Shawn Day blends the aesthetic and informative as an entrepreneur, cultural geographer, digital historian, and economist. Raised in Canada, he now resides in Cork, Ireland and lectures at University College Cork. He has lectureed at Queen's University Belfast, University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, fostering Irish scholarship in Digital and Humanities and Social Computing. He emigrated to Ireland to serve as Project Manager of the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin, Ireland[1].
His doctoral disserrtation entitled 'The Socio-Cultural Terroir of Irish Craft Brewing", asked (and attempted to answer) the simple but nuanced question of why independent brewers in Ireland would make a place here in a market dominated by Heineken and Guinness. Previous research has explored the social and economic circumstances of the nineteenth century retail liquor trade and its impact on family. He applies digital, spatial and social network analysis to the relationships between credit, respectability, and order in community. Recent articles have examined the social dimensions of the Victorian public mental hospital using GIS and statistical modeling tools. Shawn has been involved in a number of successful and innovative digital humanities projects. These include large manuscript census databases in the 1871/1891 census project (University of Guelph), the national TAPoR text analysis portal project, the Canadian Network for Economic History (CNEH) and the Network for Canadian History and the Environment (NiCHE). He is currently Head of Department of Digital Humanities at Universty College Cork.
Shawn has blended his background in management economics with an entrepreneurial ethos to found a number of successful software development ventures in Canada and bringing this experience to academic pursuits.