My name is Stewart Varner and I am the Managing Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvaia.
I got my start in digital scholarship as a graduate student in Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. In the summer of 2003, I took a job in the Beck Center working on the Emory Women Writers Resource Project (EWWRP). I started out scanning books and eventually found myself encoding the texts with TEI tags. After taking a couple of years off to finish course work and start my dissertation, I received a Woodruff Fellowship to return to the Beck Center. I had such a good time that I decided to go to library school (while wrapping up my dissertation) and to pursue a career in libraries.
In May of 2010 I graduated from Emory with a Ph.D. in American Studies. Later that summer, I graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in Library and Information Science. I worked as the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Emory from 2010 until early 2014. I also worked at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill as the Digital Scholarship Librarian from February 2014 until September 2016.
