This syllabus is my fifth version of a course aimed at introducing the digital humanities at an undergraduate level. In consultation with my colleagues, I decided that this year’s version should also include a unit that looked at digital objects with a humanities perspective. The course is organized around four projects, each of which is oriented…[Read more]

This paper examines the voluminous “poetry talks” (shihua) written by Southern Society (Nanshe) members and focuses on two tendencies in these discourses: The general cult of sentimentality and the narrative strategy on women’s poetry. These poetic discourses succeeded the language of traditional literary criticism, but also exhibited ideals of th…[Read more]

This paper examines the birth of classicist poetry by paying attention to the Southern Society’s (Nanshe) diachronic succession of the late Qing Poetic Revolution. It provides a careful analysis on the novelty of Huang Zunxian’s poetry and shows how the Southern Society transformed Huang’s Europeanized innovation into something that was roote…[Read more]

This is the first version of a larger project that I’ve been working on in my spare time to create a dataset of the guests, songs, books, and luxuries on the long-running BBC radio program Desert Island Discs (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Island_Discs). Originally, I began with data gathered by…[Read more]

An overview of proposed categories for the growing graphic medicine genre of cancer comics (i.e. cancer narratives in comic book form) and an initial theory on the significant linkage between this illness and particular medium.

The past twenty years have witnessed a mounting crisis in academic publishing. Companies such as Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor and Francis have earned unprecedented profits by controlling more and more scholarly output while increasing subscription rates to academic journals. Thus publishers have consolidated their influence despite…[Read more]

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in b…[Read more]

This article explores the use of Émilie Du Châtelet’s Institutions de physique as both an acknowledged and unacknowledged source for the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, and argues for Du Châtelet’s inclusion as a full participant in the philosophical conversations the Encyclopédie enacts. Widely considered a minor voice who entered the…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

This article examines the recurring ways in which some of the most popular DH tools are presented as easy to use. It argues that attempts to couch powerful tools in what is often false familiarity, directly undermines the goal of encouraging scholarly innovation and risk taking. The consequences of framing digital tools as either easy or more…[Read more]

In 1949, Montreal poet Louis Dudek circulated a package of poetry manuscripts through a decentralized network of writers working in the U.S. and Canada that he called the “Poetry Grapevine.” In the manifesto-like instructions for the project, Dudek declares that “THERE IS A LOT MORE HAPPENING IN OUR DAILY LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS (NOT TO SPEAK OF UN…[Read more]

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

The spread of open digital forms of scholarly communication, combined with increasing institutional pressure to track research “impact,” has encouraged scholars and administrators in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) to turn their attention to metrics that promise to help in the assessment of research outputs. As a result of the lim…[Read more]

‘Dirt’ and ‘Trash’ in Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_:
Update on the rhetoric of social stratification in R&J…

Gloria McMillan June 21, 2018

Shakespeare in early modern period of English culture demonstrates how modern exogamy (voluntarily marrying outside your group) rattles the social stratification structure in modern western societi…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]