Matthew Johannes Kollmer

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Just for fun, a choropleth map made in Plotly with data from my MA thesis

I’m a digital humanist and information scientist with a background in U.S. literary history and creative writing. I’m currently a PhD student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana – Champaign. My research is guided by my background in the humanities but applies novel methods drawn from natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, AI, and cultural analytics. I apply these methods to answer questions about U.S. literary history, texts, and culture. I’m particularly interested in literary representations of place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–in how these representations function in the larger assemblages of our understanding of place. Yet as a technology enthusiast, I also spend equal measure of time studying the computational underpinnings of many research approaches in the digital humanities, trying always to find new applications of digital tools and methods in my work. By necessity (and genuine interest), I also study print history, bibliography, print technology, and digitization, because these subjects largely define the data I use in research.

I’ve also been an undergraduate writing instructor for a decade. My teaching career began as an MFA student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Upon graduation, I continued to teach in the English Department as an adjunct faculty member. In 2021, I left to continue my graduate education in the English Department at Washington State University where I taught as a teaching assistant and instructor of record. Then in 2022, I joined the iSchool at the University of Illinois, Urbana – Champaign, where I taught IS312: Reading & Writing Data–an advanced composition course that encourages students to explore programming languages, digital platforms, and large language models through their writing processes. I taught this class as a teaching assistant and instructor of record, and I assisted in developing its curriculum.

Since 2017, I’ve also had a parallel career in the rare book trade. I started as a rare bookseller and rare book specialist at Bauman Rare Books in Las Vegas. More recently, however, I’ve started my own company, alongside my partner, Kristina Intinarelli. We own and operate Evening Land Books. We primarily handle modern first editions and general high-spots from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We launched our bookshop with the express purpose of making book collecting an exciting and accessible pastime for everyone. We are members of the Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association (MWABA) and the International Online Booksellers Association (IOBA). We operate online for the most part, but occasionally attend pop-ups and book fairs.