Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

his essay positions the use of machine learning within the digital humanities as part of a wider movement that nostalgically seeks to return literary criticism to the structuralist era, to a moment characterized by belief in systems, structure, and the transparency of language. It argues that the scientific criticism of the present attempts to…[Read more]

BACKGROUND This article sets out the economic problems faced by the humanities disciplines in the transition to gold open access and outlines the bases for investigations of collective funding models. Beginning with a series of four problems, it then details the key players in this field and their various approaches to collective “procurement” mec…[Read more]

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term ‘open access’ in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of ‘pay-to-say’ publishing. In this book, Martin Paul Eve…[Read more]

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]

Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (1986) is examined as a site of memory including: Uhry’s own memories upon which the characters and the play itself are based; the role of memory stories, settings and objects in the unfolding of the relationship be-tween its main characters, Daisy Wertham and her chauffeur, Hoke Col…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

“A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories–ours and our students as well…[Read more]

These lesson plans and corresponding handouts introduce students to methods in digital humanities (distant reading, narrative mapping, and sentiment analysis). They are aligned with the K-12 Common Core State Standards and informed by university-level DH discourses. Developed in collaboration with high school English teachers, these materials are…[Read more]

Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]

This article considers Marıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and re…[Read more]