A Victorian specialist, his interests in digital humanities are at once pedagogical, archival, and analytical. He has experimented with crowdsourcing and bibliography in the classroom, and with digitizing articles on the "Indian Mutiny" for the Victorian Web. Pionke is currently working to recover the distinctively British vision of Cuba in the late-colonial period by applying the tools of data-mining and topic-modelling to digital archives of nineteenth-century periodicals and other texts.