About
Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti (pronouns: they/them) is Managing Director of the
Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, runs the
Digital Humanities Slack, is Secretary of the
Association for Computers & the Humanities, and served as a
Digital Ethnic Futures Mentor in 2022.
Before their current role, Amanda was a TT assistant professor of digital humanities at Purdue University. They hold a Literature Ph.D. from the University of Maryland focused on the digital humanities and textual scholarship, and an M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan focused on DH and human-computer interaction. They have also worked as a professional web developer for over a decade, with specialization in online knowledge-building communities, meaningful crowdsourcing websites, and reading/annotation interfaces.
Amanda currently contributes to the scholarship of experimental and digital humanities policy and practice, bringing both critical-practical approaches to infrastructure and community design underlying scholarly innovation. They are an enthusiastic blogger, both on their
LiteratureGeek.com blog and on
the Scholars’ Lab blog, as well as a popular speaker and advisor for institutions exploring digital and experimental scholarship initiatives.
They served as an elected representative of the
Association for Computing and the Humanities (ACH) executive council and are the founder and ongoing administrator of the
Digital Humanities Slack. They previously served as a member of the
Modern Languages Association (MLA) Information Technology Committee, and as an editorial board member and then ombudsperson for
The Programming Historian.
Amanda’s 2015 dissertation (
Dr.AmandaVisconti.com) was the first humanities dissertation to fully acknowledge digital methods (code, design, user testing, blogging, no chapters) as scholarship by treating them
as the dissertation instead of addenda to traditional written chapters. The focus of their dissertation was creating the participatory digital edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses InfiniteUlysses.com, which attracted over 12,000 unique visitors in its first few weeks of open beta and was cited in
The New York Times in July 2016.
Amanda is also an appointed member of the Humanities Commons Technical Advisory Group.
