This is a position paper for an upcoming workshop convened by the Council of Graduate Schools on rethinking the dissertation. In it, I reflect on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the shift…[Read more]

In an essay entitled “Digital Blake,” J. Hillis-Miller (2006) asks a question which dominates discussions of William Blake’s relationship to New Media: “[w]ould Blake have approved of the William Blake Archive?” (p29). The Archive has itself been the focus of enormous theoretical reflection. The “Articles about the Archive” section on the Archive…[Read more]

The “modern university” is the social institution that has grown beyond the confines of brick and mortar to become a certifying body granting approval to those subjects who pass through its machinery, typically operating under the regulation and supervision of a government-sanctioned system of formalized accreditation. The modern university is ine…[Read more]

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]

Editorial response to “The Coddling of the American Mind” in the September issue of “The Atlantic”

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]

In this essay, I argue for the benefits of Suzanne Gossett’s reading of Pericles over the Oxford’s 1986 reconstructed Pericles, looking specifically at Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2. Gossett argues that Cerimon’s “rough and woeful music” is not a scribal error in the quarto, a doubling of Cerimon’s “rough” in 3.2.78-79, but perhaps intentional on…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue for the benefits of Suzanne Gossett’s reading of Pericles over the Oxford’s 1986 reconstructed Pericles, looking specifically at Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2. Gossett argues that Cerimon’s “rough and woeful music” is not a scribal error in the quarto, a doubling of Cerimon’s “rough” in 3.2.78-79, but perhaps intentional on…[Read more]