A book review of Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-’60s economists had diagnosed as “urban crisis” and in 1970 John Ashbery called “urban chaos.” I’m particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the “spatio-temporal fix” of urban renewal. My general idea is…[Read more]

This syllabus describes an interdisciplinary course for first-year students in the NC State University Honors program in Fall 2015. “Interpretive Machines” offers a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. The course also…[Read more]

This syllabus describes a first-year interdisciplinary honors course undertaken in fall 2014 at NC State University. It welcomes students into a hands-on environment for thinking about and practicing with new and old platforms for reading, interpretation, and understanding. It attempts to bridge book history and digital humanities into an…[Read more]

In 2011, U.S. News & World Report indicated that online courses had been increasing for nine straight years in a row. Or, the online presence has been continuously growing since roughly the turn of the century. The Online Learning Consortium just published a report on online learning for 2015, from which we can the pervasiveness of the online…[Read more]

Dreams are abstract thoughts in one’s mind that can be revealed. Thoughts that are suppressed can be revealed in the subconscious mind. Sigmund Freud views dreams as one views sleep; as an abstract code that can be decoded through actions and through the ‘slip of the tongue.’ The Freudian slip is found in several passages of A Portrait of the A…[Read more]

This panel was designed to address the convention’s featured issues of the academic profession, publishing & editing, open access, and new technologies. Using a roundtable format, the panel discussed how open access publications are transforming the kind of research that is possible and necessitating new editorial practices. The session hosted an…[Read more]

Open access has great potential to transform the future of scholarly communication, but its success will require a focus on values — and particularly generosity — rather than on costs.

A video essay about title sequences from films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. An exploration of motion graphic design from analog to digital.

Nearly all scholars who work on medieval or early modern texts at some point work from digital facsimiles. There are advantages and disadvantages to such objects: what they might offer in terms of convenience and availability, they lack in material information. We can adjust the nature of what questions we ask of which object, consulting digital…[Read more]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an author, letter writer and poet who lived between 1890 and 1937. His works blend science fiction with Gothic themes. Lovecraft was, by the majority of accounts (including his own), a bad writer. He was also an outspoken racist for the majority of his life to a degree which makes much of his work, to a modern reader,…[Read more]

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]