I’m delighted to tell you that Ryan Cordell, Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University, will be coming to Wesleyan on Thursday, November 21st at 4:30 to give a talk on his work and share his perspective on digital scholarship. Ryan has routinely contributed to thinking on digital matters in research and in the undergraduate curriculum as you can see from his writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education among other venues.
The title of his talk is “Viral Textuality: Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers.” The project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and is described here: http://viraltexts.org.
Cordell’s research reflects the best possibilities in the digital humanities. He writes literary history. He collaborates to do so, with computer scientists among others, and he’s revealing new phenomena with old methods and new.
Alongside traditional means of interpretation and contextualization, Cordell takes big data—newspapers for instance—and applies the latest text mining and network analysis to trace key parts of nineteenth century US culture, as they went viral via contemporary social media.
Learn about his exciting research, his innovative methods, and one path for digital research.
The talk will be in the Downey House lounge. Hope to see you there.
If you would like to meet Ryan to discuss specific methodological issues in teaching or scholarship, just tell me and I’ll try to arrange it.