big Data,” in C. M. Akker, The Routledge Companion to History and Theory (London: Routledge, forthcoming), accepted and forthcoming.
“Can Historians Be Replaced by Algorithms?” in Zoltan Simon and Lars Deile, Historical Understanding (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming), accepted and forthcoming.
“Conclusion: The Common Landscape of the Digital Humanities,” in Fridlund, Paju, and Oiva, eds., Digital, Computational, and Distant Readings of History (Helsinki University Press, 2020)
“Time Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twenty-First Century Toolkit: The History and Politics of Longue-duree Thinking as a Prelude to the Digital Analysis of the Past,” chapter 19, pp. 253-266, in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015)
“Reinventing the Academic Journal,” in Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds., Hacking the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 25-7.
“Landscape and Place," in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 66-80.
“A Map of the Virtual Territory: Individual and society in the 21st 2
century,” in Voices of the Virtual World: Participative technology & the ecclesial revolution, eds. Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou (n.p.: Wikiklesia Press, 2007), winner of the Award of Merit from the Society for New Communications Research.

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES

Jo Guldi, “Text Mining for Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review (accepted & forthcoming)
Jo Guldi, “The Algorithm: Long-term trends and short-term change,” American Historical Review 127:2 (June 2022): 895-911 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac160
Jo Guldi, “The Climate Emergency Demands a New Kind of History,” Isis 113:2 (June 2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/719704
Jo Guldi, “What Kind of Information Does the Era of Climate Change Require?,” Climatic Change 169, no. 1–2 (November 2021): 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03243-5.
“From Critique to Audit: A Pragmatic Response to the Climate Emergency from the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a Call to Action,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 5, no. 2 (September 1, 2021): 169–96, https://doi.org/10.1086/716854. 3
“The Official Mind’s View of Empire, in Miniature: Quantifying World Geography in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (June 2021): 345–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2021.0028. (with Daniel Story, Tim Hitchcock, and Michelle Moravec)
“History’s Future in the Age of the Internet,” The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1337–1346, https://doi-org /10.1093/ahr/rhaa477
“Scholarly Infrastructure as Critical Argument: Nine principles in a preliminary survey of the bibliographic and critical values expressed by scholarly web-portals for visualizing data,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14:3 (October 2020) http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000463/000463.html
With Ashley S. Lee, Poom Chiarawongse, and Andras Zsom, “The Role of Critical Thinking in Humanities Infrastructure: The Pipeline Concept with a Study of HaToRI (Hansard Topic Relevance Identifier),” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14:3 (October 2020) http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000481/000481.html
“The Measure of Modernity,” International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity (October 2019) http://www.history-culture- modernity.org/articles/10.18352/hcm.589/galley/647/download/
Jo Guldi, “Parliament’s Debates about Infrastructure: An Exercise in Using Dynamic Topic Models to Synthesize Historical Change,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 1 (March 21, 2019): 1–33. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/719944
“The Modern Paradigm of Explanation,” Isis 110:2 (June 2019): 346-353.
“World Neoliberalism as Rebellion From Below?: British Squatters and the Global Interpretation of Poverty, 1946–1974,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 10, no. 1 (April 25, 2019): 29–57, https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0001.
“Topic Modeling the History of Infrastructure in Nineteenth-century Great Britain,” Technology and Culture (forthcoming 2019)
“The Rise of Global Squatterdom,” Humanity Journal (forthcoming 2019)
“Critical Search: A Procedure for guided reading in large-scale textual corpora,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (December 2018). Includes code and data.
(with Ben Williams) “Synthesis and Large-scale Textual Corpora: A Nested topic model of Britain’s Debates overlanded Property in the Nineteenth Century,” in Current Research in Digital History 1:1 (2018): http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-01-synthesis-and-large-scale-textual-corpora/. Includes code, data, and tool.
“Global Questions About Rent and the Longue Duree of Urban Power, 1848 to the Present,” New Global Studies (March 2018).
“A History of the Participatory Map,” Public Culture 29:1 (January 1, 2017): 79–112. Link
“The Case for Utopia: History and the Possible Meanings of Brexit a Hundred Years On,” Globalizations 14, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 150–56.
(with David Armitage) “Longing for the Longue Durée.” Isis 107:2 (2016): 353-57, Link
(with David Armitage) ‘Le retour de la longue durée: une perspective anglo-américaine,’ Annales, 70, 2 (April–June 2015): 289–318; rptd. (abridged), Aeon Magazine (2 October 2014): Link; Chinese translation, Global History Review (Beijing), 6 (2013): 90–117; Dutch translation (abridged), Nexus, 69 (2015): 38–50.
(with David Armitage) ‘Pour une “histoire ambitieuse”: une réponse à nos critiques,’ Annales 70, 2 (April–June 2015): 367–78.
(with David Armitage) ‘The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,’ American Historical Review, 120, 2 (April 2015): 543–54.
“The History of Walking and the Digital Turn: Stride and Lounge,” Journal of Modern History 84:1 (March 2012), 116-144. “The Other Side of the Panopticon: Technology, Archives, and the Difficulty of Seeing Victorian Heterotopias,” Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 1:3 (2011): 1-25. Link
“The Uses of Planning and the Decay of Strategy,” Contemporary Security Policy, 27:2 (April 2006), pp. 209-236. Link

COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS: NON-REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES

“The Earth for Man,” Boston Review, May 3, 2023, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-earth-for-man/
“The Trouble with Text Mining: And why some projects take a long time, and future projects might take less time,” Historical Research in the Digital Age [blog series], ed. Ian Milligan, Royal Historical Society, Mar. 14, 2023 https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2023/03/14/the-trouble-with-text-mining-and-why-some-projects-take-a-long-time-and-future-projects-might-take-less-time/
“Without Accords, Goals to Curb Global Warming Are Toothless,” DC Journal - InsideSources, December 20, 2022, https://dcjournal.com/without-accords-goals-to-curb-global-warming-are-toothless/
“We Need a Global Government of Land, Air, and Water,” Foreign Policy News (May 20, 2022), http://foreignpolicynews.org/2022/05/20/we-need-a-global-…
(with Macabe Keliher) “It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Find a Covid Test in Dallas,” Dallas Morning News (January 5, 2022).
(with Macabe Keliher) “Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?” Public Seminar (July 2020) https://publicseminar.org/2020/07/should-governments-have-access-to-our-data/
(with Macabe Keliher) “Lessons from Taiwan,” Policy Forum (July 2020) https://www.policyforum.net/data-privacy-and-democracy-in-a-pandemic/
“The Birth of Rent Control," Flux (Summer 2020), https://e- flux.com/architecture/housing/333705/the-birth-of-rent-control/
“What Can Big Data Teach Us About Eviction?” Public Books (May 5, 2020). https://www.publicbooks.org/what-can-big-data-teach-us-about-eviction/
“Leaving Behind the Yellow Submarine,” Boston Review (November 17, 2016).
“Between Experts and Citizens,” Boston Review (September 8, 2016).
“Response to The New Nature,” Boston Review (January 4, 2016).
(with David Armitage) “Bonfire of the Humanities”. Aeon Magazine (2 October 2014).
(with David Armitage) “Look Beyond a Lifespan”. History Today 64 (10): 3-4.
“Paper Machines: A Text Analysis Visualization Toolkit,” LASA Forum 14:1 (Winter 2013): 3-5.
Working Paper, “The Origins of Expert Rule: British Liberalism, the Engineer, and the Local Poor, 1808-1850,” 2007 Breslauer Graduate Student Symposium, UC Berkeley. Link
“Chaos Creation and Crowd Control: Models of riot regulation, 1700 to 2005,” Critical Planning 12 (2005).

INVITED PAPERS

“New Spatial Practices,” Seminar of the Center for Environment, Geography, and Urbanism, The University of Chicago (April 28, 2023).
“The Long Land War,” Agrarian Studies Seminar, University of Georgia (March 17, 2023).
“Mapping Memory,” Matrix Seminar on Social Science, University of California, Berkeley (March 8, 2023)
“The Long Land War,” Seminar on British Studies, Stanford University (March 7, 2023).
“How Congress Talked About Environmentalism Since 1970,” Seminar for the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (March 6, 2023).
“The Long Land War,” Seminar on Dispossession, Law School, University of Victoria, Canada (February 16, 2023).
Keynote, “Activism,” Building the Digital Humanities Conference, University of New South Wales (November 22, 2022).
“The Long Land War,” Seminar on Modern European History, Princeton University (November 3, 2022).
“Text Mining Memory,” Cultural Analytics Seminar, McGill University, Montreal (September 16, 2022).
“Pseudo-History and Digital History: The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Turing Institute, London (July 8, 2022).
“Can Humanity Change its Destiny?” Turing Institute, London (July 8, 2022).
“The Long Land War,” National Library of Ireland, Dublin (May 31, 2022).
“The Long Land War and International Governance,” Keynote, International Land Coalition, Amman, Jordan (May 24, 2022).
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” History of Thought and Digital Methods Seminar, University of Pisa (May 20, 2022).
“The Long Land War,” Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (May 13, 2022).
“The Long Land War,” Seminar on Modern European History, Johns Hopkins University (April 21, 2022).
“Digital History,” Seminar on Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University (April 21, 2022).
Panel on Land Movements in Irish History, New York University (April 6, 2022).
“Revisiting the Centennial of the Peak of Britain’s Territorial Empire,” Godbey Lecture, Southern Methodist University (March 22, 2022).
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on the Digital Humanities, University of Texas (March 7, 2022).
Title TBD, Turing Institute, July 2022. Keynote, “The Fit Between Text Mining and History,” Conference on Digital History, University of Umeå, December 2021.
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on Digital Humanities, University of Indiana Urbana Champagne, May 21, 2021
“Topic Modeling Parliament’s Debates About Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University, May 14, 2021
“Digital Approaches to the Study of Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University, May 14, 2021
“The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities, May 13, 2021. Video here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/cMiKw386_DU/edit
Roundtable, Digital Methods in Legal History, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt, March 1-5, 2021.
The Dangerous Art of Text-Mining: Thinking About Monkeys, Violence, and Time in an Age of Automated Information Retrieval,” Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, the University of Chicago, January 8, 2021.
“A Distant Reading of Property,” Washington University, St. Louis, December 7, 2020.
“Jo Guldi in Conversation with Chris Kelty: The Participant in Troubled Times,” Yale Sawyer Seminar, October 29, 2020
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Conference, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, October 4, 2020.
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Stanford Data Practices Conference, October 2, 2020.
“Critical Search,” John Hopkins Workshop in Digital History, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, July 31, 2020.
A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives, Sawyer Seminar Series on Information Ecosystems, Pitt University, Pittsburgh, PA, January, 2020.
“Climate Change as a Security Question,” Community Action Federation conference on “The Era of Security,” Madrid, Spain, November 22-4, 2019.
“Participatory Mapping and the Scales of International Governance,” Yale Workshop on Usable Climate Science, November 6-8, 2019.
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Keynote, Computational Text Analysis and Historical Change, Umeå, Sweden, Sep. 4, 2019.
“Measuring World View,” Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn, Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2019.
“On the Commons: Game Theory, New Theories of the Commons, and a Deep Historical Account of the Modern Commons,” Workshop on “The Role of Information in Complex Conflict,” Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, Feb 3-6, 2019.
“Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.
“Topic Modeling the History of Technology,” University of Oklahoma, April 13, 2018.
“The History of State Power in the City: Participatory, Liberal, and Neoliberal,” Workshop at Columbia University, March 3, 2018.
“Discussion of the History Manifesto,” University of Swansea, Wales, February 8, 2018.
“Infrastructure, Society, Economics, and Culture: Lessons from the History of Large Technological Systems,” Universite de los Andes, Bogota, Columbia, December 5-6, 2017.
Talk, “Argumentation in Digital History,” George Mason University, September 15-6, 2017.
Plenary Talk, “Fastlanes and Potholes on the Road to the Future of Digital History,” Aalto University, Helsinki, June 2, 2017.
Keynote, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure History, NYU Paris, May 30, 2017.
Keynote, Stanford Literary Lab workshop, “Findings. Is computation changing the study of history and literature?” April 14, 2017
“Infrastructure in the Longue Duree,” keynote presentation, AAG Premeeting on Infrastructure, Boston, April 4, 2017.
“The Paper War of Land Reform,” Legal History Series, Boston University, March 2, 2017.
“The Longue Duree of Land, the Longue Duree of Land Reform: Towards a Utopian History,” talk at Uppsala University, November 21-22, 2016.
“Methods Intensive: Towards a Method of Textmining for Historical Analysis,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, November 17-8, 2016.
“On the Interpretation of History by Squiggle: Visualizing Change Beyond the N-Gram,” introductory talk at workshop, “From Quantitative to Qualitative Analysis: New Perspectives on Historical Research in Political Economy,” University of Chicago, October 14, 2016.
“Goldwin Smith and the Longue Duree of Reparations,” keynote panel, “The Public Work of Interpretation,” MLA, January 9, 2016, Link
“The Long Land War,” presentation at the Hoover Institute, Stanford, June 24, 2015.
“Digital Workshop on Paper Machines,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 14, 2015.
“Seminar on the Long Land War,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 13, 2015.
“New Work in History, Examining the Longue Durée with Paper Machines” at the University of Chicago, Disciplines & Technologies conference, May 8, 2015.
“Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” participation in dedicated roundtable hosted by the Washington History Seminar, Co-sponsored by the AHA, April 20, 2015.
“The Long Land War,” presentation at the workshop on History, Culture, and Society, Harvard University, April 3, 2015.
Presentation, “Introducing Paper Machines,” Princeton University workshop on Digital History, March 27, 2015.
“Sewers, Water, & Air,” Gilded Ages workshop, Brown University, February 26, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” Annenberg Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, February 17, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” presentation at the Kennedy School, comments by Sam Moyn, Harvard University, February 12, 2015.
“Paper Machines,” MIT World History Seminar, Cambridge, MA, January 13, 2015.
“Participatory Maps, A Global History,” Brown India Initiative, December 5, 2014.
“The Apocalyptic Anthropocene,” New England Critical Environmental Social Science Workshop, Brown University, November 21, 2014.
“A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.
“The Apocalyptic Anthropocene,” New England Critical Environmental Social Science Workshop, Brown University, November 21, 2014.
“A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.
“History Looks at the Evidence,” talk at the British Library, October 9, 2014.
“The History Manifesto,” talk in the British Government series, London School of Economics, October 8, 2014.
“Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Institute of Historical Research, Digital Humanities Seminar, October 7, 2014.
“The History Manifesto,” talk at the History Department, University of California, Berkeley, September 29, 2014.
“Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance? Food, Land, and Water,” talk at the Stanford Center for Liberation Technology, January 9, 2014. Video
“The History of Participatory Mapping,” talk at Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.
“Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.
“Property Rights, the Post Office, and the Making of the Infrastructure State,” A Symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads, University College Cork, Ireland, May 3, 2013.
“Human Infrastructure: Participatory Mapping in Chicago,” Conference on the Built Environment, University of Chicago, April 26, 2013. Video
“The Return of the Longue Durée,” Yale Legal History Forum, Yale Law School, April 23, 2013.
“How Digital Tools are Changing the Practice of History: A Report on the Longue Durée,” invited lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC, April 19, 2013.
“Human Infrastructure,” Infrastructure Monument Conference, MIT, April 8, 2013.
Roundtable on digital history, Harvard History Department, March 2013.
“Infrastructure for a revolution,” Media Places Conference, Umea University, Sweden, January 2013. Website, Storify
“Digital Methods and the Long Land War,” University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, Link
Sweden, 4 December 2012, Link
“The Long Land War: A Global History of Land Reform, c. 1860-Present” Harvard International & Global History Seminar, Harvard University November 28, 2012
Paper Machines Seminar, Rice University, Houston, November 19, 2012. Link, Link 2
“International Finance and the Rise of Global Squatterdom,” Histories of Land, Economy, and Power Conference and Workshop, Link
Harvard University, November 10, 2012 “Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video
Topic Modeling Workshop, MITH, University of Maryland, College Park, November 3, 2012 Link
“Britain Invents the Infrastructure State,” Harvard STS Circle, February 2011.
“A History of the Boundary Line,” in artists’ panel, “Natural Histories of the Boundary Line,” to accompany film work by Sarah Kanouse and Thomas Comerford, Mess Hall, Chicago, January 2011.
“Infrastructure and Social Connection,” Social Computing Seminar, New York (January 2011).
“Keywords for the Infrastructure State,” Early Modern Reading Group, November 2010
“Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History,” DHCS Conference, Northwestern, November 2010
“The City Made of Words: Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History,” University of Virginia Library, September 2010
“The Invisibility of Scotland,” Mellon Conference on the Social Sciences, University of Chicago (March 2009).
Various talks to graduate students on digital methods, University of Chicago, 2008-11
“Technology, State, and Society in the Building of the British Road Network, 1810-1850,” Technology, Politics, & Culture Seminar, the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois (April 4, 2008).

WORKS IN REVIEW

“What Kind of Information Infrastructure Does the Governance of Climate Change Need?,” Climatic Change, “Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” American Historical Review
“Should Historians Text Mine?” American Historical Review
“An Informed Panic,” Isis
“Imagine that AI Were a Tool of Democracy,” in review at Recerca, special issue on “Democracy and AI”
“A History of the Participatory Map” (submitted to Public Culture)

WORKS IN PROCESS

The Long Land War

The Long Land War tells the story of global struggles over land and water since the struggles kicked off by simultaneous land reform movements and land wars in Ireland, Scotland, and India in the 1880s. The story begins with a synthetic overview of land reform movements in the longue durée. which profiles three moments in the history of property: the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control, the ideology of “squatting” in post 1940 Britain, and the creation of the “participatory map” for contesting legal boundaries in Britain and India in the 1970s and 80s.

Portions already published:
- Ch. 12, “Participatory Mapping,” was printed in January 2017 at Public Culture
- Ch. 11, “Global Squatterdom,” is being scheduled for publication at Humanity
- The second half of Chapter 11 has been requested for a special edition of New Global History (due January 2018)
- Ch. 6, “Goldwin Smith and Land Restitution,” is in circulation (headed next to Victorian Studies)
- A new chapter, “The Valuers’ Tale,” written in the summer of 2017 on the basis of work in the Dublin archives, is in preparation for circulation to The Journal of British Studies.

Other works in progress

The Peasant Origins of Global Government - In preparation for submission to the Journal of Peasant Studies  “The Indian Origins of Appropriate Technology” – in preparation for submission to Technology and Culture
“Contesting Imperial Economics: The Land Valuer’s Tale” – in preparation  With Seth Denbo, “Iteration and Transparency in Publishing Digital History”—in preparation for submission to Historical Methods
Book manuscript co-authored with Stephanie Buongiorno, Historical Text Mining With R (in preparation), a companion to The Dangerous Art of Text Mining, which recreates the data-driven exercises from that book in code, and introduces the “Hansard” package for working with Hansard’s Debates of Great Britain
How Not to Kill Your Landlord (book manuscript in preparation, under contract) presents the story of global struggles over land and water since the struggles kicked off by simultaneous land reform movements and land wars in Ireland, Scotland, and India in the 1880s. The story begins with a synthetic overview of land reform movements in the longue durée, culminating in the establishment of the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control as a means of protecting peasant holdings in land.
- Portions already published:
  - The second half of Chapter 11 has been requested for a special edition of New Global History (due January 2018)
  - Ch. 6, “Goldwin Smith and Land Restitution,” is in circulation (headed next to Victorian Studies)
  - A new chapter, “The Valuers’ Tale,” written in the summer of 2017 on the basis of work in the Dublin archives, is in preparation for circulation to The Journal of British Studies.

Land & Water in the Longue Durée

An edited volume on Land & Water in the Longue Durée has been commissioned by Tom Summerhill for an edited series at Michigan State University Press, “Global Studies in Rural Peoples, Movements, and Sustainable Systems.” The book is based on a conference in Fall 2015. I will co-edit the book with a Brown graduate student in sociology, Michael Murphy, who helped with the conference.

Nine chapters have been solicited and abstracts were collected in July 2016.
We are presently working on an introduction and official proposal

Digital Text Mining Projects

Democracy Lab

With Stephanie Buongiorno, (https://shinyviz.smu.edu/shiny/public/hansard-shiny/), a public-facing portal for browsing the Hansard parliamentary debates of the nineteenth century using word embeddings and various statistical measures as profiled in The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (released 2021).

Digital Land Wars is an ongoing research project in collaboration with a data science team at Brown University, headed by Mark Howison. The project is designed to create:

Ongoing opportunities for teaching textmining (for instance, the DCII graduate student seminar)
Occasional co-authored publications
- Potentially, publications about the language of c19 property
- Publications about methodology, including a digital history methods textbook
Opportunities to apply for institution-building grants to support graduate student research and institution- building on campus
A new software toolkit designed specifically for historians of nineteenth-century British parliament and similar longue-duree digital corpora

Thus far, I have prepared several journal articles:

“Dissimilarity as Method” has received a request for revision and resubmission from the Journal of Cultural Analytics
“Text Mining Hansard for Technology” has been submitted to Technology and Culture
“Topic Modeling Hansard for Social History” is in preparation upon the request of the editors of Critical Inquiry (due October 2017)

CURRENT RESEARCH GRANTS

As PI NSF Grant, “The Unaffordable World,” Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) (2016-21) ($1,000,000)
With Neil Brenner and Matthew Desmond, NSF Grant, “The Unaffordable World,” Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) (2016-9)
Cogut Center for the Humanities research grant (2015)
Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Summer 2015)
Brown Salomon Grant for research (2014-6)

COMPLETED RESEARCH GRANTS

Brown University Public Humanities Center Fellowship (2014-5)
Watson Institute Collaborative Research Grant (2014-5)
Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Summer 2014)
Brown India Initiative Grant (Summer 2013)
Google Summer of Code Grant, Berkman Center/Metalab, Harvard University (Summer 2012) William F. Milton Fund, Harvard University (2011-3)

SERVICE TO THE DEPARTMENT/UNIVERSITY

Founding faculty, AI Center, SMU: Working with the chair of Computer Science and the dean of the engineering school, I drafted detailed proposals for a proposed AI Center, which is now moving forward under the direction of Fred Chang. (2019-22)
Organizer/Director/Originator, Digital Humanities Minor, SMU (2020-)
Originator/Organizer, with the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, creating interdisciplinary faculty reading groups on the digital humanities and text mining, sponsored by our “interdisciplinary institute.” (2019-21)
Co-director, along with the DGS of History and the DUS and Chair of Computer Science. Drafted possible coursework for a joint programs of studies, and proposed a series of courses open to both CS students and history-majors and other Dedman students, as well as interdisciplinary students at the graduate level. (2018-21)
Originator/Organizer, working with the dean of libraries and CIO of SMU, I led the creation of three faculty committees that oversaw the development of proposal materials for a “text mining consortium” which would prepare ready-to-use “clean” textual data for digital analysis, on demand, for university faculty (2018-20)
Organizer/Originator, not-for-credit program of instruction in the digital humanities for faculty and library staff, attended by two dozen members of the university. I taught the skills of text-mining over a 5-week “intensive” offered in tandem with my classes. (2018-20)
Member, Outreach Committee, Department of History, SMU, 2017-8.
Member, Provost’s committee on Creative and Interactive Technology (2017-18)
Member, Advisory Board to the Virtualization Center, Lyle School of Engineering, SMU, 2017-8.
Member, Faculty Search Committee, “Digital Humanities,” English Department, SMU, 2017-8.
Member, Provost’s Committee to Report on Technology on Campus, SMU, 2016-7.
Director, Fellows Program of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, 2016-7.
Organizer, speaker series, “Data is Made Up of Stories,” with talks by Kieran Healy, Jarrett Drake, David Eltis, Andrew and Anindita Basu Sempere, Simon Dedeo, and Ethan Zuckerman (sponsored by the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Initiative, Dedman College Dean’s Office, and History Department), SMU, Sep 26, Oct 3, Nov 7, Dec 5, Dec 15, Apr 14, and May 18, 2016-7.
Organizer, Conference, “Land and Water in a Long-Term Perspective,” (sponsored by the Watson Institute, History Department, S4, Taubman Center, and Humanities Initiative), Brown University, September 4-5, 2015.
Department advising, 2014-5
Advising Public Humanities masters students, 2014-5
Leader, Modern Europe Seminar, Fall 2014
Co-Organizer, Brown-RISD Critical Design Futures Conference, May 2014
Member, Brown-RISD Critical Design Futures Initiative, 2014-5.
Member, Brown Digital Humanities Initiative, 2012-5.
Various talks, Brown CS department, on historians and big data and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, 2012-4.
“Can Participatory Maps Save the World?” Talk at the Brown Library Digital Showcase, November 23, 2014. Video

SERVICE TO THE PROFESSION

Tenure reviewer for University of Pittsburgh (2023)
Board member, Current Research in Digital History, 2021-.
Seminar on the Digital Analysis of Parliaments and Congresses, an open research seminar of historians and data scientsts convened monthly over zoom with faculty of Umeå University, Jyvaskyla University, Cambridge University, and the Parliamentary Trust (UK), 2020-1
Various talks about the digital humanities in campuses around the world, 2012-7.
Chair, “People and Technology: Comparing Road Building across Three Continents,” Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, January 5, 2015.
Application reviews, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.
Reviewer, panel on Palladio software for early-modern epistolary studies, CESTA, Stanford, May 2014.
Various book manuscript reviews: Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Routledge, 2012-4.
NEH Digital Humanities grant reviewer, 2012

SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY

“The Long Land War,” This is Hell podcast, WNUR radio, Chicago, IL (June 14, 2023), https://thisishell.com/interviews/1605-jo-guldi
“A New Era of Democracy,” conversation with Audrey Tang, Minister of Information for Taiwan, A New Era of Democracy podcast, Oakland, CA (November 18, 2021), https://www.audacy.com/podcast/radicalxchanges-f9e3d/episodes/a-new-era-of-democracy-ep-1-audrey-tang-and-jo-guldi-with-rosa-ohara-8d604
6th-7th-8th grade Sunday School, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Dallas, TX (2018-19, 2022-23)
Children’s Choir, Pianist, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Dallas, TX (2018-19, 2022-23)
Small group on Climate Justice, Unitarian Church, Dallas, TX, 2020
Three-part seminar series, “The History of Methodism,” Grace United Methodist Church, Dallas, TX, July 2017.
Development of a walking tour on foreclosure and eviction in Providence with the John Nicholson Brown Center for Public History, Brown, masters student Kate Diedrick
Various public conversations about present-day infrastructure activists and the history of technology, covered by Forbes
“A Brief History of Participatory Mapping,” invited talk at Transparent Chennai (a participatory mapping nonprofit), Chennai, India, May 14, 2013.

SELECTED AWARDS AND HONORS

External Affiliate, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (2020-)
Fellow, Radical Xchange Foundation (2020-)
Fellow, KnowledgeLab, University of Chicago and Santa Fe Institute (2020- )
Fellow, Text Optics Lab, Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago (2019-20)
Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University (2015-7, deferred)
Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University (2015-6)
Named appointment, Hans Rothfels Assistant Professorship (2014-6)
Fellow, John Nicholas Brown Public Humanities Center (2014-5)
Fellow, Harvard Metalab (2012-3)
Short-term Fellowship, Huntington Library (January 2009)
University DNT Fellowship, 2007-2008. Departmental fellowship (2006- 2007)
Anglo-California Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Center for British Studies, UC Berkeley and Pembroke College, Cambridge (2005)
Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (2005)
Fellow, Yale Center for British Art (2005) Fellow, Institute for Humane Studies (2004-2008)
Fellow, Center for Landscape at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, (2004)
John Scholes Prize for Best Essay in Transportation History (2004)
Kostof Fellowship in Architectural History at Berkeley (2002-2003)
Gates Fellowship at Cambridge (2001-2002)
Eben Fiske Fellowship at Trinity College (2001-2002)

SELECTED TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Teaching Competencies

Digital History; British History, 1540-1982; Landscape History; History of Technology; European History since 1688; History of the State; History of Cities

Introductory and Advanced Text Mining in R and Python.

Courses

Hist 3380-001, “Topics in Digital History,” SMU (Fall 2017).
Hist 5392/5340, “Intellectual History of Capitalism,” SMU (Fall 2017)
Hist 7398-1172, “Interdisciplinary Digital Humanities Seminar for Graduate Students,” SMU (Spring 2017)
Hist 3366-002, “Landscapes of Capitalism, 1870-2017,” SMU (Spring 2017)
Hist 7398-1167, “Interdisciplinary Digital Humanities Seminar for Graduate Students,” SMU (Fall 2017)
Hist 3366-001, “Landscapes of Capitalism, 1350-1870,” SMU (Fall 2017)
Hist 4300, Junior Seminar in History, SMU (Fall 2016)
Brown University, Undergraduate Theses: 1 (2014-5); 3 (2014-5)
Brown University, undergraduate advising: 30 students, 2014-5
Hman 1971, “Advanced Research Seminar on the History and Theory of Property,” Cogut Seminar, Brown University (Fall 2015).
Hist 1301, “Nineteenth-Century Cities: Reform and Reformers in Paris, London, and Chicago,” undergraduate lecture course, Brown University (Spring 2014, Spring 2015)
Hist 1970u, “Digital History,” undergraduate seminar, Brown University (Spring 2015).
Hist 1311, “Land Use and Capitalism, 1350-the present,” undergraduate lecture course, Brown University (Fall 2013, Fall 2014)
Hist 1970u, “Radical Peasants, Rent Strikes, Squatters, and Land Reform: A Global Story, 1870-1980,” undergraduate seminar, Brown University (Fall 2014)
Hist 1970u, “Utopias,” undergraduate seminar, Brown University (Spring 2014)
Hist 2981h, “Property, Markets, and the State,” graduate seminar (Fall 2013).
Hist 62303, “Digital History” University of Chicago (Winter 2011) (new syllabus, co-taught as a lab with researchers from IBM and Google Books, emphasis on visualizing and text-mining historiography).
Hist 28904, “Modern History and the Landscape: Land use and the political imagination, 1350 to the present,” University of Chicago (Fall 2010)
Hist 62303, “Digital History: Information Revolutions Since Gutenberg and New Methodologies in the Digital Archives,” University of Chicago (Spring 2009)
Hist 28903, “The Birth of the Modern City: Paris, London, and Chicago in the Nineteenth Century,” University of Chicago (Spring 2009)
Graduate Student Instructor experience: History 7b, American History, 1865-2000, Leon Litwack, Instructor (Spring 2007); Architecture 170, Architecture History, 2000 B. C. E. to 1300 A. D., Stephen Tobriner, Instructor (2003-2004); Environmental Design 169a and 169b, The History of the Built Environment in America, 1600-1900 and 1900-the present; Paul Groth, Instructor (2002-2003)
Various readerships in post-1865 American History (2004-2007)

LANGUAGES

French, German, Latin, Ancient Greek (reading)