Before joining UMKC he worked for several years at the Newberry Library in Chicago where he contributed to a number of text encoding projects, crowdsourced transcription sites, and map-based digital exhibits. In 2015 he published Religion, Media, and the Digital Turn, which was a report commissioned by the Social Science Research Council that helped inspire the creation of DeGruyter University Press’s new “Introduction to Digital Humanities: Religion” series. DeGruyter recently named Cantwell the editor of the series’ volume on research methods for the study of religion, and he will be contributing a piece to the volume on his experiments building evangelical Twitter bots.