Welcome Matt Hunter!

Over the summer, Research Data & Digital Scholarship had the opportunity to hire for a new position--Head of Digital Scholarship. This role will provide guidance for the libraries’ digital scholarship initiatives, including those related to digital projects, digital humanities, and public digital scholarship. Matthew Hunter joined us in this position on January 1, 2025, and has been busy learning all about Penn, the Libraries, and our team. We asked Matt to respond to a few questions so that our patrons could get to know him better. Feel free to reach out to Matt or other members of RDDS!

What will be your primary focus in your new role? 

As Head of Digital Scholarship within the libraries, I’m hoping to foster a space (physically and intellectually) where scholars from across the Penn community can come together to share knowledge and expertise about using digital tools in their research and publications. I see myself as being most useful when I can coordinate and advocate for shared resources to help Penn scholars at all levels take the best advantage of modern and emerging research tools. Because of my background, I’ve had the most experience helping arts, humanities, and social science disciplines do this, but I am excited to broaden this focus and bring that experience to a larger audience. 

Can you share a bit about your previous experience before joining our library? Tell us about your academic background and interests.

Before entering libraries, I trained as a historian and Classicist, dabbling in both archaeology and philology. Fortunately, this was a great setup for a shift to digital scholarship since, as a discipline, Classics has always been broadly interdisciplinary and has generally welcomed experimentation with digital tools with open arms. The first time I really remember being exposed to a digital scholarship project was a desktop tool called Diogenes used to search Greek and Latin word occurrences through a massive corpus of compiled resources spanning multiple textual databases. Though I never really used the tool extensively, the amount and type of underlying data considerations were eye-opening to me; that was probably the first time that I really realized that my hobbyist passion for computer tinkering and academic interests maybe could be merged productively. Since then, I’ve tried to immerse myself in textual-analysis digital humanities methods (which I continue to explore in an ongoing PhD in Medieval English agricultural history and foodways), but I have found my professional work drawn more towards the abilities for 3D replication of heritage materials, stemming from my interest in archaeology. I’ve spent several years thinking about how modern scholarship, digital heritage, libraries, the academy writ-large, and the current multimedia landscape can productively engage, and am interested in exploring questions about academy-owned infrastructure’s readiness for nontraditional work like scholarly video games. 

What are you most excited about in your new role? 

I’m most excited to engage with the world-class scholarly community at Penn and meaningfully contribute to the work researchers are doing here. The amazing collections just within the libraries themselves provide an awesome opportunity to explore techniques for investigation, analysis, and sharing. That being said, I have so much to learn from the community here! I’m very much looking forward to really immersing myself in the work that’s being done at Penn and learning from such an incredible community of practice. 

What have you been surprised by at Penn or Philadelphia?

 Firstly, I’ve also been so thankful for the warm welcome everyone has given me here so far. Everyone I meet is so kind, and I sincerely appreciate the wonderful recommendations for restaurants and great coffee shops in the area. The thing I’ve been most surprised about, though, is just how proud people are to be Philadelphians! This goes beyond just hometown sports team support (Go Birds!), but is evident even in how excited folks are to tell me about their neighborhoods, Philly city traditions, and little bits of local wisdom. 

What do you enjoy doing in your free time? 

I’ve recently been trying to catch up on a backlog of speculative fiction I’ve had in my “to-read” list for years. I recently finished N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and I’m just about done with Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. I’m many years behind, but I’ve been trying to get through the Hugo Award winners that catch my eye - it’s slow going! Otherwise, I really enjoy exploring and finding new coffee shops, and I’m always on the hunt for my next great shot of espresso!