One of the things that I like best about Classics is the wide range of intellectual opportunities it offers. As an undergraduate I was interested in early Christianity and Latin love elegy, which are about as far from my current work as you can get! But our discipline is built for roaming and many of its earliest greats would not fit neatly into the boxes that we use today.

My current scholarship bulks in two main areas. The first is what you might call Digital Classics. Under a joint appointment in the Duke University Libraries, I direct the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3). We specialize in the creation of tools and services that serve critical infrastructure needs for Classics and beyond. We maintain papyri.info. We are working on a variety of projects to do with crowd-curation of papyrological and epigraphic texts (text, translation, metadata, commentary, bibliography, and images), geo-spatial data, prosopographical information, medieval manuscript witnesses and apparatus criticus data, image recognition and text-image alignment, and more. 

The other, more 'traditional' half of my scholarship lies at what I like to call the intersection of law, economics, and religion. Under that broad rubric I have written on currency standards and exchange, ancient charitable foundations, funding of eponymous festivals, grain supply, land leasing, taxation and tax shelter, diplomacy, and other subjects. I have long tended to pursue these subjects with a special focus on their representation in documentary sources (inscriptions, papyri, and coins). But lately, I've grown increasingly interested in Athenian law and so not only in the orators but also in the lexicographic, encyclopedic, and scholiastic traditions that preserve such a wealth of information on the subject (see Harpokration On Line). I have been especially drawn to what the law has to say about personal status (citizens, slaves, freedmen, metics, aliens).

When I am not on the clock I am often on my bike (er, bikes), on pavement, on dirt, around town, in the middle of nowhere, for a few minutes, for a few days (punk still in the earbuds; see first 6 seconds). Maybe it's that same freedom to roam that draws me.

Links

• http://www.duke.edu/~jds15
• DC3 Blog