The project is spearheaded in the Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR) and will be hosted on Github for open access purposes. As such, the team collaborators are both LEADR employees.
Gillian Macdonald is the Interim Director of the LEADR and an Assistant Professor of History (Fixed-Term) at Michigan State University. She is a historian of early modern Scotland and the British Atlantic World and holds a PhD from Central Michigan University in Transnational and Comparative history. She has also studied at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where she received her BA and MRes degrees. Broadly she studies people and their relationship with governments, how individuals are conceptualized by administrations during warfare, and their relationship with the space around them. How we define people in conflict is a reflection of politics and political determinism in the period. Gillian transcribed letters from manuscript form, cleaned data, and transformed words into numbers.
Morgan Fox is a senior at Michigan State University. She is pursuing a degree in Data Science and is currently engaged in clinical data analysis and how digital tools can optimize the success of various fields. She is also an undergraduate lab assistant in LEADR. Fox is the computing brainpower behind the scenes and completed most of the python code algorithyms.