Julia Damerow is a software engineer by training. She has a degree in media informatics and is passionate about developing software. After she finished her degree, she went on to get a PhD in computational history and philosophy of science (computational HPS) at the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University.
For her PhD, she developed a system to annotate texts with networks by extracting relevant relationships between entities such as people, places, and concepts from those texts. Such annotation networks can be used, for example, to build intelligent search engines or to analyze how the relationships between concepts change over time. This is of interest as conceptual change can be an indicator for potential innovation or paradigm shifts in the past, present, and future.
After finishing her PhD, Julia left academia for a short while to work as a software engineer in industry. However, she quickly realized that her place was in academia and she returned to ASU where she enjoys working with Manfred Laubichler. She manages the Digital Innovation Group (DigInG, http://diging.asu.edu/), a project she started with Erick Peirson during her graduate studies. In DigInG, Julia works with students to develop software for historians and philosophers of science. Many of the applications the Digital Innovation Group develops are based on her dissertation work, but the group also develops other tools such as a repository system or a pipeline for automated text extraction and OCR. DigInG also turned out to be a great educational resource for its students, who after working with the group for a few semesters move on to graduate programs or highly sought-after software engineering jobs.
Recently, Julia has also been very engaged with the digital humanities software developer community. Like the digital humanities, computational HPS faces many similar issues in regards to software development and sustainability. One focus of her work is to professionalize the development of software in this field and to increase awareness of its importance.