As an undergraduate studying classics, I fell in with a rough crowd at the Perseus Project. I not only learned about markup and morphological analysis but also about the practicalities of programming in a more real way than was taught in CS classes. After several years at Perseus as we worked on generalized tools for humanities digital libraries, I decided that a CS Ph.D. would be the best way forward for the research I wanted to do. I worked on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and machine translation with Jason Eisner and the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins. After grad school, I was a research assistant professor in CS at UMass Amherst, where I've worked on applying NLP to information extraction and retrieval from large OCR'd book collections. This fall, I'm starting as an assistant professor at Northeastern where, with Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Dillon, and David Lazer, I'll be helping to found Centers for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science.