Matthew Fisher

  

• Twitter: bookhand

Having graduated from Berkeley at the height of the dot-com boom, I did what everybody else did, and worked at a startup software company. I was the technical writer at an 11-person company targeting the enterprise space - it was a swift education in doing a bit of everything. I supported myself through graduate school with some of those skills - first with web design, then as a network admin, and ultimately as a generalized IT person for several small businesses. Computers thus paid the bills while I pursued my graduate research in medieval literature. In the years since I started working at UCLA, however, I have finally begun to bring those two sides of my interests together. I launched a Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts in 2008, which was a big deal if you were a medievalist who worked with manuscripts, though less noteworthy for the rest of the planet. Even as I begin work on my second book, I'm also looking to bring my hybrid interests to bear in initiating new tools, projects, and conversations in the digital humanities.