Bill Turkel, Assistant Professor of History University of Western Ontario, will discuss his new book project, “The Programming Historian” with faculty & graduate students.

Additional Public Info: Dr. Turkel earned his PhD in History from MIT in 2004. He teaches environmental and Canadian history, as well as courses in digital and public history. Turkel’s interest in environmental and digital history are evident in his current projects, which include The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau (University of British Columbia Press, 2007) and the upcoming The Programming Historian, an open-access monograph he is writing with Alan MacEachern, also of Western Ontario University. The Programming Historian is designed to teach historians how to use programming to “augment their ability to do research online.” Users will learn how to program in web browsers and existing projects, including Zotero, to assist in information retrieval through data mining, machine learning, and other techniques. MacEachern and Turkel were recently awarded a $2 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to further development of NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, a site designed to assist in the collection and research of historical environmental data.