Dean Rehberger does digital history at Michigan State University, where he serves as Associate Professor in the Department of History. His career has been built on constructing digital infrastructures for research, with particular emphases spanning digital history, GLAM stewardship, and the semantic web. Rehberger’s current research interests are AI, Knowledge Graphs, and Semantic Web.
After nearly two decades of leadership, Rehberger stepped down from his role as Director of Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences in 2025, with Walter Hawthorne assuming directorship. During his eighteen years at the helm, Rehberger helped to transform Matrix into an internationally recognized research center, overseeing numerous digitization and archival projects while building globally-networked resources for humanities and social sciences (greatly aided by an amazing research staff at matrix, and a great many scholars and partners).
Through Matrix, Rehberger has led or co-led multi-institutional projects that have helped to rethink data practice in the humanities. His most significant contribution remains Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org)—a Mellon-funded, university-hosted platform that aggregates people-, place-, and event-level records across the Atlantic world. This groundbreaking database serves as a discovery hub for information about enslaved people and their captors, providing access to over a million people records and five million data points. The project originated from earlier work on Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2012.
Rehberger’s other major projects demonstrate his commitment to preserving cultural heritage through digital means. One of his longest running and most successful projects is the Quilt Index. He co-directed the Institute of Museum and Library Services initiative Oral History in the Digital Age, which established technical and ethical guidelines for collection, curation, and access of oral histories. This comprehensive project brought together experts from museums, libraries, and scholarly societies to develop best practices for digital oral history across all phases of the process. Brining a lot of scholars and cultural heritage professionals together is at the heart of many of the projects he has worked on.
The National Endowment for the Humanities-funded What America Ate project represents another significant achievement in Rehberger’s portfolio. Working with food historian Helen Zoe Veit and libraries specialist Peter Berg (and the staff at Matrix), he helped create an interactive website and online archive documenting American food culture during the Great Depression. The project digitized thousands of WPA America Eats materials, community cookbooks, and food advertising from the 1930s, making these rare historical documents accessible to researchers and the public.
Rehberger’s methodological innovations have moved humanities cyberinfrastructure toward linked open data and knowledge graph architectures. Enslaved.org exemplifies this approach, engineered as a graph-based hub using Wikibase and Blazegraph with an openly documented ontology. The project team has published design methods for the Enslaved.org knowledge graph, detailing provenance, schema choices, and materialization pipelines.
Since 2020, Rehberger and colleagues at Matrix have extended this work into geospatial knowledge graphs through his role as co-PI on KnowWhereGraph (KWG)—an NSF Convergence Accelerator project building a large-scale, cross-domain, FAIR, “AI-ready” geoknowledge graph to link human and environmental data for decision-support. This $5 million project creates tools that enable GeoEnrichment—the process by which data becomes augmented with auxiliary information tailored to geospatial study areas. The KnowWhereGraph contains over 12 billion information triples supporting scenarios in disaster relief, agricultural land use, and food-related supply chains.
Rehberger has published on digital humanities methodology and practice. His work appears in venues ranging from the Journal of Digital Humanities to conference proceedings at major international gatherings [25][26]. His publications include collaborative pieces on KORA, Matrix’s digital repository and publishing platform, and contributions to edited collections on digital decision simulations and oral history in the digital age. He has presented his research at conferences worldwide, from wonderful venues like the Digital Humanities Institute at Hamilton College to international symposia on digital humanities theory and practice.
His commitment to open-source development and collaborative partnerships has distinguished Rehberger’s approach throughout his career. Matrix operates using inexpensive hardware and open-source software to facilitate collaboration with developing countries and partners with limited resources. The center has partnered with external organizations including museums, libraries, and archives to digitize collections of cultural resources significant for public access and education.
Currently, Rehberger is developing a cultural history of AI with particular focus on the idea of the mechanical brain. This research direction builds on his established work in AI applications for historical research, documented through his “Artificial Historian” venue and public scholarship tracking the methodological frontier of AI in historical research.
Rehberger’s scholarly trajectory reveals a consistent methodological through-line: designing interoperable, provenance-rich data that historians, communities, and machines can reason over; building open, maintainable services; and publishing the schemas and practices that make reuse possible. This program—visible in Enslaved.org’s LOD stack and the geospatial scope of KnowWhereGraph—represents his most recent contributions to digital history’s evolving landscape. His work demonstrates how humanistic inquiry can leverage cutting-edge computational approaches while maintaining rigorous scholarly standards and ethical commitments to the communities whose stories these digital platforms preserve and illuminate.