James Lee
James Lee has been appointed associate vice provost for digital scholarship and associate dean of libraries effective November 1, 2019.
“James’ new role is a direct investment from university leadership to support UC Libraries’ growing responsibility to lead our institution’s enterprise-wide digital scholarship and digital integration vision,” said Xuemao Wang, vice provost for digital scholarship and dean and university librarian.
In May 2019, Provost Kristi Nelson and Vice President for Research Pat Limbach jointly announced that UC Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) was selected as one of the first six anchor teams for the Digital Futures initiative. Digital Futures is integral to the Next Lives Here vision in UC’s strategic plan: “It will empower diverse teams of thinkers and doers to push the boundaries of what’s possible,” President Neville Pinto said, “to bend the future in Cincinnati’s direction.” In July 2019, Provost Nelson announced Dean Wang’s expanded responsibilities as vice provost for digital scholarship, describing his new portfolio as “…covering a broad spectrum of areas including the DSC, Scholar@UC and research and data management, but also digital archives and preservation, digital records and assets management, scholarly communication and digital publishing, as well as the rapidly evolving movements of open science, open education resources, open data and open access.”
Professor Lee is currently the director of the Digital Scholarship Center and an associate professor of digital humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences where he will continue to teach digital humanities related courses. He leads the research activities of the DSC and brings to the enterprise digital integration vision expertise in the areas of digital humanities, machine learning + text mining techniques on archives, social network analysis and data visualization. Much of his work has used machine learning methods applied to large text corpora and other unstructured datasets to rethink what it means to perform historical analysis. His research also investigates ways to visualize the results of machine learning algorithms in an interpretable way that enables non-technical audiences to glean useful information from the data. His research has been published widely in a diverse range of disciplines, reflecting collaborations that apply digital humanities methods with partners in biomedical informatics, new media, law, design and archeology among others. To date, he has served in leadership roles for over $3 million in grants, notably $1.6M (at Grinnell College and the University of Iowa) and $900,000 (at the University of Cincinnati) awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr. Lee received his B.A. from Cornell University and earned his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley.
“I think this expanded role will continue much of the work I’ve already been doing, but for more people and more projects. I hope to help as many people as possible across the institution integrate digital methods and technology into their work and projects,” said Lee.
“I look forward to working with everyone to develop a comprehensive, enterprise digital integration vision over our next UC Libraries strategic framework planning process, to advance UC Libraries and become the globally engaged intellectual commons of the university, as well as to be a thought-leader in our professional field. Please join me in congratulating Dr. James Lee on his expanded leadership responsibilities,” concluded Dean Wang.