As Digital Research Architect at Stanford Libraries, Nicole advances research practices through technology, ethical AI, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Nicole is also Research Director for Humanities + Design, a research lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).
Nicole believes that the usefulness and effectiveness of technology is determined by the people using it and the freedom to make it their own. At Stanford Libraries, for example, she led an AI initiative that encouraged library staff from collections, archives, acquisitions, conservation, circulation, and metadata development to identify applications of AI that would best serve their needs and then facilitated collaborations with developers to give those ideas form.
Together with Stanford faculty Nicole founded the Humanities + Design research lab to continue the data analysis work that originated in the grant-funded Mapping the Republic of Letters project. In this lab Nicole led teams of humanities researchers, engineers and designers in the development of open source critical data visualization tools such as Palladio, Breve and Data Pen. Work in the lab has evolved with the generalizable capabilities of AI (machine learning) to focus on grounding systems design in humanistic theory as a way to counteract the bias and harmful outputs of current AI systems.
Nicole is now working on “People’s Data: a pluralist design for data in government policy and legislation” which combines large language models, human-centered metadata creation, and a community-based knowledge graph to make the government policy documents more understandable and useful for the people that these policies are meant to serve. The project is a collaboration between CESTA and the Office of Community Engagement’s program to provide research internships to currently and formerly incarcerated students. The work is inspired by “Know Systemic Racism”, a project initiated by Felicia Smith, Racial Justice and Social Equity Librarian at Stanford.
Nicole has written extensively about technology and cultural heritage. She is co-author of the open access book The Network Turn (2020, Cambridge University Press) and “Computer Vision and Cultural Heritage” in Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Institutions which will be published by UCL Press in 2024.