Dan Costa Baciu

Dan Costa Baciu
Dan Costa Baciu

Dan Costa Baciu joins WE1S after completing his Ph.D. in 2018 in Architectural History at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Originally trained at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he was a practicing architect and editor of a professional architecture journal before coming to the U.S. on a Fulbright to pursue his doctorate. In 2017, he was one of four scholars chosen for a HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Advanced Collaborative Support grant. He developed an innovative “wikification” approach that deployed named-entity linking to Wikipedia to facilitate text classification and the “non-consumptive use” of the millions of texts in the HathiTrust corpus. (See his HTRC final report.) Dan’s dissertation, “Everything Called Chicago School: Lines of Thought in Public Discourse,” drew from his HTRC research to explore the cultural meaning of “the Chicago School.” An intriguing case study in how to use digital methods to reinvent intellectual history, the concept of “the Chicago School” is at once constrained by disciplinary context to particular meanings (for example, in architecture) and broadly disseminated in other areas of meaning (for example, economics and law). Dan’s research complements the WE1S project’s digital study of the similarly narrow/broad idea of “the humanities.” (See the following for more information on Dan Baciu: ORCID page | SAATCHI Art profile.)