Matthew Christy

I’m a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades. In college, at the University of North Texas, I earned a BS in Computer Science with a minor in TechnicalWriting (nowadays they call it a Technical Writing Certificate). I also earned a BA in History at the same time.

After college, I worked as a programmer in the telecommunications field for 9 years through the telecom boom and subsequent bust. I then returned to UNT to earn an MLS in Information Science, and worked as librarian in a Medical Sciences library for 7 years. During my time there I was in charge of the library’swebsite, the staff and public computers, the ILS (Endeavor), maintaining access to our electronic resources, the library’s link resolver and journal finder (SFX), the library’s proxy server (exproxy), the library’s ILL software (Ariel) and hardware, yearly journal renewals, and more stuff that I can’t remember. In the end I was the Head of Cataloging, the Head of Electronic Resources and the Systems Librarian.

These days I’m the programmer at the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media and Culture (IDHMC) at Texas A&M University. It’s the perfect job for me, combining technology, the humanities and librarianship in one job. I love it. As the Lead Software Applications Developer I work with XML/XSLT, HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP, and shell scripting for various project inside and outside of TAMU. I am a technology consultant for various grant projects and proposals. I am working hard on our big OCRing project eMOP, learning to use Tesseract and Gamera to OCR early-modern english works. I am also helping to manage that project which is an even greater learning experience than OCR. I am also involved in grant writing and editing and working with collaborators from outside of the IDHMC, the English Department, the College of Liberal Arts, and the University on grant proposals.