Daniel J. Evans
Daniel Evans is an information scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the largest museum complex in the world. He received his PhD in Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he was part of the HathiTrust Research Center and a Diana Korzenik Virtual Research Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. His research is focused on the impacts of data reuse on cultural heritage collections at scale.
His dissertation, The Layered Incompleteness of Historical Data: The Construction of the Bibliographic Record, 1869–1925, examines how commercially produced newspaper directories shaped the historical record of the American press. He developed a layered incompleteness framework to model how gaps in historical datasets are produced through commercial selection, institutional preservation, and digital remediation. Using multimodal entity extraction, he constructed a dataset of approximately 300,000 unique newspaper titles from the directories of George P. Rowell & Co. and N.W. Ayer & Son.
Before returning to graduate school, he held various technical positions at EBSCO Information Services, Carnegie Mellon University, JSTOR Labs, and 3M.
During this time, he worked on and produced a number of digital archive projects from the American Antiquarian Society, New York Historical, Arté Publico Press, the John Carter Brown Library, the H.W. Wilson Company, among others.
He also helped produce a number of born digital projects such as the Viral Texts Cluster Search, Marxdown, the Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Print and Probability, and Juncture.
In his free time, he enjoys bicycle touring, woodworking, and tinkering on his C&P Pilot Press.
If you are interested in collaborating on research, teaching, or digital projects, please reach out at djevans4 __at__ illinois dot edu