Porter Olsen

PhD Candidate, University of Maryland  

Porter Olsen is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland, studying born-digital and hybrid literary collections under the direction of Matthew Kirschenbaum. From 2011 to 2015, Porter worked at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) on a number of digital humanities projects, including the BitCurator Project—an effort to bring digital forensics tools and techniques to libraries, archives, and museums tasked with preserving born-digital materials. Porter’s research focuses on the born-digital literary archives of postcolonial literary figures. He has conducted extensive research into the born-digital components of the Salman Rushdie Collection at Emory University and the Gabriel García Márquez collection at the Harry Ransom Center and has presented his research at a number of national and international conferences, including MLA, Digital Humanities, and the annual conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. Porter continues to be an active member of the BitCurator community where he serves as a member of the BitCurator Consortium’s executive council. He currently teaches in the Design, Cultures & Creativity Honors Program at the University of Maryland.  You can follow Porter on Twitter at @pwolsen and on his blog at www.porterolsen.wordpress.com.

Teaching