Mesoamerican Short Title Catalog
Collaboration with Princeton to develop a centralized repository aggregating Mesoamerican manuscripts, building international scholarly partnerships.
Library & Information Studies · Digital Humanities · Archival Research
Kurt Lemai-Nguyen is a PhD student at UT Austin's iSchool studying how library digital infrastructure mediates our relationship with material culture. Working closely with librarians, archivists, software developers, and digital humanists, he aims to build a more reflective digital practice that honors the agency of things while encouraging free access to our collective cultural heritage.
With experience in institutional cataloguing, humanities software development (HTR models, dataset management, visualization), and archival research, he is available to work on research projects spanning the humanities.
Locating, describing, and organizing manuscript and archival materials.
For scholars, grant applications, or digital humanities projects.
OCLC and holdings records, accession data, collection description.
Scripts, data visualization, and tools for research infrastructure — digitization workflows, catalog scraping, network and relational visualization.
Compiling, cleaning, and structuring research datasets.
Collaboration with Princeton to develop a centralized repository aggregating Mesoamerican manuscripts, building international scholarly partnerships.
Cleaned and compiled transcription and image data of Colonial Society of Massachusetts church records; trained a Transkribus handwritten text recognition model on an 18th-century pastor's writings, applied to Princeton's 1680 Broadside. Presented at the Machine Learning and the Future of Philology Symposium.
Produced an interactive Plotly network graph visualizing rhyme relationships in Wang Bi's corpus for a paper submitted to the Journal of the American Oriental Society by Qiran Jin.
Relabeled 1,391 folders across 35 boxes of the Scribner's Archive manuscript letters, enhancing cataloging records to improve researcher accessibility.
Produced a bibliography of Marquis de Lafayette-related items in Princeton's Special Collections; collaborated with the American Friends of Lafayette on a digital exhibition for the Bicentennial Anniversary of Lafayette's U.S. tour.
Developed a TimelineJS timeline of cultural events from 1929, contributing to discussions on Special Collections materials entering the public domain.
Available for archival research, literature reviews, cataloging and metadata work, and humanities software development. Reach out at lemai.kurt@gmail.com.