Jeff Appelhans
AI adoption, content, and community for public-trust work
I build source-bounded AI workflows for public-serving teams: adoption training, clear enablement content, and community support that helps produce new knowledge at scale.
Historian at the American Philosophical Society.
Work
Selected work (AI, adoption, and evidence): I built two linked research systems at APS that moved from manual copy/paste workflows to reproducible, source-linked pipelines for bibliography and archival analysis.
Proof: Bibliography canon now tracks 6,449 editions interrogated; HSTM extends that base across 34 XML finding aids and 6,352 EAD components, with NEH-supported public launch programming engaging 126+ participants.
Background: My historical research focuses on early American political and religious culture, including an NEH-supported book project on the creation of American Catholicism in the early Republic.
The Catholic Church of St. Mary, Philadelphia, ca. 1829, drawn on stone by W. L. Breton, Library Company of Philadelphia, https://www.librarycompany.org/
About
I operate in politically contested public environments by staying nonpartisan, evidence-first, and mission-focused: public trust is never squandered on personal ideology.I hold a PhD in History (University of Delaware, 2018) and pair deep domain expertise with practical adoption systems that help teams move from pilot to durable daily use.
NEH-supported digital bibliography: 6,449 editions interrogated (Bibliography canon).
Public launch programming: 126+ participants.
Deadline-driven, source-linked stakeholder briefs (including a quantified overlap analysis: 19 of 24 founders were APS members).
Built repeatable pipelines for authority control (loc.gov), EAD/XML finding-aid search, and linked HTML/CSV outputs.
Modernized analytics workflows from early Power BI prototypes toward maintainable semantic modeling.