David Francis

I provide technical support for various digital initiatives for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Arctic Museum, and the Bowdoin Library's Special Collections. Additionally I provide support for faculty projects. At Bowdoin, I have had the opportunity to use all the skills I have learned to develop a variety of applications and, of course, learn about all the many haunted aspects of this fine institution!

Noteable Projects

• Digital Ricoeur. (Fernando Nascimento) The Digital Ricoeur website provides access to the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005). A rich full-text search of a growing number of Ricoeur's works, as well as a complete listing of his works as a searchable bibliography.
• Kinolab. (Allison Cooper) Kinolab's aim is to be the richest, most comprehensive collection of film and series clips available for non-commercial use in the United States, built from the ground up by the students and scholars using it. Kinolab is built on LAMP technology specially designed for the digital analysis of moving images.
• Media Trades. (Daniel F. Stone) Media Trades is an application for helping people break out of their "echo chambers." Many people seem to get their news from like-minded sources nowadays. Left-leaning people get news from sources that lean left and right-leaning people from right-leaning sources. So, for many people, the news just echoes what they already believe. Media Trades allows people trade stories from opposite sides of the political spectrum.
• Cratylus: The Art Tagging Toolset. (Bowdoin Museum of Art) Cratylus is a mobile application that gamifies the tagging of works in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art which will make our collections more searchable and accessible.
• Assyria to America: A Digital Exploration. (Bowdoin Museum of Art) In addition to exploring the ancient and modern histories of the Assyrian reliefs at Bowdoin, the exhibition Assyria to America, launched in 2019, showcases a variety of new digital approaches to the study of ancient art that the BCMA staff have been deploying across the collections. Some technologies showcased include: International Image Interoperability Framework, polychromy, Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and 3D modeling.
• A Resounding Beat: Music in the Inuit World. I helped the Arctic Museum set up a number of listening devices for their exhibit which included two workstations that allowed visitors to sample music from an easy to navigate playlist.

Recent Conferences & Workshops

• Speaker: Working Better, Together: Communication Tools and Practices for Stronger Museum Teams. New England Museum Association Annual Conference. Manchester, NH. November 5, 2025
• Demonstration: Opening Speaker, Women in Technology: Project FutureScape & AI with Holly Sherburne. Bowdoin Colege. September 23, 2024
• Demonstration: Cratylus: Crowd-sourced Tagging to Enhance Discoverability, April 5, 2021. MuseWeb 2021 (online)
• From the Northwest Palace to the Northeast US. A workshop on Assyrian reliefs in New England and New York. May 17-18, 2019 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick Maine
• Demonstration: Expanding Access to Non-Sighted Visitors: An Innovative and Easy-to-Build Audio Device for Any Museum, MuseWeb 2019, Boston, MA. Schematics and How-tos