MassMine Team

MassMine was founded by Nicholas Van Horn and Aaron Beveridge in 2014. In May of 2015, MassMine received its first round of funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities (2015 NEH grant award information), as well as an additional round of funding from the University of Florida Informatics Institute that same year (2015 UFII application).

The development team members, advisory board members, and intellectual contributors listed below are actively involved in developing (1) a full graphical user interface for MassMine, (2) expanding the software’s available data sources, (3) adding new processing (including emoji processing) and exporting functionality, (4) writing an open access MassMine textbook, and (5) running MassMine’s new features and documentation through extensive usability testing. This work is in fulfillment of our newest round of funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities (2019 NEH press release), in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Capital University, Arizona State University, and Texas Tech University. Full 2019 NEH funding details are available here.

Founders:

Nicholas Van Horn (Founder, Head Developer) Dr. Van Horn is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Capital University. He is a data scientist and active researcher in the interdisciplinary field of computational cognitive neuroscience. Work in this area represents the convergence of advances in a number of related fields, including neuroscience, psychology & psychophysics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, mathematical modeling, as well as computer science more broadly construed. His research and teaching span topics from memory, learning, and perception to cyberpsychology— the study of the psychological antecedents and consequences of networked and online social behaviors and relationships. In parallel with his teaching and research, Van Horn actively writes and maintains open source software related to writing and productivity, statistical analysis, text processing, and other data science solutions. This work in part led to the development of the current functionality of MassMine, of which he remains the software developer.

Aaron Beveridge (Founder, Project Director) Dr. Beveridge is an assistant professor of digital rhetoric in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research combines humanities and data science methods to study networked writing and the circulation of digital artifacts. With a focus on text mining, natural language processing, and data visualization, Beveridge’s work contributes to the ongoing expansion of data-driven methods in rhetoric and composition. Beveridge’s research and teaching interests also include media ecology, the rhetoric of science, maker culture, and technical communication. Beveridge’s work has been published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, and Composition Forum. Beveridge is currently working on an edited collection with Laurie Gries titled, Doing Digital Visual Studies, and he is editing a special issue for Computers and Composition titled, “Composing Algorithms: Writing (with) Rhetorical Machines,” forthcoming 2020.

Funded Team Members/Co-PIs:

Jennifer Feather (Project Dissemination and Consulting) Dr. Feather is Associate Professor of English and Cross-Appointed Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is co-founder of the UNCG Humanities Network and Consortium (HNAC), a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. In this capacity, she has coordinated a number of public events, developed projects in connection with the Humanities Action Lab, and supported a variety of faculty research projects. She is currently working on a research project on transforming higher education by broadening graduate training in the humanities to include public engagement. She is an active participant in the National Humanities Alliance and the American Association of University Women.

Kellie Gray (Emoji Processing and Analytics Development) Gray teaches in the Technical Communication and Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University. Her research examines the rhetoric of emoji through a methodological framework that negotiates the deterministic elements of code and platform, the creative agency of digital writers, and the broader structural, cultural, and political elements that influence how emoji circulate.

Martin Halbert (Project Dissemination and Sustainability) Dr. Halbert is the Dean of Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Halbert previously served as Dean of the Libraries at the University of North Texas since 2009. Halbert also serves as president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute, a growing international alliance of cultural memory organizations that was one of the founding partners of the National Digital Preservation Program. His experience also includes serving as Director for Digital Innovations at Emory University and Head of Library Networked Systems at Rice University.

Claire Lauer (GUI Design and Development, User Experience Research) Dr. Lauer is an associate professor of technical communication and faculty in the user experience master’s program at Arizona State University. Her current research investigates how people read data visualizations and are susceptible to deceptive tactics used in graphs. She also researches how to communicate scientific information to public audiences and how to effectively design data-driven interfaces for researchers. She has published on the advantages and pitfalls of data-driven vs. manual qualitative language analysis research, how we use language to describe changes in technology-mediated text production, how technology impacts creative thinking and design, how to effectively teach design, and how the work of technical communicators has adapted within the ever-evolving technological workplace. She is the past chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group for the Design of Communication (SIGDOC) and serves as the vice chair of operations on the SGB Executive Council of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Somya Mohanty (GUI and Analytics Development) Dr. Mohanty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He teaches data science and security courses, and his research interests include big-data, machine learning, cyber-security, and data for social good. He also has expertise in the design and development of large scale databases, data-mining approaches, efficient algorithms, web applications, network and computer security architectures. The research has been funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Energy (DoE), Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station (MAFES), and National Institute of Justice (NIJ).

Advisory Board:

Intellectual Contributors:

*For lists of former funded team members and contributors, please see the linked grant applications from NEH and UFII listed above