Headshot of Dr.Lauren Craig Tilton

Dr. Lauren Craig Tilton

Professor of Digital Humanities
E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts
Data Science Advisory Board Member
  • Profile

    Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities in the Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies. Her research focuses on analyzing, developing, and applying digital and computational methods to the study of 20th and 21st century documentary expression and visual culture. Tilton’s first book, Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and Texts (2015, second edition forthcoming), built off work applying digital humanities to the study of photography for the digital, public humanities project, Photogrammar (photogrammar.org), which she directs. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as American QuarterlyDigital Humanities QuarterlyDigital Scholarship in the Humanities, and Journal of Cultural Analytics. Her work has received support from ACLS, CLIR, NEH, and Mellon Foundation, and she recently finished a stint as a researcher with the Library of Congress as a part of the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud Initiative. Her co-authored scholarship also includes Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History Project (layeredLives.org), which was released with Stanford University Press in 2022, and Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images (distantviewing.org/book), which was released with The MIT Press in 2023.  She is the co-editor of the forthcoming "Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities" (University of Minnesota Press). She received her PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

    Please visit her website, laurentilton.com,for the most updated information about her research, service, and teaching.

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    • Grants and Fellowships

      The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - Public Knowledge. Awarded to develop the Distant Viewing Toolkit. 2022-2025


      NEH Level III Advancement Grant.Awarded to develop PGViz.  2022-2025


      Library of Congress Scholar-In-Residence. Awarded to apply computer vision to photography collections from the Library of Congress.  2021


      Images as Data. Awarded to apply computer vision to collections from Harvard Libraries and Museums. Joint grant with Harvard University Libraries. Part of Mellon-funded Collections as Data Initiative.  2020 – 2021


      NEH Digital Humanities Level II Advancement Grant. Awarded to develop the Distant Viewing Toolkit.  2018-2021.


      NEH-Mellon Digital Publication Fellowship. Awarded to develop Layered Lives.  2019-2020


      University of North Carolina Visiting Summer Research Fellowship. Awarded for research in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Summer 2018


      American Council of Learned Societies Digital Extension Grant. Awarded for Photogrammar.  July 2016 – June 2018  


      NEH Digital Projects for the Public. Awarded for Participatory Media. Partnership between University of Richmond and University of Virginia.  December 2015 – June 2018


      $50,000 “Collections As Data," funded by the Mellon Foundation: “Images as Data: Processing, Exploration and Discovery at Scale”


      $100,000 National Endowment of the Humanities grant: "Distant Viewing."

  • Publications
    Books
    Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images (MIT Press, 2023). https://distantviewing.org/book/ 
    Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History Project  (Stanford University Press, 2022). https://layeredlives.org 
    Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and Text (Spring 2015, 2nd edition 2024). https://humanitiesdata.org
    Journal Articles

    Tilton, Lauren, Emeline Blevins, Luke Malcynsky and Hanglin Zhou, “The Role of Metadata in American Studies,” Polish Journal for American Studies 14 (2020): 149-164.

    Lauren Tilton and Brent M. Rogers, "Introduction to Focus Issue: Collections in a Digital Age," Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 12, no. 4 (2016): 377-380.

    Lauren Tilton, "Preservation First? Re-Viewing Film Digitization," Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 12, no. 4 (2016): 391-399.
    Additional Publications
    Lead co-editor of American Quarterly Special Issue “Toward a Critically Engaged Digital Practice: American Studies and the Digital Humanities."
  • Links