Curriculum Vitae

Matthew J. Lavin

Work Address: 411 Burton D. Morgan Center, Denison University, 100 West College Street, Granville, Ohio 43023
Website: https://matthew-lavin.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3867-9138
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ilpx_SgAAAAJ&hl=en
E-mail: lavinm [at] denison.edu

Education

Ph.D., The University of Iowa, English, 2012.
Master of Science, Utah State University, English and American Studies, 2006
Bachelor of Arts, St. Lawrence University, Cum Laude, Honors in Philosophy and English, 2002

Dissertation

“Collaborative Momentum: The Author and the Middle Man in U.S. Literature and Culture, 1890-1940.” June 2012"

Positions Held

• Assistant Professor of Humanities Analytics, Data Analytics Program, Denison University, Fall 2020-present
• Clinical Assistant Professor of English and Director of Digital Media Lab, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2015-Spring 2020
• Associate Program Coordinator, Mellon Humanities Grant, “Crossing Boundaries: Re-envisioning the Humanities for the 21st Century,” St. Lawrence University, August 2013-Summer 2015
• Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Fall 2012-Summer 2013
• Frederick F. Seely Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for Teaching and Research, English Department, The University of Iowa, Fall 2011-Spring 2012
• Graduate Instructor, General Education Literature Program. The University of Iowa, Fall 2009-Spring 2012
• Graduate Instructor, Department of Rhetoric, The University of Iowa, Fall 2007-Spring 2009
• Grader and Research Assistant, The University of Iowa, Fall-Spring 2007

Publications

• (In Press) “Patterns and Outliers among People, Dates, and Places in Cather’s Correspondence” Cather Studies 15. Submitted to Press, January 2025. 
• (In Press) Review of Janis P. Stout, Willa Cather among the Moderns (University of Alabama Press, 2019), Great Plains Quarterly. Invited submission, accepted for publication in June 2020.
• (In Press) “Critical Reception at the Network Level: Willa Cather and The New York Times Book Review” Cather Studies 16. Resubmitted April 2025. 
• “Modeling ‘Worth by Association’ in U.S. Book Reviews, 1905-1925” DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. April 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaf012
• “Modular Bibliographical Profiling of Historic Book Reviews.” Journal of Open Humanities Data, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.183
• “Linear Regression in Python.” The Programming Historian. Summer 2022, https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/linear-regression
• “Logistic Regression in Python.” The Programming Historian. Summer 2022, https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/logistic-regression
• “Why Digital Humanists Should Emphasize Situated Data over Capta” Digital Humanities Quarterly 15.2 (Fall 2021): http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/2/000556/000556.html
• “Digits: Two Reports on New Units of Scholarly Publication” The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP). Co-authored by Matt Burton, Matthew J. Lavin, Jessica Otis, and Scott Weingart (author order alphabetical). Winter 2019, http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0022.105
• “Gender Dynamics and Critical Reception: A Study of Early 20th-century Book Reviews from The New York Times” CA: the Journal of Cultural Analytics. January 2020, https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11831-gender-dynamics-and-critical-reception-a-study-of-early-20th-century-book-reviews-from-the-new-york-times
• “Logistic Regression.” The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook. 2019, https://cmu-lib.github.io/dhlg/
• “Analyzing Documents with TF-IDF.” The Programming Historian. May 2019, https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/analyzing-documents-with-tfidf or https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0082
• Review of Cather Studies 11: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux and Something Complete and Great: The Centennial Study of My Ántonia. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 36.1, Summer 2019
• “Reciprocity and the ‘Real’ Author: Willa Cather as S.S. McClure’s Ghostwriter.” Auto|Biography Studies. Spring 2016
• “Stylometry and Collaborative Authorship: Eddy, Lovecraft, and ‘The Loved Dead’.” Journal of Digital Scholarship. Co-authored by Alexander Gladwin, Matthew Lavin, and Daniel Look. Summer 2015
• “Data Curators at Work: Focus on Projects and Experiences.” Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Co-authored by Inna Kouper and Katherine Akers. October-November 2013
• “Material Memory: Willa Cather, ‘My First Novels [There Were Two],’ and The Colophon: A Book Collector's Quarterly.” Studies in the Novel, Special Issue on Willa Cather and the History of the Book. Fall 2013
• “Living up to the Part of Authorial Celebrity.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review. Spring 2013
• “Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Frontier Masculinity and Boston Manliness in The Rise of Silas Lapham.” Western American Literature. 45.4 (Winter 2011): 364-382
• “It’s Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It: Profit and Prestige Shared by Cather and Her Literary Agent.” Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. 158-181
• Review of Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class by Stephanie C. Palmer. Western American Literature. 45.2. Summer 2010
• Review of The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather, by Lionel Rolfe and Surviving the Crossing: (Im)Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen by Jessica G. Rabin.” Western American Literature. 42.1. Spring 2007
• “Intellectual Warfare in Collier’s Magazine: Art versus Advertising in Willa Cather’s Serialized Novel The Professor’s House.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review. Fall 2005

Competitive Research Fellowships

• 2018: “From Collection Records to Data Layers: A Critical Experiment in Collaborative Practice.” 18-month “Collections as Data” implementation grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Disciplinary Expert and Co-PI with Aaron Brenner and Tyrica Terry Kapral.
• 2017: "Digits: a Platform to Facilitate the Production of Digital Scholarship." 18-month Grant ($60,000) from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Primary Investigator with Matt Burton (Pitt), Jessica Otis (CMU), and Scott Weingart (CMU)
• 2016: "Computational Approaches to Textual Networks," Special Initiatives for the Humanities, University of Pittsburgh, 2016
• 2014: St. Lawrence University Dean’s Faculty Development and Research Grant. This competitive award provided funding for a two-week residency to conduct archival research at the New York Public Library
• 2012: Woodress Visiting Scholar Award, The Cather Project, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This competitive fellowship will provide funding for a one-month residency to conduct archival research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• 2011: Frederick P. W. McDowell Scholarship. This competitive scholarship provided funds for my Fall 2011 research trip to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for research on my dissertation’s fourth chapter, “Irresistible Anthologies”
• 2011: Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Travel Scholarship, July 2009. Received funds to attend the 13th International Cather Seminar, Northampton, Mass. Also received award for International Cather Seminars held in 2005, 2007, and 2009
• 2010: Everett Helm Fellowship, The Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington. This competitive fellowship provided financial support for a one-month residency in Bloomington, Indiana to conduct archival research on S.S. McClure for my dissertation’s second chapter, “‘I suppose that you owe something to Miss Cather’: Reciprocity and the Ghost-Writing of S.S. McClure’s My Autobiography
• 2009: Research Grant, Graduate College, The University of Iowa, June 2009. Competitive funds to conduct research at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for my dissertation’s third chapter, “Discovery of the Month: D’Arcy McNickle, Literary Agents, and the Apparatus of Literary Debut
• 2005: Charles Redd Center Award. This competitive fellowship provided funds to conduct archival research at the Brigham Young University Library for the first chapter of my master’s thesis, “Western Roots, Eastern Audience: Marketing and Resisting the Exotic in Zitkala-Ša’s Serial Autobiography

Courses Taught: Denison University

• AC 101: Advising Circle. Spring 2022
• DA 101: Introduction to Data Analytics. Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2025
• DA 200: Data Analytics Colloquium. Spring 2022, Fall 2024
• DA 210: Data Systems. (Cross-listed Computer Science 181) Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
• DA 245: Introduction to Cultural Analytics. Spring 2022
• DA 283: Leveraging Databases for Data Analytics. Spring 2026
• DA 301: Practicum in Data Analytics. Fall 2020, Spring 2022
• DA 350: Advanced Methods in Data Analytics. Fall 2022
• DA 351: Advanced Descriptive Methods in Data Analytics. Spring 2024, Spring 2025, Spring 2026
• DA 401: Seminar in Data Analytics. Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Fall 2024, Fall 2025

Courses Taught: 2007-2020

• Composing Digital Media. University of Pittsburgh, English Department. Fall 2015, Spring 2018, Spring 2020
• Written Professional Communication. University of Pittsburgh, English Department. Fall 2019
• Advanced Composing Digital Media. University of Pittsburgh, English Department. Spring 2017, Spring 2019 (aka Projects in Digital Composition)
• Graduate Seminar: Digital Humanities Approaches to Textual Objects. University of Pittsburgh, English Department, Fall 2018
• Making the Book. University of Pittsburgh, English Department. Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018
• Graduate Seminar: Digital Pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh, English Department. Fall 2016
• Narrative and Technology. University of Pittsburgh, English Department, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017
• Digital Humanities Meet Literary London. St. Lawrence University, Performance and Communication Arts (cross-listed in English), Spring 2015
• Media and International Politics. St. Lawrence University, First Year Program Course, Fall 2014
• This is Your Brain on Facebook: Knowing in the Digital Age. St. Lawrence University, First Year Program Seminar, Spring 2014
• Novelty and Rebirth in American Literature and Culture, 1898-1936. University of Iowa, English Department, Spring 2012
• Interpretation of Literature. Theme: Crime and Place. University of Iowa, English Department, Spring 2012
• American Lives. Theme: Place and Identity in American Literature, 1890 to present. University of Iowa, English Department, Spring 2011
• Literatures of Native American Peoples. Focus: Native American novels, short stories, and poetry, 1900 to present. University of Iowa, English Department, Fall 2011
• American Lives. Theme: The Body and Technology in American Literature, 1840 to 1936. University of Iowa, English Department, Fall 2011
• Interpretation of Literature. University of Iowa, English Department, Fall 2009, Spring 2010
• Introduction to Rhetoric. Introduction to reading, writing, and speaking. University of Iowa, Rhetoric Department, Fall 2007-Spring 2009. Six sections in total

Other Awards

• 2012: University of Virginia Rare Book School. Awarded competitive departmental funds to participate in “Teaching the History of the Book,” taught by Michael Suarez, S.J.
• 2011: Frederick F. Seely Fellowship, Competitive Dissertation Year Fellowship, The University of Iowa. This fellowship provides a funded research semester and gives doctoral candidate the opportunity to teach an undergraduate class for English majors in the spring, Fall 2011-Spring 2012
• 2011: Best Graduate Student Essay Prize, The University of Iowa English Department. This prize named “Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Frontier Masculinity and Boston Manliness in The Rise of Silas Lapham” the year’s best graduate student paper published or forthcoming for publication
• 2010: Summer Fellowship, Graduate College, The University of Iowa. Competitive funds for dissertation writing and research
• 2009: Post-Comprehensive Exam Course Release Fellowship, Fall 2009. Departmental funds awarded to outstanding students for completion of comprehensive exams
• 2009: Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Seminar, “Story in Theory,” led by James O. Freedman Professor of Letters Garrett Stewart
• 2008: J. Golden Taylor Award, Best Graduate Student Essay, Western Literature Association Annual Meeting, Fall 2008. For “Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Moral Manliness, Masculine Strength, and the American West in The Rise of Silas Lapham”

Selected Conferences and Invited Talks

• Panel Organizer: “Cultural Analytics and the Book Review: Models, Methods, and Corpora.” Paper Presentation: “Modeling Bibliographical Information in Historic Book Reviews: Large Scale Applications with Proquest’s American Periodicals Series.” DH2020, Online Conference, July 22-24, 2020
• "Introduction to Web-Scraping and Web-Crawling," Invited workshop, Digital Scholarship Services, University of Pittsburgh. October 4, 2019
• “New Horizons in Network Analysis: Machine Learning for Classification and Clustering,” Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), Pittsburgh, PA, July 23-26, 2019
• “Getting Started with Machine Learning: Logistic Regression in Digital Humanities,” Invited Instructor, Digital Humanities Literacy Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, May 2019
• “Web-scraping and Web-crawling with Python,” Invited workshop, Digital Scholarship Services, University of Pittsburgh. April 5, 2019
• “Large Scale Analysis of Historic Book Reviews: A Pilot Study of The New York Times and Early 20th-century Reading,” Society for the History of Authorship, Reception, and Print/Publishing (SHARP), Sydney, AU, July 10-12, 2018
• “Research Design for Large Scale Text Analysis,” Invited workshop, Carnegie Mellon University. May 2018
• “Designing Research in the Digital Humanities,” Invited talk, co-presented with Scott Weingart. University of Pennsylvania. April 5, 2018
• “Research Design for Large Scale Text Analysis,” Invited workshop, Digital Scholarship Services, University of Pittsburgh. March 30, 2018
• “Large Scale Computational Methods for the Printed Book Review: A ‘Data Lifecycle’ Approach,” Book History and Digital Humanities, Madison, WI. Fall 2017
• “Digital Humanities and Literary Studies,” Invited talk and workshop for DH Literacy Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University. May 2017
• “Computational Methods in Authorship Studies: Willa Cather as a Case Study,” digital humanities talk and workshop, Duquesne University. February 22, 2017
• “Digital Humanities Approaches to Text Analysis,” Invited talk and workshop, Digital Scholarship Services, University of Pittsburgh. January 27, 2017
• “Continuity and Discontinuity in Gothic and Horror,” How to Do Things with Millions of Words, Vancouver, BC. November 2-4, 2016
• “Using Jupyter Notebooks to Build Code Literacy and Introduce Digital Humanities,” digital humanities workshop, Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, October 28-30, 2016
• “Digital Humanities and Literary Studies,” Invited talk and workshop for DH Literacy Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University. Summer 2016
• “Teaching and Doing Digital Humanities with Jupyter Notebooks,” PyGotham, New York, NY, July 28-31 2016
• “When Literature Refuses to Act its Age: Large-Scale Stylochronometry among the Weird Genres,” Keystone DH, Pittsburgh, PA, June 22-24, 2016
• Roundtable, “Book History and Digital Humanities,” Sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reception, and Publishing. Modern Language Association, Chicago, IL. January 2014
• “Digital Biographies of Books: Death Comes for the Archbishop as a Case Study.” Invited talk. University of Iowa Digital Studio for Public Arts and Humanities, Fall 2013 Studio Talks Series, December 5, 2013
• “Representing Materiality in a Digital Archive: Death Comes for the Archbishop as a Case Study,” DH2013, Lincoln, NE. Summer 2013
• “Mediating Power in American Editions of Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” Printing Science, Sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reception, and Publishing. Modern Language Association, Boston, MA. January 3-6, 2012
• “Material Memory: Willa Cather, ‘My First Novels [There Were Two],’ and The Colophon: A Book Collector's Quarterly.” Western Literature Association Annual Meeting, Lubbock, TX. November 7-10, 2012
• “From Pulp to Paperback.” The Past, Present, and Future of the Book, ACM Conference at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA. February 3-4, 2012
• “Institutional Defeat and Symbolic Defiance in Cather, London, and McNickle.” Western Literature Association Annual Meeting, Missoula, MT. October 5-8, 2011
• “Character, Personality and the Entrepreneur: William Dean Howells’s Fulkerson and Willa Cather’s Tom Outland.” The 13th International Cather Seminar, sponsored by The University of Nebraska-Lincoln & the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation. Northampton, MA. June 20-25, 2011
• “A Confluence of National and Literary Interests: Willa Cather, McClure's Magazine, and The Autobiography of S. S. McClure.” Research Society for American Periodicals, American Literature Association Annual Conference, May 26-29, 2011
• “Cather and the Dream of Embedded Exchange.” Western Literature Association Annual Meeting, Prescott, AZ. October 20-23, 2010
• “The Suicidal Signifier in Cather’s My Ántonia.” Western Literature Association Annual Meeting, Spearfish, SD. September 30-October 3, 2009
• “It’s Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It: Cather and Her Literary Agent in the Modern Magazine Marketplace.” The 12th International Cather Seminar, sponsored by The University of Nebraska-Lincoln & the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation. Chicago, June 24-28, 2009
• “‘It had largely put itself together’: Autonomy, Accountability, and the Intermediary in A Hazard of New Fortunes.” M/MLA Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN. November 13-15, 2008
• “Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Moral Manliness, Masculine Strength, and the American West in The Rise of Silas Lapham.” Western Literature Association Annual Meeting, Boulder, CO. October 15-18, 2008

• Natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning
  • NLP: authorship attribution; genre analysis; publication date prediction; named entity recognition; part-of-speech tagging; stemming and lemmatization; sentiment tagging and analysis; collocations analysis
  • Computer vision and automation: tesseract OCR with Celery for task distribution; web scraping; extensive work with various APIs including Twitter, HathiTrust, Github, hypothes.is, Google Maps, New York Times, Worldcat, VIAF data service
  • Machine learning: Scikit Learn for cosine similarity, feature extraction, topic modeling, regression, and clustering; exposure to deep learning modules like keras and tensorflow; limited experience with R

• Web development
  • CMS: Drupal 7, Drupal 8, and Wordpress
  • Standalone web applications and static sites: Flask, Github pages, Jekyll, and Lektor
  • Web dev languages: css, javascript, jquery, php, and python
  • Design applications: Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat Professional, Gimp, Audacity, and Sketchup
  • Web-based data visualization: Gephi, matplotlib, ggplot, Bokeh, timelinejs, and Tableau
  • Database design: mysql, psql, sqlite, and some work with rabbitmq, redis, and mongdb (with SQLalchemy)
  • Workflows and providers: git and Github, Docker, ssh, AWS, and Digital Ocean

• Geospatial data
  • Visualizations: D3, Leaflet, Mapbox, StoryMapJS, Tableau
  • Analysis: geopy and some work with Google Earth, QGIS, ArcGIS, and CartoDB
  • Co-directed Winter Institute and May College workshop, “Geospatial Technologies,” St. Lawrence University, January 2014 and May 2014

Service

• Faculty Senate Computing and Information Technology Committee, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2018-Spring 2020
• Pedagogy Committee, English Department, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2018-Spring 2020
• Project Team, Digital Lead for online course materials repository in partnership with the English Department's Pedagogy Committee, Fall Spring 2016-Spring 2020
• Project Team, Digital Lead for Secret Pittsburgh Project, Fall Spring 2015-Spring 2020
• Graduate Student Placement Committee, English Department, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2017-Spring 2018
• Digital Humanities Research Network (DHRX), University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2015-Spring 2020
• Chair, Digital Humanities Committee, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2015-Spring 2017
• Scholarships, Grants, and Fellowships Committee, St. Lawrence University, Fall 2013-Spring 2015
• Faculty Development Committee, St. Lawrence University, Spring 2014-Spring 2015
• Assistant Editor, Western Literature Association Online Syllabus Exchange, 2010-2017
• Critical Literacies Committee, St. Lawrence University, Fall 2013-Spring 2014
• Peer Reviewer, Scholarly Editing, Fall 2015-present; Authorship, 2013-2018; Cather Studies, 2011-present; Western American Literature, 2006-present; Twentieth-Century Literature, 2005-2012
• Website Editor, Research Society for American Periodicals and American Periodicals Scholarly Journal, Spring 2011-Spring 2014
• Graduate Student Representative, Executive Council, Western Literature Association, 2010-2012
• Permanent Section Chair, Bibliography and Textual Studies, Midwest Modern Language Association, 2010-2012

Graduate and Undergraduate Mentorship

• Graduate Mentor for the Digital Media Learning Coordinator. University of Pittsburgh, English Department, Fall 2015-Spring 2020
• Graduate Student consultations on digital research methods and pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh, English Department, Fall 2015-Spring 2020
• Faculty Mentor, Archival Scholars Research Award. University of Pittsburgh, Office of Undergraduate Research, Spring 2018
• Dissertation Committee Member for Sam Hamilton, “(Re)Presentations of Self-Culture, or What it Means and Takes to be a Digital Learner.” University of Pittsburgh, English Department, Spring 2017
• Faculty Mentor, First Experiences in Research. University of Pittsburgh, Office of Undergraduate Research, Spring 2017