About the Workshop Leaders
Ryan Horne, University of California, Los Angeles
Ryan Horne is a Research Consultant in the GIS, Visualization, XR & Modeling team at UCLA's Office of Advanced Research Computing. In this role, he collaborates with campus researchers at all levels of their digital scholarship, including conceptualization, implementation, and publication.
Before joining UCLA, Dr. Horne was the Digital Humanities Research Facilitator in the Research Data Services department of the UCSB Library, the Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library Data Coordinator in the Digital Library program at UCLA library, and held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Horne earned his PhD in Ancient History (2015) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill after previously working as a software engineer at Lockheed Martin. He is an expert in leveraging Linked Open Data for digital humanities research, with particular attention on geospatial and network analysis. Dr. Horne is a consultant for the Black Lunchtable oral history archive, serves as a managing editor for the Pleiades project, was an awardee of a NEH/Mellon grant for digital publication, has worked with the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, the Ancient Itineraries Institute, and Pelagios Network, and served as the director of the Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC Chapel Hill.
Becky Seifred, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Becky Seifried is a Geospatial Information Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. In this role, she helps the UMass community learn about GIS and use different geospatial resources in their research and teaching.
Before joining UMass Amherst, Dr. Seifred was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher (2017–2019) at Institute for Mediterranean Studies (FORTH) in Crete and the University of Zagreb as the Principal Investigator for the project “European Frontiers: Rural Spaces and Expanding States” (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016 750843), an archaeological and historical project investigating rural life in Europe during the past five centuries. In 2016–2017, she was the Project Manager at the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where she assisted with the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership to document and assess cultural heritage in Afghanistan.
Dr. Seifred earned her PhD in Anthropology (2016) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and received the university’s “Outstanding Dissertation Award” for her study on the Mani Peninsula in Greece. Her research focuses on the interaction between marginal, rural regions and expanding empires in the Mani peninsula during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, using a combination of archaeological data, archival sources, and remotely-sensed imagery analysis. She is co-director of the CARTography Project (Cataloguing Ancient Routes and Travellers), an archaeological and Digital Humanities research initiative that documents and analyzes the routes that early explorers took to the Mani peninsula in southern Lakonia, Greece.