Shawn Day is an entrepreneur, digital historian, economist and student of information and data design (the blending the aesthetic and the informative). Raised in Canada, Shawn now works with the Digital Humanities Observatory, a project of the Royal Irish Academy, to leverage Ireland's participation in the emerging practise of digital humanities scholarship.

His own academic research explores the social and economic circumstances of the nineteenth century retail liquor trade and it's impact on family. He applies digital, spatial and social network analysis to the study of the relationships between credit, respectability, and order in the Victorian community. Recent articles have examined the social dimensions of the Victorian public mental hospital using GIS and statistical modeling tools. Shawn has been involved in a number of successful and innovative digital humanities projects throughout Canada. Most recently he has worked with large manuscript census databases in the 1871/1891 census project (University of Guelph). He is a team member of the national TAPoR text analysis portal project (McMaster) and the Network for Canadian History and the Environment (NiCHE - UWO).

Prior to a return to academia, Shawn co-founded Ardesic Corporation, which was an active player in the business2business exchange market. Shawn has blended his background in management economics with an entrepreneurial ethos to found a number of successful software development ventures in Canada and find a means to adapt this to the academic arena.