Who Am I?

Good question. In brief: I am an Early American historian, a database designer, and a photographer. I'm also sleep-deprived, but that probably isn't related . . .

I am the daughter of a computer scientist (Evan Bauer) and a novelist (Joan Bauer), so I grew up in a house full of computers and stories. I was bitten by the history bug at the tender age of eight and am now an advanced doctoral candidate in Early American history at the University of Virginia, studying with Peter S. Onuf and J.C.A. Stagg. I work on the origins and early development of the U.S. Foreign Service.

I am a former Presidential Fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a former Digital Humanities Fellow in the University of Virginia Library's Digital Scholars' Lab. I am currently a NINES Graduate Fellow and will complete my degree by May of 2011.

Since coming to UVA I have become involved in designing and building databases to facilitate historical research and analysis. I am the lead developer of Project Quincy, an open source Ruby on Rails application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space. The flagship (read guinea pig) application for Project Quincy is The Early American Foreign Service Database, which allows me to trace my Early American diplomats, consuls, special agents, and their clerks all over the globe.

I have also transcribed, translated, and decoded letters for The Papers of James Madison, designed a database for The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and served as Design Researcher for Documents Compass, a digital consulting organization for documentary editors and a service provider of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

And the photography? That is harder to discuss because everything else in my life is expressed in words. I recommend looking at my photographs and drawing your own conclusions. I will say, though, that being a photographer has dramatically influenced how I design interfaces. For (a trivial) example, this whole website was designed around the photo "Looking Up" from a show I exhibited in August of 2009 called "Looking at Flowers: A Photographer's Tribute."