Benjamin Charles Germain Lee


Publications			Benjamin Charles Germain Lee	CV
Essays				Talks
Contact				Honors
			Newspaper Navigator

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington's Information School, where I started the Lab for Computing Cultural Heritage. I am also an associate faculty member in the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering and a Data Science Affiliate of the eScience Institute. Before starting in the iSchool, I was a Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress. I completed my Ph.D. in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, which was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in machine learning. Previously, I was a 2020 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. You can read more about my project, Newspaper Navigator, here. You can read more about my recent work on my publications page. For example, I'm currently working on a project called GovScape, which supports multimodal search for over 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million PDF pages).

I am a general editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly, a member of the Digital Public Library of America’s Cultural Heritage Steering Committee, an advisory board member of the Research Society of American Periodicals, an editorial board member of the Nineteenth-century Data Collective and Cultural Analytics, a founding affiliate of the University of Washington’s Center for Advancing Libraries, Museums, and Archives, and a member of the Research & Engineering Advisory Council of the Harvard Institutional Data Initiative. I am also a co-editor of the forthcoming "Debates in DH" volume Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, Labor.

I also write essays, which have appeared in Longreads, The New Republic, WIRED, Current Affairs, Jacobin, Gawker, Real Life, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Protean Magazine, and GoldFlakePaint; a new essay is also forthcoming in the Bennington Review. I'm perhaps best known for my essay in The New Republic about being the first member of the public to watch Jerry Lewis's footage of The Day the Clown Cried. My recent essay on the rise of betting for Current Affairs was named a Curators' Pick for Best in Journalism by The Syllabus. It was also translated into Italian and featured as the cover story of Internazionale (18/24 aprile 2025, Numero 1610).

I maintain a semi-regular newsletter to share my writing as it is published.

Before beginning my Ph.D., I was the inaugural Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard's History Department. I graduated from Harvard College in 2017 with a double major in Astrophysics & Mathematics and a minor in Physics.

This website design is inspired by Space Jam's Website, which has remained untouched since 1996. The tiled background is a 100x100 pixel cutout of a Sloan Digital Sky Survey r-band image of the Globular Cluster M2 (SDSS run 2583, field 136, camcol 2). I studied this patch of sky for my undergraduate thesis with Professor Douglas Finkbeiner and Stephen Portillo.

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