About William
Hi, I’m William Mattingly.
I wear a lot of hats. I’m a historian, data scientist, and NLP Engineer, but I’m also a digital nomad, public speaker, and content producer. I work primarily with multilingual documents and develop tools to help process them more easily.
I’m currently a postdoc at the Smithsonian Institution in the Data Science Lab. I’m also attached to a few projects outside the Smithsonian, such as the Bitter Aloe Project, Placing the Holocaust, Personal Writes the Political, and TheirStory. For each of these projects, I’ve developed custom solutions to solve real-world problems. Think I’m a good fit for you? Consider booking a consultation with me down below.
My Approach
I approach every problem the same. I listen so that I can understand. I have the most fun when I work with data that I have never encountered. It presents new challenges and keeps things interesting. I’ve worked on projects ranging from training machine learning models to transcribe medieval manuscripts to identifying named entities in Holocaust documents in 15 languages. And here’s one thing I’ve learned: vastly different data doesn’t necessarily mean vastly different solutions.
Listen & Understand
When I work on a project, I’m rarely the content expert. I spend most of my time early in the project listening to you describe your particular problem so that I can understand not only how to build a solution, but build a reproducible solution.
Build it
Once I get a sense of your data, I immediately go to work and starting tailoring a custom solution for you. I primarily work with Python, but am comfortable in R as well.