Jeri Wieringa

As CDH Assistant Director, Jeri is responsible for the CDH annual grant and program cycles, manages the CDH research portfolio and co-leads the research software engineering (RSE) team. She also coordinates outreach to humanities RSEs and faculty across campus. She focuses on the full lifecycle of computational research at the CDH, from project intake to project closeout.

A historian of American religion, Jeri’s research focuses on the application of computational methods within historical research and on the intersection of technology, gender, and culture. Prior to joining the CDH, Jeri was assistant professor in the department of religious studies at The University of Alabama. She was the founding director of the REL Digital Lab, established in 2021 to support the research and teaching of the department. She received her PhD in History from George Mason University in 2019, completing a fully digital dissertation. She worked previously as the digital publishing production lead with the George Mason University Libraries and as a research assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on projects such as Omeka and PressForward.

Jeri's research engages with issues of infrastructure for digital humanities scholarship, data construction and curation, as well as machine learning and natural language processing with historical sources. Current projects include:

• DH and "data" in religious studies, an exploration into "data" in the study of religion;
• Afterlives, a study of DH projects and their potential futures;
• Coding DH, a data project with Zoe LeBlanc to identify and study the DH community on GitHub;
• The Tie that Binds, a reworking of her dissertation, A Gospel of Health and Salvation: Modeling the Religious Culture of Seventh-day Adventism, 1843-1920.

She has presented at the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the annual ADHO conference, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Publications include:

• with Zoe LeBlanc, Celeste Týờng Vy Sharpe, “From Precedents to Collective Action: Realities and Recommendations for Digital Dissertations in History,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
• “Mining Eschatology in Seventh-Day Adventist Periodicals,” in Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies (De Gruyter, 2022), 57–76,
• “The Tie That Binds: Developing a Scholarly Edition of Seventh-Day Adventist Literary Systems,” in Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational History (HistoInformatics 2021), ed. Yasunobu Sumikawa et al., vol. 2981, CEUR Workshop Proceedings,
• “Beyond the PDF: Navigating the Digital Dissertation,” The American Historian, 2020,
• “Intro to Beautiful Soup,” Programming Historian, December 30, 2012 (now retired).