About Us - Wheaton College Massachusetts

We are eight summers of undergraduates exploring digitized texts and building tools. Michael Drout, Scott Kleinman, Mark LeBlanc are blending start-up and research cultures to build and apply tools for introductory explorations of your favorite collection of texts.

Dr. Michael Drout. Anglo-Saxon scholar, Professor of English at Wheaton College. Mike enjoys the study of really old writing, writing from way, way before you were born. Drout has written extensively on medieval literature, including articles on Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon wills, the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang, the Exeter Book ‘wisdom poems’ and Anglo-Saxon medical texts. Drout’s English grammar book, King Alfred’s Grammar, is available at his website, www.michaeldrout.com, where you can hear him read you some Anglo-Saxon as a bedtime story.

Dr. Scott Kleinman. Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Digital Humanities at California State University, Northridge. Scott is a classic digital humanities professor: studying Middle English verse one moment and cutting code the next. Scott is lead developer in the latest release of Lexos software as well as a client, sharing effective practice with Lexos in his graduate and undergraduate courses.

Dr. Mark D. LeBlanc. Professor of Computer Science at Wheaton College. LeBlanc teaches ‘computing for poets’ (an undergraduate introduction to text mining experiments, currently taught using Python) and has supervised the development of many software tools and computational experiments in genomics and lexomics. Throughout the year, Mark tries to manage the software-types.

Kate Boylan, Director of Archives & Digital Initiatives at Wheaton College. Kate is helping the group manage our research data, including repositories that capture some of our hours of previous work spent finding, scrubbing, and cutting texts and entire corpora in special ways, for example, Shakespeare’s plays.

Weiqi Feng ’19. Weiqi is our Summer 2018 software lead. Following his work in summer 2017, Weiqi worked through the Fall 2017 semester to continue the back-end refactoring work. A computer science and mathematics major at Wheaton, Weiqi is curious about the world around him and is passionate about writing elegant code.

Cheng Zhang ’18. Cheng led our recent back-end (Python) refactoring efforts, prompting the group of eight developers to adopt PEP8 standards, type hinting, unit testing with code coverage, and continuous integration. Cheng is heading to Boston University for his Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Previous Research Groups:

Lexomics 2018 Team — **2018**: (Back, left to right) Scott Kleinman, Phuntsho Norbu, Weiqi Feng, Ginger Ciaburri, Abigail Cahill, Marissa Gamache, Kate Boylan, Danny Mullen, Eammon Littler. (Front, left to right) Mark LeBlanc, Yenny Bautista, Nina Treese, Jigme Sherpa, Mat LeBlanc, Krissa Cusanelli, Mike Drout.

**2017**: (Back, left to right) Alvaro de Landaluce, Joshua Wolfe, Emma Steffens, Weiqi Feng, Scott Kleinman, Elizabeth Oliveira, Xinru Liu, Shi Shen (Front) Mark LeBlanc, Jonathan Gerkin, Cheng Zhang, Arianna Alfiero, Katherine Greene, Michael Drout (Not Pictured: Wenzhuo Shi)

**2016**: (Back, left to right) Alvaro de Landaluce, Jordan Hamilton, Bastien Brule, Elizabeth Oliveira, Elizabeth Crowley, Audrey Dubois, Mark LeBlanc, Evan Laferriere, Michael Kristy (Front) Scott Kleinman, Jillian Valerio, Caren McCarthy, Heather Fang, Carly Lewis, Kristina Reddy, Steven Waterhouse, Yiqing Cao, Cheng Zhang, Michael Drout (Not Pictured: Rowan Lowell, Theoni Varoudaki, Sarah Kinkade)

**2015**: (Back, left to right) Elizabeth Crowley, Jack Segal, Cora Kohn, Jingxian Liu, Caleb Wastler, Jonathan Gerkin, Austin Gillis, Audrey Dubois (Front) Prof. Mark LeBlanc, Shiwei Huang, Sara Zhang, Moses(Cheng) Zhang, Chloe Urbanczyk, Jesse Aronson, Jillian Valerio, Rowan Lowell, Prof. Mike Drout (Not Pictured: Prof. Scott Kleinman, Sarah Creese, Helen Meng)

**2014**: (Back, left to right): Jinnan Ge, Jonathan Gerkin, Elizabeth Peterson, Tom Armstrong, Clayton Rieck, Richard Neal, Bryan Jensen (software lead) (Front) Mark LeBlanc, Qi (Sara) Zhang, Lithia Helmreich, Jillian Valerio, Stephanie Lowell, Mike Drout (Not Pictured: Scott Kleinman)

**2013**: (Back, left to right): Leah Smith, Elie Chauvet, Devin Delfino, Julia Morneau, Bryan Jensen, Allison Dennett (Front) Mark LeBlanc, Helen Meng, Ann Brasacchio, Mike Drout, Natasha Piirainen (Not Pictured: Richard Neal, Vicky Li, Rose Berger)

Software Group 2013: (left to right): Bryan Jensen, Julia Morneau, Mark LeBlanc, Vicky Li, Devin Delfino (Not Pictured: Software Lead — Richard Neal)

**2012** (Back, left to right): Elie Chauvet, Mark LeBlanc, Richard Neal, Mike Kahn, Donald Bass, Carol Mannix, Doug Raffle (Front) Mike Drout, Leah Smith, Rose Berger, Alicia Herbert, Scott Kleinman, Veronica Kerekes

**2011**: (left to right, those in **bold** worked with Lexomics) Chris DeMolles ’13, **Courtney LaBrie ’13**, Stephanie Antetomaso ’12, **Phoebe Boyd ’12**, Anthony Castellani ’13, **Amos Jones ’11, Rachel Scavera ’12**, Nathaniel Hunt ’13, **Emily Bowman ’13, Donald Bass ’12** (see article)

2009-2010: Christina Nelson ’11 and Neil Kathok ’10

2008: Christina Nelson ’11 (see article about our founding student researcher)