Catherine Nicole Coleman

Nicole is Digital Research Architect for the Stanford University Libraries and Research Director for Humanities+Design, a research lab at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Nicole works at the intersection of the digital library and digital scholarship as a lead architect in the design and development of practical research services. She is currently leading an initiative within the Library to identify and enact applications of artificial intelligence —machine perception, machine learning, machine reasoning, and language recognition— to make the collections of maps, photographs, manuscripts, data sets and other assets more easily discoverable, accessible, and analyzable.

At Humanities + Design she has led the design and development of numerous tools for data visualization and analysis including Palladio, Breve, and, most recently, Data Pen. The lab encourages and supports collaboration between researchers from the humanities and design to encode interpretive method in tools for data analysis. Lessons learned in that work have proven essential to designing human-centered applications of machine intelligence in support of research.