I am an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty in the NuLab for Texts, Maps and Networks.

My research joins the fields of cultural history and digital humanities.
I focus on the ground between the traditional history of concepts, and new methodologies resulting from the massive digitization of texts in the past decade. My dissertation, Paying Attention, studied the emergence of modern concepts of attention in the early twentieth century United States, focusing on actors in psychology, advertising, and pedagogy.
At Northeastern, I’ve taught classes on digital history and the history of “big data.”

I write about text mining and digital humanities on my blog Sapping Attention. I have another, less serious, blog–Prochronisms–that looks at historical changes in language by algorithmically checking historical TV shows and movies.

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts.

You can e-mail me at {b.schmidt (at) neu -dot- edu}. I have other web presences at Twitter, Github, and Northeastern.