Participants
Mark Algee-Hewitt
Mark Algee-Hewitt, of Stanford University, is the director of the Stanford Literary Lab and an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities. His research with the Lab spans disciplines and fields, combining quantitative textual analysis with literary critical and historical concepts. In his recent work, he has brought this combination of methods to bear on diverse fields of inquiry, publishing collaborative articles in The Journal of Energy Research and Social Science, Cultural Anthropology, and DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. At the Literary Lab, he leads projects on suspense literature, race and identity in American fiction, micro-genres and the gendered use of quotation in novelistic writing. His book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, uses digital humanities methods to explore the rise and disappearance of the concept of the sublime in aesthetic theory and literature across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
David Bamman
David Bamman is an assistant professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where he works on applying natural language processing and machine learning to empirical questions in the humanities and social sciences. His research often involves adding linguistic structure (e.g., syntax, semantics, coreference) to statistical models of text, and focuses on improving NLP for a variety of languages and domains (such as literary text and social media). Before Berkeley, he received his PhD in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and was a senior researcher at the Perseus Project of Tufts University.
Jana Diesner
Jana Diesner is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool/ School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She conducts research in human-centered data science by combining network analysis, natural language processing and machine learning into computational, mixed-methods solutions that are grounded in theories from linguistics and the social sciences. With her lab, she has been addressing the following problems: 1) Impact assessment I: How can we assess the impact of information products on people beyond relying on count metrics? 2) Impact assessment II: How do limitations in data quality and data provenance impact research findings? 3) NLP for building and enhancing graph data and theory: How can we use user-generated content to construct, infer and refine network data? 4) Ethics and regulations for working with human-centered and online data: How to be rule compliant and still innovate? Jana holds a PhD from the Computation, Organizations and Society program (now Societal Computing) at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. She was a 2015 faculty fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois, and a 2016 research fellow in the Dori J. Maynard Senior Research Fellows program.
Chris Forstall
Chris Forstall has a PhD in Classics from the University at Buffalo. He has worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Classics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and is currently a post-doc in Computer Science at Notre Dame. His book, Quantitative Intertextuality, coauthored with Walter Scheirer, will be published by Springer later this year.
Ryan Heuser
Ryan Heuser is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University, studying British literature and culture in the long eighteenth century. His dissertation explores the interface between forms of abstraction and notions of agency in the period. Within the digital humanities, Ryan has worked on historical prosody, literary geography, and computational semantics. Ryan is a member of the Stanford Literary Lab, and from 2011-2015 served as its Associate Research Director.
Hoyt Long
Hoyt Long is associate professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (2012), and has published extensively in the field of media history and digital humanities. Most recently, he has co-authored “Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism Between Close Reading and Machine Learning” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 2016) and “Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature” (Modern Language Quarterly, Fall 2016). He co-directs the Chicago Text Lab with Richard Jean So.
Marit MacArthur
Marit MacArthur is associate professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield, and a research associate in Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis. Her current research on performative speech lies at the intersection of literary, performance and voice studies. In 2015-16, as an ACLS Digital Innovations Fellow with the ModLab and the Digital Scholarship Lab at UC Davis, she supported the development of new open-source vocal analysis tools. Her recent work on poetry performance and sound studies has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Sounding Out!, Stanford’s Arcade Colloquies, and Cultural Analytics.
Lev Manovich
Dr. Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of ten books including Cultural Analytics (forthcoming), Instagram and Contemporary Image, Data Drift, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media, which was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design" in 2013 and the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" in 2014. Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. The lab created projects for MoMA (NYC), New York Public Library, Google, and other organizations.
Howard Rambsy II
Howard Rambsy II is a Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he teaches courses on African American literature. He is the author of The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry. He has curated mixed media exhibits concentrating on African American literary art, and he is the editor of the Cultural Front blog.
Kenton Rambsy
Kenton Rambsy is an assistant professor of African American literature and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington where he teaches courses on short stories and rap music. Currently, Kenton is working on a manuscript that illuminates an important, though often understudied, mode of literary art by interpreting the depictions of characters navigating distinct social and physical environments in short fiction by the seven most frequently published black writers. He regularly blogs about his digital literary projects on culturalfront.org.
Walter Scheirer
Walter Scheirer is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame, where he specializes in computer vision, machine learning, and digital humanities. He worked previously at Harvard University's Center for Brain Science, and at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His book, Quantitative Intertextuality, coauthored with Chris Forstall, will be published by Springer later this year.
Daniel Sinykin
Dan Sinykin is a visiting assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster. Beginning in August, he will be a postdoctoral fellow in computational literary geography at Notre Dame. He is at work on a book project, Conglomerate Books: A Computational History of Literature in the Age of the Agent, which demonstrates how changes in the publishing industry have shaped contemporary authorship and literary form. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary History, ASAP/Journal, Dissent, Genre, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Post45, and Salon.
Richard Jean So
Richard Jean So is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He specializes in quantitative and computational approaches to literature and culture, especially American culture from 1950 to the present. He has co-written several articles that have appeared in Critical Inquiry, MLQ and PMLA and is working on a book project titled The Data of Cultural Inequality: Race and American Writing, 1950-2000.
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (M.A. 1998, PhD 2002 in Comparative Literature, Aarhus University) is Professor with Special Responsibilities of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature (2008), The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society (2013), and the editor of several volumes, including World Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012), Danish Literature as World Literature (2017) and Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017). He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, canonization, and historical representations of the posthuman. Thomsen has taught at the Institute for World Literature (Harvard, 2013), and he is currently co-director of the research project “Posthuman Aesthetics” (2014-17), co-director of the Digital Text Lab (2015-) and director of the research focus area “Human futures” (2016-19). He is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-).
Ted Underwood
Ted Underwood is Professor of English and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of two books about literary history, including most recently Why Literary Periods Mattered (Stanford, 2013). His articles have appeared in PMLA, Representations, MLQ, and Cultural Analytics. He is currently collaborating with HathiTrust Research Center, and finishing a book to be called The Horizon of Literary History.
Matthew Wilkens
Matthew Wilkens is the symposium organizer and a member of the English faculty at the University of Notre Dame. He works on contemporary literature and computational methods of cultural analysis. He is the author of Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction and has published articles in journals including American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, New Literary History, American Quarterly, Post45, and CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics. Professor Wilkens is the director of the Textual Geographies project and a co-investigator on the Text Mining the Novel project. He is currently at work on a book titled "American Spaces: The Literary Geography of the United States, 1800-2000."