I am a graduate student in history at Princeton University and the Visiting Graduate Fellow at the Cultural Observatory at Harvard; beginning in fall 2013, I will be an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University. I live in Somerville, Massachusetts.

My research is in intellectual history: I focus on the ground between the traditional history of concepts, and new methodologies resulting from the massive digitization of texts in the past decade.

My dissertation, Paying Attention, studies the emergence of modern concepts of attention in the early twentieth century United States, focusing on actors in psychology, advertising, and pedagogy.

I write about text mining and digital humanities on my blog Sapping Attention.

I have another, less serious, blog–Prochronisms–that looks at historical changes in language by algorithmically checking historical TV shows and movies.

At the Cultural Observatory, I helped create Bookworm, a tool to interactively create and visualize huge text corpuses.

You can e-mail me at {bmschmidt (at) post -dot- harvard -dot- edu}.