Erin Ridnour

Digital Scholarship Librarian

Bio:

Erin Ridnour partners with students, faculty, and staff on digital scholarship projects that explore new ways of asking and answering research questions. She teaches workshops and course-integrated sessions on geospatial humanities, text analysis, and digital storytelling, and facilitates programs and collaborations in the Library’s digital scholarship space, The Catalyst.

Erin holds an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Wyoming, where her work focused on twentieth-century food and consumer culture. Her interdisciplinary humanities background informs her approach to digital scholarship, particularly at the intersection of cultural history and computational methods.

Her current research includes Computers Reading Cookbooks, a collections-as-data project utilizing community cookbooks from the Library’s Iowa Cookbook Collection. Using Python and natural language processing tools, she analyzes these cookbook texts to identify shared foodways, trace how dishes evolve over time, and surface both common and culturally distinct culinary traditions across Iowa communities. She is also building expertise in static web development and web mapping through the Campus Cornerstones project, which uses open-source GIS tools to connect historical maps, photographs, and texts in an interactive exploration of Iowa State University’s campus history.

Current Projects

Campus Cornerstones

Computers Reading Cookbooks

The Day Edition

Workshops:

• Data Viz Glow Up: Pick a Chart Type
• Creating an Academic Portfolio Website with GitHub Pages
• Exploring Free Tools for Text Analysis