Research software engineer & book historian
I'm a Research Software Engineer at the British Library, where I'm developing IIIF infrastructure as part of the library's recovery from the 2023 cyber-attack. I'm also a lead developer of the Universal Viewer, an open-source IIIF viewer used by cultural heritage institutions around the world.
My research is in computational bibliography: the use of code and data to understand the history of printing and publishing. I'm especially interested in typography, and my forthcoming book is a data-driven study of blackletter, roman, and italic type in sixteenth-century England. Before joining the British Library, I was a Language Engineer at Oxford Languages, working on the Oxford English Dictionary, and before that I built research databases and taught at the universities of Geneva and Oxford. I teach a course on early modern typography at the London Rare Book School every summer.
Universal Viewer. An open-source viewer for IIIF images, audio, and video, used by cultural heritage institutions worldwide.
IIIF Timeline. An interactive timeline for exploring IIIF collections.
Eebography. A font that recreates the visual distortions of Early English Books Online.
To the Reader. A database of 19,140 early modern printed prefaces and other paratexts, built for the University of Geneva.
Typography 1509–1592. A dataset describing the typography of every book on Early English Books Online printed between 1509 and 1592.
Octopus. An app for constructing complex search queries and running them across eight databases at once, built for researchers at the OED.
Q-Gen. A Chrome extension that generates XML citations in the OED’s house style.
Reading Early English Typography, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
With Eetu Mäkelä, Devani Singh, and Mikko Tolonen, ‘Opening the Black Box of EEBO’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 40 (2025).
‘Eebography: A Specimen’, Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, 5 (2025).
‘Typography’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. by Adam Smyth (Oxford University Press, 2023).
‘Kludging Type: Some Workarounds in Early English Print’, in Printing & Misprinting, ed. by Anthony Grafton, Paolo Sachet, and Geri Della Rocca de Candal (Oxford University Press, 2023).
With Devani Singh, ‘Computing Book Parts with EEBO-TCP’, Book History, 27 (2022).
‘For Lack of Letters: Early Typographical Shibboleths of English and Other Foreign Languages’, in Print, Agency, and Regional Identity, ed. by Rachel Stenner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
‘Copland, Robert (Tudor poet)’ and ‘The Pilgrim’s Tale’, in The Chaucer Encyclopedia, ed. by Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Katie Walter (Wiley Blackwell, 2023).
‘Signifying Nothing: Following a Hole through Three Text Technologies’, Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, 2 (2021).
With Louise Mycock, ‘Lone Pronoun Tags in Early Modern English: The Dramas of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson’, English Language and Linguistics (2020).
Review of John Boardley, Typographic Firsts: Adventures in Early Printing, Journal of the Early Book Society, 22 (2019).