Bio


Nicole is Digital Research Architect for the Stanford University Libraries and Research Director for Humanities+Design, a research lab at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Nicole works at the intersection of the digital library and digital scholarship as a lead architect in the design and development of practical research services. She is currently leading an initiative within the Library to identify and enact applications of artificial intelligence —machine perception, machine learning, machine reasoning, and language recognition— to make the collections of maps, photographs, manuscripts, data sets and other assets more easily discoverable, accessible, and analyzable.

At Humanities + Design she has led the design and development of numerous tools for data visualization and analysis including Palladio, Breve, and, most recently, Data Pen. The lab encourages and supports collaboration between researchers from the humanities and design to encode interpretive method in tools for data analysis. Lessons learned in that work have proven essential to designing human-centered applications of machine intelligence in support of research.

Institute Affiliations


  • Research Director, Humanities+Design, Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research

2023-24 Courses


All Publications


  • Seeking the eye of history Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies Coleman, C. N. Oxford, UK Voltaire Foundation Liverpool Liverpool University Press. 2020
  • Managing Bias When Library Collections Become Data International Journal of Librarianship Coleman, C. N. 2020; 5 (1)
  • British Travelers in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Ceserani, G., Caviglia, G., Coleman, N., De Armond, T., Murray, S., Taylor-Poleskey, M. 2017; 122 (2): 425–50
  • Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Edelstein, D., Findlen, P., Ceserani, G., Winterer, C., Coleman, N. 2017; 122 (2): 400–424
  • Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Edelstein, D., Findlen, P., Ceserani, G., Winterer, C., Coleman, N. 2017; 122 (2): 25
  • British Travelers in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Ceserani, G., Caviglia, G., Coleman, N., De Armond, T., Murray, S., Taylor-Poleskey, M. 2017; 122 (2)
  • Idiographic Network Visualizations LEONARDO Caviglia, G., Coleman, N. 2016; 49 (5): 447-447
  • Communication Design and the Digital Humanities 4th International Forum of Design as a Process Giorgio, C., Ciuccarelli, P., Coleman, N. 2013
  • Knot: an interface for the study of social networks in the humanities Proceedings of the Biannual Conference of the Italian Chapter of SIGCHI Uboldi, G., Caviglia, G., Coleman, N., Heymann, S., Mantegari, G., Ciuccarelli, P. 2013: 15