I am an Assistant Professor of History and Computational Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Previously, I have worked at Lancaster University, The Alan Turing Institute, Stanford University, Western Sydney University, and Bates College.
I am interested in histories of infrastructure and information, especially when these showcase how experiences in built and natural environments catalyze social and political change. My training began as a historian of eighteenth-century France, but since finishing my PhD I have worked across other fields, from book history to British history.
For the last several years, I have been developing methods and tools for analyzing large collections of digitized maps. The MapReader software library was an early effort develop a humanities-oriented computer vision tool for map analysis. I am proud that it’s still going, and that our patch classification and text spotting pipelines are being used around the world. Learn more here.
Find my email and a longer, more formal description of my research and teaching on my CMU profile page.
Current Projects
MapReader - open-source software for analyzing digitized map collections. [repo] [docs] [paper]
Computational Map Studies - a long-term project exploring computational approaches to understanding both the history of maps and their contents at scale. See the Imago Mundi Forum I co-edited with Valeria Vitale for an introduction to this work.
Public Work: Making Roads and Citizens in Eighteenth-Century France - the book manuscript based on my dissertation. This history of the forced labor practice of the corvée sits at the intersection of studies of the origins of the French Revolution, the history of highways as a “modernizing” infrastructure, and everyday rural life. Working with a variety of sources that captured information in ways that were relatively new in the eighteenth century, this book brings a political and cultural perspective to bear on a part of French peasant life which is typically only described in economic terms.
Past Projects
Data/Culture: Building sustainable communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and tools
Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment
Recent and Forthcoming Publications
R. Ahnert, E. Griffin, J. Lawrence, & the Living with Machines Team, Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry (University of London Press, 2027).
R. Ahnert, K. McDonough, D. Wilson, “Show Me the Data,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2026): 1-18.
K. Beelen, J. Lawrence, D. Wilson, K. McDonough, “Whose News? Bias in British Digital Newspaper Collections,” Computational Humanities Research 1 (2025): 1-21.
K. McDonough and V. Vitale, “Introduction: Maps and Machines: Recent Perspectives on Humanities Research using AI and Maps,” Imago Mundi 76, no. 2 (2024): 279-284.
K. McDonough, K. Beelen, D. Wilson, R. Wood, “Reading Maps at a Distance: Texts on Maps as New Historical Data,” Imago Mundi 76, no. 2 (2024): 296-307.
K. McDonough, “Maps as Data,” in Debates in DH: Computational Humanities, ed. by J. M. Johnson, D. Mimno, & L. Tilton (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).