Shawn Martin

Shawn Martin is a scholar, educator, and administrator who cares deeply about the values we use to shape our society. Through his research, teaching, and program management work, Shawn endeavors both to uncover hidden assumptions about why we work in the ways we do, and, more importantly, to teach others to make a more positive social impact.

Shawn has been a leader in sectors including higher education, civic engagement, publishing, cultural heritage, and social enterprise. In service to those areas, he has directed both grant-funded and capital initiatives that have included projects in strategic planning, fundraising, and IT development. He has also worked on a considerable number of other activities such as consulting with non-profits to prepare capital campaign reports, developing workshops to help people assess their values, organizing conferences on more equitable business models for publishing, and teaching courses to overcome community polarization.

Shawn’s professional interests have focused primarily on information and research management. More specifically, he has worked extensively on scholarly communication, or the ways in which academic research is funded, created, regulated and distributed. As part of that work, he has contributed to furthering scholarship and practices that create better mechanisms for the distribution of data, teaching resources, software, articles and books across medical, engineering, physical science, social science, arts, and humanities disciplines.

Shawn’s creative interests, though covering many different subjects, have focused on bridging divides between individuals, groups and academic disciplines. In scholarly communication, Shawn has worked to bring together commercial publishers, researchers, students, librarians, government agencies and the many different organizations that are making research available. In his scholarship, he has worked to bring perspectives of history, sociology, philosophy and other disciplines into conversation with each other in order to ask fundamental questions about social values and how they shape collective action. Shawn has also utilized the techniques he has written about to teach classes on political polarization and community values. Most importantly for Shawn, he has worked with both academic and non-academic publications and organizations with the intention of lessening the increasing distrust between scholarly institutions and the public that they serve.

Over the course of his career, Shawn has worked at both public and private research-intensive institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan as well as teaching-focused schools including Dartmouth College and Washington College. He has also been a consultant at non-profit and social impact companies such as Empower Success Corps and Moving Worlds, and he has worked as a specialist for digital cultural heritage projects at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and at the Ohio Historical Society. Shawn has also served in multiple leadership positions and committees within organizations such as the Association for Information Science & Technology, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Braver Angels, and the Association of College and Research Libraries, among others.

Shawn has published and presented widely. His scholarship has been reviewed and circulated at conferences and journals both nationally and internationally on a broad range of topics like the history of nineteenth-century science, digital teaching methods, research management, computational analysis for textual studies, data archiving, and comparative religion.

Shawn holds a Ph.D. in information science from Indiana University, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from The Ohio State University and the College of William and Mary, and certificates in business from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, consulting from Georgetown University, and theology from the University of Notre Dame as well as additional training in a variety of different subjects encompassing systems thinking, social entrepreneurship, political science, art history, and intellectual property law.

More information about Shawn can also be found on his LinkedIn profile or his CV which also include links to some of his publications and other writing.