My research brings computational methods, especially computer vision and multimodal AI, to the
study of photography, film, and television. With collaborators, I have written books including
Distant Viewing (MIT Press), Layered Lives (Stanford University Press), and
Humanities Data in R (Springer), and I publish across digital humanities, media
studies, and American studies. I am committed to open access publishing, so that my scholarship,
data, and software are freely available to anyone. I also build open-source software and public
humanities projects such as Photogrammar and the Distant Viewing Toolkit, supported by funders
including the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences.
Books
US History in 15 Photographs: 1865 to the 21st CenturyR. Wingo and L. Tilton, eds. April 2026. Bloomsbury. — Publisher Page
Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and TextT. Arnold and L. Tilton. Springer. 2nd edition Fall 2024. 1st edition 2015. humanitiesdata.org.
Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational HumanitiesL. Tilton, D. Mimno, and J. M. Johnson, eds. University of Minnesota Press. Fall 2024. — Open Access
Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital ImagesT. Arnold and L. Tilton. The MIT Press. October 2023. — Open Access
Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History ProjectT. Arnold, C. Rivard, and L. Tilton. Stanford University Press. August 2022. — Open Access
Peer-Reviewed Articles & Proceedings
“Seeing Formalism or Formal Viewing: Computational Formalism for the Analysis of Visual Media Forms and Contexts.” L. Tilton and J. Wigard. Journal of Cultural Analytics. Vol 10, Issue 3, 2025. — Open Access
“Automated Image Color Mapping for a Historic Photographic Collection.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference. 2024. Open Access. Best Short Paper Award.
“Explainable Search and Discovery of Visual Cultural Heritage Collections with Multimodal Large Language Models.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference. 2024. — Open Access
“Access and Advocacy: Text & Data Mining and DMCA §1201.” Q. Dumbrowski and L. Tilton. Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique. October 16, 2023. — Open Access
“AHR Roundtable: Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for the Present and Future of Historical Research.” L. Tilton with J. Sternfield, M. Broussard, K. Crawford, M. L. Jones, and B. Schmidt. In R. D. Meadows and J. Sternfield (Eds). American Historical Review. Vol 128, Issue 3, September 23, 2023. — Online
“Understanding Peanuts and Schulzian Symmetry: Panel Detection, Caption Detection, and Gag Panels in 17,897 Comic Strips Through Distant Viewing.” T. Arnold, L. Tilton, and J. Wigard. Journal of Cultural Analytics. Vol 8, No 3, September 2023. — Open Access
“Automatic Identification and Classification of Portraits in a Corpus of Historical Photographs.” T. Arnold, L. Tilton, and J. Wigard. 2023. Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference. CEUR-WS, Aachen University. — Open Access
“Distant Viewing Toolkit: A Python Package for the Analysis of Visual Culture.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2020. Journal of Open Source Software. — Open Access
“Visualizing a Large Spatiotemporal Collection of Historic Photography with a Generous Interface.” T. Arnold, N. Ayers, J. Madron, R. Nelson and L. Tilton. 2020. 2020 IEEE 5th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH). — Open Access
“Enriching Historic Photography with Structured Data using Image Region Segmentation.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2020. Proceedings of the First Artificial Intelligence for Historical Image Enrichment and Access (AI4HI). — Open Access
“Race and Place: Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the FWP Slave Narratives.” L. Tilton. 2019. Current Research in Digital History. — Open Access
“Building Pedagogy into Project Development: Making Data Construction Visible in Digital Projects.” T. Arnold, C. Rivard, and L. Tilton. 2019. Digital Humanities Quarterly. — Open Access
“Visual Style in Two Network Era Sitcoms.” T. Arnold, A. Berke, and L. Tilton. July 2019. Journal of Cultural Analytics. — Open Access
“The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments and New Ways to Argue.” J. Cox and L. Tilton. 2019. Review of Communication. — Access Online Through UR Repository
“Beyond Lexical Frequencies: Using R for Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities.” T. Arnold, N. Ballier, P. Lissón, L. Tilton. 2019. Language Resources and Evaluation. — Open Access
“Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual Corpora.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2019. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. — Open Access
“American Studies + Computational Humanities.” L. Tilton. 2018. American Quarterly. 2018 Special Issue. — Access Online / Author Pre-Print
“Cross-Discourse and Multilingual Exploration of Textual Corpora with the DualNeighbors Algorithm.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2018. Proceedings of the 2nd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2018). — Open Access
“Participatory Archives.” G. Hale and L. Tilton. 2017. Archive Journal. Issue 7. — Open Access
“Knowledge creation through recommender systems.” T. Arnold, P. Leonard, and L. Tilton. 2017. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Special Issue Digital Humanities 2016. August 2017. ii151–ii157. — Open Access
“Basic Text Processing in R.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2017. Programming Historian. (19 February 2017). — Open Access
“Uncovering Latent Metadata in the FSA-OWI Photographic Archive.” T. Arnold, S. Maples, L. Tilton and L. Wexler. 2017. Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol 12, No 2. — Open Access
“Preservation First?: Re-Viewing Film Digitization.” L. Tilton. 2016. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 12:04 (Fall 2016): Focus issue on “Collections in a Digital Age” guest edited by L. Tilton and Brent Rogers, edited by Juilee Decker. 391–399. — Open Access Through UR Repository
Book Chapters
“Advocacy, Institutions, and Resistance: Reflections from the Association for Computers and the Humanities.” P. R. Lach, E. Grumbach, A. Janco, and L. Tilton. In: K. B. Josephs and L. Thomas (Eds). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2028. University of Minnesota Press. Forthcoming. Open Access.
“More Than Words: Expanding the Multimodal Humanities.” R. Sutton Koeser, T. Arnold, L. Tilton, J. Wieringa, and L. Buchak. In: K. B. Josephs and L. Thomas (Eds). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2028. University of Minnesota Press. Forthcoming. Open Access.
“Visual Data.” L. Tilton and J. Wigard. In: Pim Huijnen (Ed). Big and Small Historical Data. Forthcoming. Open Access.
“Another Way of Viewing: Digital Humanities + Documentary.” L. Tilton. In: J. Glick and P. Aufderheide (Eds.). Oxford Handbook of American Documentary. Oxford University Press. Available here. 2025.
“What’s in a Name? ‘Labs’ in the Digital Humanities.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2021. In: A. McGrail, A. D. Nieves, and S. Senier. People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center. University of Minnesota Press. — Open Access
“Depth in Deep Learning: Layered, Knowledgeable, and Impenetrable.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2021. Eds. Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible. Deep Mediations. University of Minnesota Press. Spring 2021. Edited volume received the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Award for Best Edited Collection.
“Rethinking Resources in Our National Battlefields.” J. Madron and L. Tilton. 2019. Eds. Todd Lookingbill and Peter Smallwood. Collateral Values: The Natural Capital Created by Landscapes of War. Springer Press.
“New Data, New Histories: The Role of Statistics in DH.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2019. Debates in Digital Humanities 2019. University of Minnesota Press. — Open Access
Special Issues
Digital Humanities Quarterly. T. Arnold, J. van Gorp, S. Scagliola, and L. Tilton, eds. 2021. Special Issue: AudioVisual Data in DH. 15.1. — Open Access
American Quarterly. L. Tilton, A. Earhart, M. Delmont, S. Garfinkel, J. P. Karlberg, and A. David Nieves, eds. 2018. Special Issue – Towards a Critically Engaged Digital Practice: American Studies and the Digital Humanities. — Access Online
Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals. B. M. Rogers and L. Tilton, eds. 2016. Focus issue on “Collections in a Digital Age”. 377–380. 12:04 (Fall 2016). — Open Access Through UR Repository
Invited Publications
“Review: Black Lives, British Justice: Black People in London Criminal Justice Records, 1720–1841.” L. Tilton. Reviews in Digital Humanities. Forthcoming. — Journal site
“Book Review: Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press).” Journal of American History. Volume 111, Issue 4, March 2025, Pages 827–828, — doi
“Book Review: Computational Formalism by Amanda Wasielewski (The MIT Press).” Critical AI. Vol 2, Issue 1, 2024. Duke University Press. — doi
“Analysing Audio/Visual (A/V) Data in the Digital Humanities.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2023. In: J. O’Sullivan (Ed). Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities. Bloomsbury. Access through UR Repository.
“The Interdisciplinarity and Influence of Alan Trachtenberg.” J. Guiliano and L. Tilton. U.S. Intellectual History Blog. September 2020.
“Digital Projects Review: Tropy.” L. Tilton. 2018. Journal of American History. June 2018.
“Experimenting with the Digital Humanities to Remix Scholarship.” L. Tilton. Process: A Blog for American History (Organization of American Historians). April 2018. — Open Access
“Organization of American Historians Theme Visualizer.”
T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2018. Organization of American Historians. March.
“What Happened to Sit-In?: Digital Archival Erasure and Struggles for Open Access.” L. Tilton. 2017. Field Guide: a media commons project.
“ ‘Come Let Us Build A New World Together’: The SNCC Digital Gateway.” L. Tilton. 2017. Teaching with #DigHist. American Historical Association. — Open Access
Show earlier invited publications (2016)
“ ‘We’ve been lots of places.’: Mapping the New Deal.” L. Tilton. 2016. SouthWritLarge. Issue: Summer 2016. — Open Access
Public Humanities, Software & Data
Museum Exhibition: Before the Prompt: A Generative History of AI. Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art. University of Richmond. January – April 2028.
Index of American Design Digital Prototype. For the National Gallery of Art (USA). In collaboration with Taylor Arnold, Keith Kurt, and Matthew Westerby. Fall 2025.
Digital Documerica. T. Arnold and L. Tilton, eds. 2025. — Open Access
Distant Viewing Explorer and Scripts. T. Arnold and L. Tilton. Launched 2025. Software to support access to computer vision and MLLM models for the analysis of film, TV, and visual culture. — Open Access Software
Real Photo Postcards. DH Workshop exploring real photo postcards as historical data. 2021. — Open Access
Photogrammar. Director. Version 3.0 was released in Spring 2021 and version 4.0 in 2025 with T. Arnold, N. Ayers, J. Madron, and R. Nelson. For more information about the history of the digital, public humanities project, see About. Awarded the American Studies Association 2022 Garfinkel Prize. OA and Open Source.
Participatory Media. Toolkit for community-driven digital public humanities archives. 2015–2018. — Open Access
Works in Progress
The Machine That Imagined: How Art Made Generative AI. L. Tilton. Book manuscript in progress.
Museum Exhibition: Before the Prompt: A Generative History of AI. Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art. University of Richmond. In preparation; opening January 2028.
“Every Shot, Zero-Shot: The Decoupling of Framing and Duration in Sound-Era Hollywood and Prestige Film.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. Computational Humanities Research 2027. Under review.
“The Shortcom Is Not a Short Sitcom: Visual and Aural Pacing in French Television Comedy.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. Computational Humanities Research 2027. Under review.
External Grants
Schmidt Sciences. 2025. Bridging Large Scale Computational Analysis and Close Viewing of Film and TV. Collaboration across Bowdoin, UC–Berkeley, and University of Richmond. $750,000. Co-Director with T. Arnold, D. Bamman, and A. Cooper.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – Public Knowledge. 2025. Awarded to build and offer workshops for the Distant Viewing Explorer. Center for Liberal Arts and AI. $1,000,000. Co-PI with T. Arnold.
National Endowment for the Humanities. 2025. Awarded to launch the Center for Liberal Arts and AI. $1,000,000. Award #RAI-301501-25. (Rescinded by DOGE; reinstated 2026.) PI. — Award Details
Virginia Humanities Rapid Grant. 2023. $5,000. Co-led with M. Lazar.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – Public Knowledge. 2022–2025. Awarded to develop the Distant Viewing Toolkit (DVT). $485,000. Co-PI with T. Arnold.
National Endowment for the Humanities Level III Advancement Grant. 2022–2025. Awarded to develop PGViz. $325,000. Award #HAA-284853-22. (Rescinded by DOGE; reinstated 2026.) Co-PI with T. Arnold. — Award Details
Library of Congress Scholar-In-Residence. 2022. Awarded to apply computer vision to photography collections from the Library of Congress. $72,000
National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Level II Advancement Grant. 2018–2022. Awarded to develop Distant Viewing Toolkit. $100,000. Award #HAA-261239-18. Co-PI with T. Arnold. — Award Details / Narrative
Images as Data. 2020–2021. Awarded to apply computer vision to collections from Harvard Libraries and Museums. Joint grant with Harvard University Libraries. Part of Mellon-funded Collections as Data Initiative. $50,000. Co-PI with T. Arnold and C. Chiodo.
NEH-Mellon Digital Publication Fellowship. 2019–2020. $35,000
University of North Carolina Visiting Summer Research Fellowship. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina. 2018. $1,500
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension Grant. 2016–2018. “Photogrammar: Seeing and Hearing America’s Documentary Record.” $150,000. Co-PI with L. Wexler and T. Arnold.
National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public Discovery Grant. “Participatory Media.” 2015–2018. $30,000. Award #MD-234145-16. Co-PI with G. E. Hale. — Award Details
Show earlier grants (2014–2015)
Yale Digital Humanities Seed Grant. Yale University. 2015.
Rockefeller Archive Center Grant-in-Aid. 2014.
National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant. 2011–2015. $50,000. Award #HD-51421-11. Co-Director. — Award Details
CLIR Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). 2013–2014. $30,000
Reviews of Work
“Book Review: Humanities data in R: Exploring networks, geospatial data, images, and text (second edition),” Qidi Li, Jianwei Yan, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2025. — Link
“Book Review: Distant Viewing,” Nicole Braida, European Network for Cinema and Media Studies. Book Reviews, Spring 2024. June 26, 2024. — Link
“Book Review: Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images,” Maibell Ong, Convergence, 30(5), 1851–1852. 2024. — Link
“Book Review: Distant Viewing,” Emily Pugh, The Art Bulletin, 106(3): 2024. — Link
“Book Review: Layered Lives,” Tara Mitchell Mielnik, Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 4, March 2024, Pages 824–825. — Link
“Project Review: Photogrammar,” Carol Quirke, Journal of American History, Volume 109, Issue 3, December 2022, Pages 735–737. — Link
“Review: Distant Viewing Toolkit,” Patrick Sui, Reviews in Digital Humanities, 2(4). 2021. — Link
“Photogrammar – The American Archivist Reviews Portal,” Anna-Sophia Zingarelli-Sweet. The American Archivist. November 2017. — Link
Show earlier reviews (2016)
“Photogrammar: A New Look at New Deal Photography,” Jillian Russo, American Quarterly, 68(2), June 2016, 439–442. — Link
“Book Review: Humanities Data in R,” Jose M. Pavía, Journal of Statistical Software, 69(2), 1–5. 2016. — Link
Awards
Computational Humanities Research Best Short Paper Award. 2024. For “Automated Image Color Mapping for a Historic Photographic Collection” at CHR 2024.
Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) Open Scholarship Award Honorable Mention. 2024. For Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History Project.
American Studies Association’s Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities. 2022. For Photogrammar.org
Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Public Scholar Award. 2013.
US History in 15 Photographs: 1865 to the 21st Century
Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and Text
Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities
Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images
Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History Project
“Seeing Formalism or Formal Viewing: Computational Formalism for the Analysis of Visual Media Forms and Contexts.” L. Tilton and J. Wigard. Journal of Cultural Analytics. Vol 10, Issue 3, 2025. — Open Access
“Access and Advocacy: Text & Data Mining and DMCA §1201.” Q. Dumbrowski and L. Tilton. Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique. October 16, 2023. — Open Access
“AHR Roundtable: Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for the Present and Future of Historical Research.” L. Tilton with J. Sternfield, M. Broussard, K. Crawford, M. L. Jones, and B. Schmidt. In R. D. Meadows and J. Sternfield (Eds). American Historical Review. Vol 128, Issue 3, September 23, 2023. — Online
“Distant Viewing Toolkit: A Python Package for the Analysis of Visual Culture.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2020. Journal of Open Source Software. — Open Access
“Race and Place: Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the FWP Slave Narratives.” L. Tilton. 2019. Current Research in Digital History. — Open Access
“Building Pedagogy into Project Development: Making Data Construction Visible in Digital Projects.” T. Arnold, C. Rivard, and L. Tilton. 2019. Digital Humanities Quarterly. — Open Access
“The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments and New Ways to Argue.” J. Cox and L. Tilton. 2019. Review of Communication. — Access Online Through UR Repository
“American Studies + Computational Humanities.” L. Tilton. 2018. American Quarterly. 2018 Special Issue. — Access Online / Author Pre-Print
“Participatory Archives.” G. Hale and L. Tilton. 2017. Archive Journal. Issue 7. — Open Access
“Basic Text Processing in R.” T. Arnold and L. Tilton. 2017. Programming Historian. (19 February 2017). — Open Access
“Preservation First?: Re-Viewing Film Digitization.” L. Tilton. 2016. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 12:04 (Fall 2016): Focus issue on “Collections in a Digital Age” guest edited by L. Tilton and Brent Rogers, edited by Juilee Decker. 391–399. — Open Access Through UR Repository
“Book Review: Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press).” Journal of American History. Volume 111, Issue 4, March 2025, Pages 827–828, — doi
“Book Review: Computational Formalism by Amanda Wasielewski (The MIT Press).” Critical AI. Vol 2, Issue 1, 2024. Duke University Press. — doi
“The Interdisciplinarity and Influence of Alan Trachtenberg.” J. Guiliano and L. Tilton. U.S. Intellectual History Blog. September 2020.
“Experimenting with the Digital Humanities to Remix Scholarship.” L. Tilton. Process: A Blog for American History (Organization of American Historians). April 2018. — Open Access
“Organization of American Historians Theme Visualizer.”
“What Happened to Sit-In?: Digital Archival Erasure and Struggles for Open Access.” L. Tilton. 2017. Field Guide: a media commons project.
“ ‘Come Let Us Build A New World Together’: The SNCC Digital Gateway.” L. Tilton. 2017. Teaching with #DigHist. American Historical Association. — Open Access
“ ‘We’ve been lots of places.’: Mapping the New Deal.” L. Tilton. 2016. SouthWritLarge. Issue: Summer 2016. — Open Access
Museum Exhibition: Before the Prompt: A Generative History of AI. Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art. University of Richmond. January – April 2028.
Index of American Design Digital Prototype. For the National Gallery of Art (USA). In collaboration with Taylor Arnold, Keith Kurt, and Matthew Westerby. Fall 2025.
Digital Documerica. T. Arnold and L. Tilton, eds. 2025. — Open Access
Distant Viewing Explorer and Scripts. T. Arnold and L. Tilton. Launched 2025. Software to support access to computer vision and MLLM models for the analysis of film, TV, and visual culture. — Open Access Software
Photogrammar. Director. Version 3.0 was released in Spring 2021 and version 4.0 in 2025 with T. Arnold, N. Ayers, J. Madron, and R. Nelson. For more information about the history of the digital, public humanities project, see About. Awarded the American Studies Association 2022 Garfinkel Prize. OA and Open Source.
Schmidt Sciences. 2025. Bridging Large Scale Computational Analysis and Close Viewing of Film and TV. Collaboration across Bowdoin, UC–Berkeley, and University of Richmond. $750,000. Co-Director with T. Arnold, D. Bamman, and A. Cooper.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – Public Knowledge. 2025. Awarded to build and offer workshops for the Distant Viewing Explorer. Center for Liberal Arts and AI. $1,000,000. Co-PI with T. Arnold.
National Endowment for the Humanities. 2025. Awarded to launch the Center for Liberal Arts and AI. $1,000,000. Award #RAI-301501-25. (Rescinded by DOGE; reinstated 2026.) PI. — Award Details
Library of Congress Scholar-In-Residence. 2022. Awarded to apply computer vision to photography collections from the Library of Congress. $72,000
Images as Data. 2020–2021. Awarded to apply computer vision to collections from Harvard Libraries and Museums. Joint grant with Harvard University Libraries. Part of Mellon-funded Collections as Data Initiative. $50,000. Co-PI with T. Arnold and C. Chiodo.
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension Grant. 2016–2018. “Photogrammar: Seeing and Hearing America’s Documentary Record.” $150,000. Co-PI with L. Wexler and T. Arnold.
Yale Digital Humanities Seed Grant. Yale University. 2015.
CLIR Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). 2013–2014. $30,000
“Book Review: Distant Viewing,” Nicole Braida, European Network for Cinema and Media Studies. Book Reviews, Spring 2024. June 26, 2024. — Link
“Review: Distant Viewing Toolkit,” Patrick Sui, Reviews in Digital Humanities, 2(4). 2021. — Link
“Photogrammar – The American Archivist Reviews Portal,” Anna-Sophia Zingarelli-Sweet. The American Archivist. November 2017. — Link
“Book Review: Humanities Data in R,” Jose M. Pavía, Journal of Statistical Software, 69(2), 1–5. 2016. —