Book history, digital humanities, old newspapers, and information sciences
The following was delivered as the keynote for the “Thinking Through Printing” symposium at the University of Toronto on June 4, 2026. This talk is part of a series that will become an article, and some text repeats from a previous talk, “Anemoia, AI, and Skeuomorphism: The Material Turn in Digital Humanities”, given at Purdue’s inaugural DH Day in April 2026. If you read or heard that earlier…
The following was prepared for Purdue University’s inaugural DH Day on April 7, 2026. I’ve modified the text a bit to omit some prefatory material that makes less sense in a blog post, and to change some of the “talk” language to read more clearly as a single written piece.
The following are my remarks as a respondent to papers by Kathi Inman Berens, Brian Croxall, and Matthew Kollmer for the “Student-Centered AI & DH Practices” roundtable at MLA 2026. Some was written ahead of the panel, and some during the panelists’ talks, so forgive its informality.
The following are my brief remarks for the ACH’s MLA 2025 roundtable on “Book History and the Digital Humanities.”. As you will see, I went in a slightly different direction between my abstract and the actual roundtable.
This is cross-posted from the Skeuomorph Press blog. If you want you can forget the prose below & just go straight to the whitepaper.
The text below was developed over a few speaking engagements this past year, including UICB’s Annual Nancy Brownell Lecture on the History of the Book, a talk for Freie Universität’s Dahlem Humanities Center and the Bloomsbury Chapter Stevenson Lecture. This research and my previous post, “Toward a Bibliography of AI Systems,” are both part of new work seeking to apply bibliographical and book…
The following resources were prepared for a workshop at the Exploring Digital Humanities Conference, which will be held on 30 June 2023 at the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University.
The following remarks were prepared for The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography forum on “Preserving and Analyzing Digital Texts.”
The following remarks were prepared for the 30 Years of Digital Humanities at UVA conference, as part of a panel on “DH, Graduate Education, Careers.”
I’m happy to have another essay I wrote pre-pandemic out now out. “Newspapers and Periodicals” can be found in the American Literature in Transition, 1851-1877. This piece allowed me to delve into the radical hybridity of nineteenth-century periodicals and discuss everything from the columns of Fanny Fern to the origins of Scientific American.