I am the Geospatial Information Librarian in the Digital Scholarship Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, and I have a PhD in Anthropology. My main role is to help folks at UMass learn about GIS and use different geospatial resources in their research and teaching. My own research focuses on the interaction between marginal, rural regions and expanding empires in the medieval and post-medieval Eastern Mediterranean, using a combination of archaeological data, archival sources, and remotely-sensed imagery analysis.