Patrick Burns
Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Burns is an Associate Research Scholar in Digital Projects at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World with 12 years of experience bridging classical scholarship and software development. He holds a PhD in Classics from Fordham and applies practical Python engineering—plus experience with Flask, JavaScript, Ruby, and Bash—to build data-driven humanities tools, web portals, and preservation workflows. A longtime digital humanist and teaching mentor, he designs curricula and workshops on programming, linked data, and responsible research for graduate students and faculty. His research and publications focus on computational Latin philology and literary criticism, and he contributes to the widely used Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK), improving Latin tokenization for enclitics and compounds. Based in New York, he combines domain depth in ancient languages with hands-on NLP and visualization skills to make historical texts accessible and analyzable at scale.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts, English Textual Studies, Magazine Journalism, Bachelor of Arts, English Textual Studies, Magazine Journalism at Syracuse UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Classics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Classics at Fordham UniversityRegis High School
French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (5)
tokenize10
tokenizer10
nlp10
python10
testing10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
cltk/cltk
Jun 2014 - Feb 2022
The Classical Language Toolkit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 218 commits, 66 PRs in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Patrick contributed primarily to the Latin Classical Language Toolkit, a project focused on NLP for Latin. Their contributions included updates to the word tokenizer, specifically addressing enclitic handling and compound word splitting. The user's work involved implementing and refining the tokenization of Latin words, updating existing functions, and including additional unit tests for functionality.
nlplingpythonlatinnltk
cltk/grc_text_tesserae
Dec 2018 - Jun 2022
Plaintext files with Ancient Greek texts from the Tesserae Project
Contributions:1 release, 22 commits, 2 PRs in 3 years 7 months
tesseraeancient-greekancientgreek-textsplaintext
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