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 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]

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]

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]

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]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[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.

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

This essay surveys Thoreau’s antislavery writings from across his career and demonstrates the ecological concerns central to Thoreau’s abolitionist commitment.