Daniel J. Evans
Daniel Evans is an information scientist and PhD candidate (expected June 2026) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I'm part of the HathiTrust Research Center at UIUC and a Diana Korzenik Virtual Research Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. My research is focused on the impacts of data reuse on cultural heritage collections at scale.
My 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. I develop 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, I 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, I held various technical positions at EBSCO Information Services, Carnegie Mellon University, JSTOR Labs, and 3M.
During this time, I 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.
I 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 my free time, I enjoy bicycle touring, woodworking, and tinkering on my C&P Pilot Press.
If you are interested in collaborating on research, teaching, or digital projects, please email me at djevans4 __at__ illinois.edu