Curriculum vitae
EDUCATION
Ph.D. Scandinavian Studies, University of Washington, 2011
Dissertation: Imagining Themselves: National Belongings in Post-Ethnic Nordic Literature
M.A. Scandinavian Studies, University of Washington, 2005
B.A. Art History, University of Chicago, 1997
WORK EXPERIENCE
Stanford University Libraries, Assistant University Librarian for Research Data Services, 2022-present
Yale University Library, Director of Digital Humanities Laboratory, 2015-2022
Yale University Library, Librarian for Digital Humanities Research, 2013-2015
University of Chicago, Associate Director for Humanities Research Computing, 2011-2013
Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching & Learning, Lead Technologist, 2000-2003
Appointments
Yale Department of Statistics and Data Science, Lecturer, Spring 2022
Gothenburg University Centre for Digital Humanities, Associated Researcher
UCLA Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics, Departmental Scholar, Spring 2016
UCLA European Languages & Transcultural Studies, Postdoctoral Fellow, 2010-2011
Uppsala University, Fulbright Fellow, 2007-2008
PUBLICATIONS
Reports
Parry, Ross and Peter Leonard. UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions: Workshop Report & Recommendations UKRI AHRC Reports and Reviews (2019)
Journal Articles
DeRose, Catherine and Peter Leonard. “Digital Humanities on Reserve: From Reading Room to Laboratory at Yale University Library.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14.3 (2020).
Broadwell, Peter M., Peter Leonard & Timothy R. Tangherlini: “‘Hvad der byggedes om dagen, blev revet ned om natten...’ Word Sequence Repetition in Danish Legend Tradition” Svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv [Swedish Dialects and Folk Traditions] (2017): 9-26
Arnold, Taylor, Peter Leonard, and Lauren Tilton. “Knowledge Creation Through Recommender Systems.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32 (2017): ii151–ii157
Tangherlini, Timothy R., and Peter Leonard. “Trawling in the Sea of the Great Unread: Sub-Corpus Topic Modeling and Humanities Research.” Poetics 41.6 (2013): 725–749.
Leonard, Peter. “Det Etniske Gennembrud [The Ethnic Breakthrough]: Multicultural Literature in Denmark.” Multiethnica 31 (2008): 32–34.
Book Chapters
DeRose, Catherine, and Peter Leonard. “Foregrounding Users in Humanities-Centric Labs.” Forthcoming in Designing Libraries for the 21st Century. Chicago: Association of College & Research Libraries, 2021
Leonard, Peter. “Swedish Identity and the Literary Imaginary.” In Migration and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022.
Leonard, Peter. “Text mining och digitala författarskap. Förädlade arkiv och semantisk uppmärkning i de stora råtextsamlingarnas tid [Text Mining and Digital Authorship: Curated Archives and Semantic Markup in the Era of Textual Big Data.]” Textkritik som Analysmetod [Textual Criticism as Analysis Method], ed. Paula Henrikson, Mats Malm and Petra Söderlund. Nordiskt Nätverk for Editionsfilologer. Skrifter 12. Stockholm: Svenska vitterhetssamfundet, 2017.
Malm, Mats, and Peter Leonard. “Marknadens intertextualitet. Kulturarv och återbruk 1840–1900 [The Intertextuality of the Marketplace. Cultural Heritage and Recycling, 1840-1900.]” Spänning och nyfikenhet: festskrift till Johan Svedjedal. Möklinta: Gidlund, 2016. 28–36.
Leonard, Peter. “Bi- and Multilingual Aspects in the Literary Writing of Translingual Authors in Sweden.” Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 149–174.
Book Reviews
Leonard, Peter. “Review of Svensk litteratur som världslitteratur. En antologi by Johan Svedjedal (ed.),” Samlaren: tidskrift för svensk litteraturvetenskaplig forskning 134 (2013): 373–376.
Leonard, Peter. “Review of Den Föreställda Mångkulturen: Klass och etnicitet I Svensk samtidsprosa [Imagined Multiculturalism: Class and Ethnicity in Contemporary Swedish Literature] by Magnus Nilsson,” Scandinavian Studies 83.2 (2011): 281–284.
Leonard, Peter. “Review of Those That Fly without Wings: Music and Dance in a Chilean Immigrant Community by Jan Sverre Knudsen,” Scandinavian Studies 79.3 (2007): 373–376.
AWARDS AND HONORS
2019 Selected participant, People and Machines: co-creating with heritage collections. UK National Archives & Aarhus Stadsarkiv.
2016 Selected participant, Scandinavian Modernism and Computational Methods. Aarhus, Denmark.
2014 Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar, Aspen Institute
2012 Selected participant, NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities: Topic Modeling for Humanities Research
2012 Selected participant, NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities: Digital Cultural Mapping: Transformative Scholarship and Teaching in the Geospatial Humanities}
2010 Selected participant, NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities: Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities
2009-2010 HASTAC Scholar, Humanities, Arts, Science & Technology Advanced Collaboratory
GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2022 Principal Investigator, United States. “Enriching Exhibition Scholarship: Reconciling Knowledge Graphs”
NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions
2021-2022 Google Cloud Platform Research Grant, Yale Center for Research Computing
Cloud computing credits for image segmentation, generative music, and ImageNet retraining
2020-2022 Whitney Humanities Center Fellow
2018 Co-Principal Investigator, “Every Pixel on the Sunset Strip: Machine Vision and the Streets of Los Angeles”
Ed Ruscha’s “Streets of Los Angeles” Research Project, Getty Research Institute
2015-2018 Director, Digital Humanities Laboratory at Yale University Library
$3,000,000 grant for STEAM initiatives awarded from the Goizueta Foundation
2010-2012 Co-Principal Investigator, Google Digital Humanities Research Award.
$100,000 grant for “Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books”
2007-2008 Fulbright Fellowship, Uppsala University Centre for Multiethnic Research
2007 Scan|Design Fellow, University of Washington/University of Copenhagen
2004 Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) grant for language study in Sweden
INVITED TALKS
2024 “AI-arbete på Stanfords universitetsbibliotek”. Swedish National Library. Stockholm, Sweden
2024 [Keynote] ”Against the Cloud: Local Models and Local Control for AI Cultural Heritage Work”. Scholarly Information Services 2024 Symposium. Australian National University Library
2024 “Bias as a Virtue: On LLMs and Historic Corpora” Flows & Frictions: Integrating Mixed Methods for Data-rich Research on Historical Media. The New Order of Criticism, Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg. Gothenburg, Sweden
2024 “Forskningsdata tjänster på Stanfords universitetsbibliotek” Lund University Library. Lund, Sweden
2024 Plenary Speaker, “AI Tools in Humanistic and Social Research” Learning & Networking Week Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference
2024 “Utvecklingen inom internationell digital humaniora de senaste åren och framtida löften” [Recent Developments within International Digital Humanities Future Directions]. Digitalisering av det litterära kulturarvet: varför, vad, hur? [Digitization of Literary Cultural Heritage: Why, What, How?"] Symposium at The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Stockholm.
2024 Respondent to Alisea McLeod & Bethany Nowviskie, “Transformations in the Archive” – The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis
2023 “Next-Generation Search & Discovery At Stanford Libraries” 8th National Strategic Colloquium, Innovative Data Utilization and Challenges, National Assembly Library of Korea 대한민국 국회도서관
2021 “Collections as Data” Digital Humanities Network, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio
2021 “Relecture de l'histoire de l'art au DHLab de Yale : PixPlot à BlakeTint.” Lundis numérique. Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, France.
2021 “When Algorithms Dream: Latent space, generative models, and cultural heritage.” DH-Seminariet. Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion. University of Gothenburg. Gothenburg, Sweden.
2021 “Deploying Digital Humanities for Cultural Work.” UC Berkeley Berkeley, California.
2021 “Fixity and Falsehood: Generative Models and Cultural Heritage.” Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University.
2020 “Digital at a Distance: Continuity of Service during a Pandemic”: Supporting Digital Scholarship During the Pandemic: What’s Possible. Coalition for Networked Information.
2020 “From Archive to Insight: DHLab as Scholarly Accelerator.” (with Cathy DeRose) On Asia: Digitizing and Visualizing Historical Sources. Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
2019 “Collection-Scale Visualization with PixPlot.” Fantastic Futures: 2nd International Conference on AI for Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Stanford University, California.
2019 “Data Science for the Humanities: Texts and Images at Scale.” International Conference of Library Strategic Planning and Discipline Development. Jiangsu University 江苏大学. Zhenjiang, China.
2019 “Libraries and Digital Humanities: From Access to Analysis to Engagement.” Fudan University. Shanghai, China
2019 “Analyzing and Visualizing Large Digitized Collections.” Smithsonian Digitization Conference. Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC.
2019 “Deep Learning & Cultural Heritage.” Ethics and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Workshop. Yale University. New Haven, Connecticut.
2019 “Imaginary Space and Imaginary Georg Brandes.” Georg Brandes Digital Seminar. UC Berkeley. Berkeley, California.
2019 [Keynote] “Machine Vision, Human Gaze: Deep Learning and Cultural Heritage.” ALIA Information Online. Sydney, Australia.
2019 “Every Pixel on the Sunset Strip : Machine Vision and the Streets of Los Angeles” Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California
2018 “Ed Ruscha’s Photography as Artist’s Book and Dataset.” NSF IPAM Culture Analytics Reunion Conference II. Lake Arrowhead, California.
2018 “Building the Franke Family Digital Humanities Lab.” Designing Libraries VII. University of Calgary, Canada
2017 “Visual Culture Computation: Dreams & Nightmares” NSF IPAM Culture Analytics Reunion Conference I. Lake Arrowhead, California.
2017 “Digital Humanities: Building Institutional Support in a Library Context”. Forum för digital humaniora. Uppsala University Library, Sweden.
2017 “DH Methods for the Literary Scholar and Visual Culture Computation”. Forum för digital humaniora. Uppsala University Library, Sweden.
2017 “Building Digital Humanities at Yale University.” Hong Kong Baptist University. Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
2017 “Digitale metoder til litteraturforskning i forbindelse med det Georg Brandes-digitaliseringsprojekt.” [Digital Methods for Literature Research for the Georg Brandes Digitization Project.] Copenhagen, Denmark.
2017 [Keynote] “Processing Pixels: Towards Visual Culture Computation” (with Lindsay King). Special Interest Group Audio-Visual Material in Digital Humanities. Montreal, Canada.
2017 “Text & Data Mining for the Humanities.” Syddansk Universitet. Odense, Denmark.
2017 [Keynote] “Towards a Macroscope for the Study of Nordic Literatures” (with Tim Tangherlini). Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries. Gothenburg, Sweden.
2017 “Swedish Identity and the Literary Imaginary.” Managing Multicultural Scandinavia. UMass Amherst. Amherst, Massachusetts.
2016 “Humanities Disciplinarity in the Age of Big Data.” The University of Washington. Seattle, Washington.
2016 “Sub-Corpus Topic Modeling & Word Embedding Models for 19th Century Literature.” Scandinavian Modernism and Computational Methods. Aarhus, Denmark.
2016 [Keynote] “Digital Humanities In and Of the Library.” Association of European Research Libraries. Helsinki, Finland.
2015 “Text mining och digitala författarskap. [Text Mining and Digital Authorship]” Nordisk Netværk for Editionsfilologer [Nordic Network for Editions Scholarship] conference. Gothenburg, Sweden.
2015 “Beyond Text: Digital Humanities Methods for Visual Culture at Scale.” Visualizing Asia in the Modern World. New Haven, Connecticut.
2015 “Topic Modeling and the Canon: Using Curated Collections to Understand the Great Unread.” Nettverket for digital humaniora. University of Oslo. Oslo, Norway.
2014 “Mining Large Data Sets for the Humanities.” International Federation of Library Associations. Lyon, France.
2014 “Humanities Data Mining: Transforming Local Copies of Vendor-Digitized Cultural Material.” American Library Association. Las Vegas, Nevada.
2014 “Macroscopic Perspective: Data Visualization in Humanities Research Projects.” The Critical Life of Information. Yale University. New Haven, Connecticut.
2014 “Texts, Networks, Discourses: Extracting Patterns from Humanistic and Historical Data.” BYU Office of Digital Humanities & Scandinavian Studies Program. Provo, Utah.
2014 “Sub-Corpus Topic Modeling and Humanities Research.” Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion. University of Gothenburg. Gothenburg, Sweden.
2013 “Digital Scholarship and the Archive: Micro- and Macroscopes.” New Directions for Digital Scholarship. Yale University. New Haven, Connecticut.
2013 “Topic Modeling the Great Unread.” Alabama Digital Humanities Center, University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
2012 “Text-Mining Strindberg.” Association of Swedish Teachers and Researchers in America. Berkeley, California.
2012 “Analysis and Visualization Using Large Bodies of Electronic Text.” (with Elisabeth Long) Center for Research Libraries. Chicago, Illinois.
2011 “Networks and Large-Scale Text Analysis.” NEH Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities. UCLA Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics. Los Angeles, California.
2010 “Data Mining Northern Europe.” 紀伊國屋書店 Kinokuniya International Library Roundtable, Waseda University Library. Tokyo, Japan.
2009 “Post-Ethnic Identity in Swedish Literature.” Raoul Wallenberg Lecture Series. Nordic Heritage Museum. Seattle, Washington.
2008 “Identitet och vantrivsel: Kroppen mot staten i svensk och dansk samtidslitteratur [Identity and its Discontents: The Body and the State in Contemporary Swedish and Danish Literature.]” Center for Multiethnic Research. Uppsala, Sweden.
CONFERENCE ACTIVITY
Papers Presented
2023 “Transformer-Based Models for Metadata Creation” (with Peter Broadwell) Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea
2020 “Visualizing Medical Heritage Collections at Scale” (with Cathy DeRose) Medical Heritage Library 10th Anniversary Conference. Virtual
2019 “Lina Jonns efterträdare: Lund’s Photographic History as Dataset” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Madison, Wisconsin
2017 “Transforming Theater History through Crowdsourced Transcription” (with Lindsay King.) Digital Humanities. Montreal, Canada
2017 “Word Embedding Models & the Modern Breakthrough.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Minneapolis, Minnesota.
2016 “Text and Data-Mining on Licensed Collections” Coalition for Networked Information. San Antonio, TX
2016 “Crowdsourcing Theater History Metadata from the Archives” (with Lindsay King.) Coalition for Networked Information. Washington, DC
2016 “Data Mining, Commercial Licenses and Copyright.” Digital Humanities. Kraków, Poland.
2016 “Text Mining 105 Years of Scandinavian Studies.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. New Orleans, Louisiana.
2014 “Data Mining on Vendor-Digitized Collections.” Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition. Charleston, South Carolina.
2014 “Photogrammar: Organizing Visual Culture through Geography, Text Mining, and Statistical Analysis” (with Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton). Digital Humanities. Lausanne, Switzerland.
2014 “Mapping the Ecological Imaginary” (with Christopher Oscarson). Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. New Haven, Connecticut.
2013 “The Evolution of the Ecological Imaginary: Environmental Discourse in Scandinavia at the Turn of the Century” (with Christopher Oscarson). Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. San Francisco, California.
2012 “Topic Modeling Nordic Literature.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Salt Lake City, Utah.
2011 “Modeling Folklore in the Google Books Corpus.” American Folklore Society. Bloomington, Indiana.
2011 “Computational Approaches to Nordic Literature.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Chicago, Illinois.
2010 “Insights into Ibsen: Remixing Scholarship Online.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Seattle, Washington.
2009 “Men, Women and Pistols: Staging Suicide in Mørk-Eidem’s Hedda Gabler.” XIIth International Ibsen Conference. Shanghai, China.
2007 “Identity and its Discontents: Corporeal Indexicality in Claus Beck-Nielsen & Jonas Khemiri.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Rock Island, Illinois.
2006 “Heterosexuality v. Homosociality: Bodies in Motion in Wenger’s ‘Borta i tankar’.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Oxford, Mississippi.
2005 “ScandArabian Narrative: Voice, Truth, Reception in Jonas Khemiri’s Ett öga rött.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Portland, Oregon.
2004 “Home Alone: Lilja 4-ever and the Crisis of Domestic Masculinity in Sweden.” Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Redondo Beach, California.
Panels Organized
2012 Digital Humanities Stream. Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Salt Lake City, Utah.
Public Events Organized
2006 “Sweden’s Desperate Hunt for Diversity.” University of Washington Department of Scandinavian Studies, Seattle, Washington.
2006 “Marjaneh Bakhtiari at Scandinavia House.” Consulate General of Sweden, New York, New York.
2005 “Jonas Hassen Khemiri at Scandinavia House.” Consulate General of Sweden, New York, New York.
GUEST LECTURES
Yale University
Avant-Gardes and Emigres, Fall 2016
Lecture and workshop on “Introduction to Topic Modeling”
Mellon Graduate Concentration in the Digital Humanities
(En)Visualizing Knowledge: Text Mining, Mapping, Networks, Archiving & Big Data, Fall 2015
Lecture and workshop on “Digital Humanities as a Field”
Lecture and workshop on “Introduction to Topic Modeling”
Lecture and workshop on “Topic Modeling Academic Journals”
Fact & Fiction in the Archives, Fall 2015
Lecture on “Digital Humanities and the Archive”
Introduction to Digital Humanities, Spring 2015
Lecture and workshop on “Introduction to Topic Modeling”
Lecture and workshop on “Topic Modeling JSTOR Data”
Lecture and workshop on “Data Mining Magazines”
The Shenbao Lab, Spring 2014 & Spring 2015
Lecture on “Text Mining Historic Newspapers”
University of California Los Angeles
Scandinavian Folklore, Winter 2011
Lecture on “The Nyckelharpa as Folk Instrument”
University of Washington
The Swedish Novel, Winter 2011
Lecture on “Post-Ethnic Fiction”
Folk Narrative, Winter 2011
Lecture on “Mining Folklore”
Children’s Literature, Winter 2009
Lecture on “Hans Christian Andersen”
Introduction to Scandinavian Culture, Fall 2006
Lecture on “Nordic Identity”
SERVICE
Professional Organizations
Society of the Advancement of Scandinavian Study
Lifetime Member
Executive Council Representative, History & Social Sciences 2013-2017
Ibsen Society of America
Graduate Student Representative 2007-2010
Advisory Boards
Computational Humanities Research Advisory Board (Open access journal in the computational humanities)
2024-present
Huminfra Scientific Advisory Board (Swedish national infrastructure supporting digital and experimental research in the Humanities)
2023-present
Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives & Museums (AI4LAM)
Secretariat. 2022-present; Council. 2021-2022
Digital Historical Maps of Singapore and Southeast Asia. Yale-National University of Singapore College
2019-2021
Kritikens nya ordning: mixade metoder i studiet av svensk litteraturkritik under ett och ett halvt sekel
[The Order of Criticism Revisited: A mixed-methods study of a century and a half of literary criticism in Sweden]
University of Gothenburg
2020-2023
320 York Street Humanities Grant Selection Committee
2019-2020
Yale-Smithsonian Partnership Advisory Committee
2018-2022
Yale Digital Humanities Committee
2015-2020
Data-Mining the Digital Bookshelf
University of Oslo
Funder: Noregs forskingsråd [ Research Council of Norway]
Eugenic Rubicon: California’s Sterilization Stories
Arizona State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Michigan
Funder: National Endowment for the Humanities
Ten Thousand Rooms Project (廣廈千萬間項目) [Classical Chinese Texts]
Yale University
Funder: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The HistoryMakers [African-American Oral History]
Funder: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Federal Programs
National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities
2011 Application Reviewer, Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
2016 Application Reviewer, Digital Humanities Implementation Grants
National Science Foundation, UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics
2016 Organizing Committee Member, Culture Analytics & User Experience Design
Conferences
Love Data Week
Co-Organizer, Stanford University Love Data Week
Palo Alto, 2023
Measuring Modernity: Literary and Social Change in Scandinavia 1870-1900
Workshop Organizer: Tracking the not-mentioned-but-somehow-present
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, 2022
ARL/CNI/EDUCAUSE Expert Panel: Collaboration on Emerging Technologies
San Diego, 2020
Invited Participant
UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions 2019
UKRI-AHRC/Smithsonian Institution/NEH/NSF/Library of Congress
United States Moderator
Library of Congress Machine Learning + Libraries Summit
Washington, DC 2019
Invited Participant
Getting Things Done: Administrative Tips, Tricks, Helps, And Hindrances In Digital Scholarship
DH 2019 Utrecht
Co-Organizer
Machine Vision for Cultural Heritage & Natural Science Collections 2019
Yale-Smithsonian Partnership
Organizer
Planning a Digital Scholarship Center 2017
Coalition for Networked Information & Association of Research Libraries
Organizer
CNI Roundtable: Supporting Digital Humanities
Washington, DC 2014
Invited Participant
New Directions for Digital Scholarship 2013
Yale University
Organizer
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science
2012 Organizer
2011-2012 Program Committee
Media Coverage
Kekauoha, Alex. “Stanford Libraries creates new division to support scholars’ data needs”. Stanford Report, September 2022
Karampelas, Gabrielle. “Peter Leonard as inaugural Assistant University Librarian for Research Data Services”. Stanford Libraries News, August 2022
Michael Beirut and Jessica Helfand. "Episode #98: Traffic", The Observatory, February 22 2019
Heller, Nathan. “What the Enron Emails Say About Us.” The New Yorker 17 July 2017.
Hartnett, Kevin. “The Ideal Woman of 1980, and Other Lessons from 100 Years of Vogue.” The Boston Globe 7 October 2014.
Lauridsen, Holly. “What’s in Vogue? Tracing the Evolution of Fashion and Culture in the Media.” YaleNews, 5 Sept. 2014
Gwinn, Mary Ann. “A Seattle Connection to the Massive Google Books Project.” The Seattle Times 25 July 2010.