University of Maryland
This website has not been updated in a decade and is no longer actively maintained. As of January 2026, I am Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English at the University of Virginia. Please see my faculty profile there for contact information and a current description of my research.
For news and updates related to my recently published book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, please see my Tumblr site.
I recently gave the 2016 Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, under the collective title of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage. All three nights are now available for viewing. The book version of the lectures is under contract to the University of Pennsylvania Press. The Transformissions of the Archive: Literary [ ]
Very excited for two new books coming out this spring: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, due out from Harvard/Belknap in early May 2016 (approx. 340 pages with over 20 photographs), and Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, an 800-page (!) anthology with almost 70 contributors and over 100 illustrations co-edited with the [ ]
Available here is the full text of an essay published in differences 25.1 (2014) as part of a special issue entitled In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities edited by Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed. Duke UP’s publishing agreements allow authors to post the final version of their own work, but not using the publisher’s [ ]
Those who follow my work will know that I ve been focused for a while on issues around the preservation and scholarly investigation of a variety of different kinds of born-digital materials, from electronic manuscripts to video games and virtual worlds. I ve tried to be a bridge between the professional practitioners in the archives community and [ ]
This is the text of a talk I gave on April 5, 2013 on the plenary panel at the Electronic Literature Showcase at the Library of Congress, curated by Kathi Inman Berens and Dene Grigar. In a 2006 novel entitled Lisey’s Story, Stephen King recounted the thoughts of a best-selling writers’ widow as she fends [ ]
I wrote this short piece for Slate about my pick for the first novel written with a word processor a teaser from Track Changes.
This is the text of a brief (5-minute) talk I delivered today at the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference as part of a panel entitled “All Your Bits Aren’t Belong To Us: Opportunities and Challenges of Personally Revealing Information in Digital Collections. Fellow panelists were Cal Lee, Naomi Nelson, and Kam Woods. The ideas could [ ]
February 6 I m running an introduction to MLA Commons for the UMD English department. We re doing a BitCurator panel on ethics and digital forensics at the Personal Digital Archiving conference February 21-22. I ll be giving a talk with Wendy Chun at NYU on March 1, both of us speaking under the general rubric of Media [ ]