Position

Adjunct Professor

Academics

• Assistant Director, McGill Centre for Digital Humanities, Lecturer in History & Religious Studies, McGill University (2014-16)
• Digital Humanities Coordinator, Instructor & Research Associate in History & Religious Studies, McGill University (2010-14)
• Postdoctoral Fellow: Making Publics Project (SSHRC MCRI), McGill University (2008-10)
• Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies (LMS): Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
• PhD: University of Warwick
• MA: University of Guelph
• BA (Joint Hons.): University of New Brunswick

Contact

Department of History
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, NL A1C 5S7
Email: mmilner@mun.ca
Website: https://www.matthewmilner.name
Twitter: @milner_matt

Research Interests

Late Medieval & Reformation England; History of the Senses, Religion, Magic, Natural Philosophy; Digital History; Open Data; Modeling Historical Data; Events; Chronometry; Digital Historical Method

Current Research

Nanohistory

Nanohistory.Org is a prototype platform for historical research that permits the documentation of and networking between the most minute historical actions. It envisages a digital history focused on discursive networks of historical data, and a view of historical phenomena as overlapping conflictual interweaving (and competing) narrative pathways through myriad of sources. In many ways a digital ethnographical method, the transformation of historical data into history-as-data is aimed at teasing out issues currently at the fore of digital historical research: modeling historical phenomena for computation, chronometry or the measurement and representation of time, discourse vs content analysis of historical evidence, granularity in the age of Big Data, and empowerment of historical scholars in the face of algorithms, automation, machine-learning, and data provenance.

For more information, see https://www.nanohistory.org/about

For examples, see https://www.nanohistory.org/about/examples

To see a representation of the Nanohistory Ontology see https://sandbox.matthewmilner.name/tools/vowl/#nanohistory

Digital History / Humanities

I am happy to discuss digital history & digital humanities interests with faculty & students, in any discipline, or on matters related to cyber-infrastructures (from CFI to content management systems), project development, grant consulting, and historical data practices.

Teaching

My appointment does not involve teaching duties, nor does it permit me to supervise graduate students directly. I am, however, able to sit on graduate committees on subjects related to my research areas, and can act as an informal resource for students interested in digital historical methods in their research.

Selected Publications

Monographs & Edited Volumes

Torrance Kirby & Matthew Milner (eds), The Cultural Mediation of Religion in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2011)

Essays, Chapters & Articles

Matthew Milner, Stephen Wittek, Stefan Sinclair ‘Introducing DREaM (Distant Reading Early Modernity)’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 11:4 (2017). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/4/000313/000313.html

Eun G. Park, Qing Zou, Matthew Milner, ‘Making Publics 2.0: Linking Humanities Data through a Topical Repository’, Proceedings of the 76th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Beyond the Cloud: Rethinking Information Boundaries 2013 (American Society for Information Science), 50:1 (2014): 1-3.

Matthew Milner, ‘The Senses in Religion: Towards the Reformation of the Senses’, in A Cultural History of the Senses: the Renaissance, eds Constance Classen and Herman Roodenburg (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Matthew Milner, ‘The Physics of Holy Oats: Vernacular Knowledge, Qualities, and Remedy in Fifteenth-Century England’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43:2 (2013): 219-245.

Matthew Milner, ‘To Captivate the Senses: Sensory Governance in Heresy and Idolatry in Mid-Tudor England’ in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, eds. Wietse de Boer, Christine Goettler, Herman Roodenburg (Leuven: Brill, 2012).

Datasets, Tools, & Vocabularies

Nanohistory Ontology http://purl.org/nanohistory/ns (2018)

‘EEBO TCP Phase 1 DREaM Metadata Headers’, Nov. 16, 2015 (Revised 6 May 2016), Distant Reading Early Modernity (http://dream.voyant-tools.org/dream/?corpus=dream), https://s3.amazonaws.com/mmilnerpublic/eebo_tcp-phase1_DREaM-metadataheaders.zip

Nanohistory.Org https://www.nanohistory.org (2014- present)

Storea http://digihum.mcgill.ca/storea (2013- present)

Creative Outputs

Wanley Partbooks Men’s Pieces – recording music for men’s voices from late 1540s Protestant England, 4 August 2014 – http://www.oneequallmusick.org/listen .