His research interests are in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His first project, "Paying Attention," describes how new ways of measuring attention in early 20th century psychology found unexpected uses in teaching, advertising, and media. His digital humanities research focuses particularly on integrating humanistic reading with techniques of text mining and visualization applied to large historical datasets. His recent work is in topic modeling, visualization of historic data, and thematic mapping. More details are available at benschmidt.org.