The digital archive of Saint-Domingue poses major questions relating to power and the production of history, especially since North American institutions possess and have digitized massive collections of French language materials. Once digitized, how will the material be curated, read, and interpreted by the archive’s various users (teachers,…[Read more]

This presentation explores ethical dilemmas for graduate school educators in programs that prepare M.A. students to teach English in community colleges. Such graduate programs attract students and produce strong, enthusiastic teachers, and university administrators value the programs because they draw tuition; however, the job prospects for…[Read more]

The text of the job talk that I gave for my position as Head of Graduate Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at the UVA Library. The talk argued that the position as advocate for graduate students and facilitator of collaborative DH pedagogy required a person to think in terms of prepositions. Such a position requires making connections across the…[Read more]

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes.

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

To understand the Oulipo’s forays into computer science and more importantly, why they abandoned them, I designed and carried out one of the inaugural projects of the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities. The goal was twofold: first, through exploratory programming, I intended to create interactive, digital annexes to accompany my doctoral…[Read more]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[Read more]

Syllabus for a graduate-level course with the following overview: “We will examine how theoretical discourse has evolved through shifting technological platforms, with particular attention to the challenges software, code, and networks present to our understanding of texts. We will engage with examples of complex procedural works ranging from…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]