This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Ian is based in the English department at Brown University and is joining the lab as a Digital Scholarship Fellow. He is in the final stages of writing his dissertation about the Oulipo, a collective of poets and mathematicians who used programmatic constraints to generate new literary forms.
In addition to his dissertation, Ian is also developing Shelflife, an app for scholarly note-taking. It allows users to organize PDFs using metadata, to annotate them with highlights and notes, and to search these annotations as well as full-text PDFs.
Ian learned about the lab through his involvement in the digital humanities and new media communities. When he found himself living in Victoria, he had a chat with Ray about joining us. He finds the large monitors in the lab helpful for editing his writing and enjoys being part of the lab community.
Ian’s essential tools include writing app Ulysses and one he developed called Gnome. His dissertation is written in Markdown, and Gnome transforms the Markdown text into a formatted document. When he’s not developing apps or writing, Ian takes improv classes at Paper Street Theatre, produces electronic music, and enjoys cooking with his sous vide machine.