Benjamin Charles Germain Lee

Timeline

1. By 2019

   Harvard and Holocaust records

   In 2017, he graduates from Harvard College with a double major in astrophysics and mathematics and a minor in physics. As a Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he uses machine learning to help users and researchers search the International Tracing Service archive. He also serves as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s History Department; his grandmother survived Auschwitz, and his search for family history informs his interest in improving access to cultural heritage collections.

2. 2019–2020

   Newspaper Navigator at the Library

   In 2019, he starts Newspaper Navigator as a Library of Congress Innovator in Residence, using machine learning to extract visual content from more than 16 million historic newspaper pages. Released in September 2020, the application lets users search more than one million images by keyword and find visually similar results.

3. 2022

   A checklist for heritage data

   In 2022, he posts The “Collections as ML Data” Checklist for Machine Learning & Cultural Heritage, which offers guiding questions for teams that build machine-learning projects with cultural heritage collections.

4. 2023–2024

   A UW PhD and Kluge fellowship

   In 2023, he completes a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at UW. By July 2023, he is a Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress and is set to join UW’s Information School as an assistant professor in September 2024.

5. 2024

   A map-search conference award

   With Jamie Mahowald, he coauthors a paper on integrating visual and textual inputs for searching large-scale map collections. It receives the Best Long Paper Award at the 2024 Computational Humanities Research Conference.

6. November 2025

   GovScape for federal documents

   In November 2025, he coauthors GovScape, a public search system for 10,015,993 federal government PDFs from the 2020 End of Term crawl. The system supports filters for domain and crawl date, exact-text search, semantic-text search and visual search across individual PDF pages.

7. 2025–2026

   An essay wins an ASJA award

   In September 2025, he publishes “Uncanny Testimony” in Longreads. In 2026, the American Society of Journalists and Authors names it the Technology category winner.

8. By August 2026

   Harvard and DPLA appointments

   By July 2026, he receives a visiting fellowship at Harvard Library Innovation Lab for research on public-data discoverability. By August 2026, he is appointed to the board of the Digital Public Library of America.

9. October 2026

   AI tools for federal records

   In October 2026, he leads the three-year project “Toward a Multimodal Understanding of 250 Years of U.S. Government Documents,” supported by a $403,833 Schmidt Sciences grant. The team plans to develop AI tools that trace how historical and literary figures are quoted, pictured and remembered in government documents.

10. Since September 2024

    Assistant professor at UW

    As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor in UW’s Information School and leads the Lab for Computing Cultural Heritage. He serves on the board of the Digital Public Library of America and as a general editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly.