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]

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]

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]

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]

The block that I am teaching on Birkbeck, University of London’s MA in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2018-2019.

This wide-ranging block focuses on a series of important topics examining the convergence of technology, subjectivity and cultural theory. By examining technological, political, and cultural change, we will consider how 20th and…[Read more]

The Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities is about researching media through new media: for example, playing games to better understand their politics and mechanics, exhibiting new media art to witness how people engage it, building stories to become more familiar with their structures and narratives, making wearable technologies to…[Read more]

This article argues that the humanities and medicine fields have paid insufficient attention to race, which is reflected in and enabled by the apolitical nature of their cornerstone principles, their practices of literary interpretation, and their paucity of scholarship on writers of color. I examine the fields’ interpretation of Audre Lorde’s ill…[Read more]

This essay identifies four major factors responsible for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Analyses of selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott illustrate that these four factors include the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]