I am a 2^nd year doctoral student in the English program. My focus is on technologies of reading and writing in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries; some of the things my work has focused on include the development of the back-of-the-book index, dictionaries and language standardization efforts in the early U.S., and imaginary accounts of poetry-writing machines in the long 18^th century. I am interested in bringing these older technologies into dialogue with contemporary computer technologies, including digital publishing and text mining/corpus linguistic techniques.

Before I came to the Graduate Center, I worked as a database and data visualization programmer, first at Nature Publishing Group and then at NYU Medical School. Although I studied literature in college and at the MA level, I also have an extensive background in computers, especially in graphics and compilers/programming language design. The inspiration for the work that I am doing now came in part from my experience working with faculty data in a large university. One of my overall goals is to historicize the roles that databases and other computer technologies play in organizations like universities. What assumptions, I want to ask, underlie the way in which we incorporate these technologies into our institutions at the present moment?

Like many people who have switched from programming to the humanities, I am strongly committed to a humanistic approach, and I am wary of scholarly approaches that straightforwardly attempt to apply computer science methodology to the humanities. What I have tried to do instead is engage with computers as a historically-situated object of study that sits on a level with material from the past. I began taking this approach in my first major project, a collaboration with Collin Jennings in which we looked at the index from the 1784 edition of The Wealth of Nations in comparison with a topic model generated using the text. I also wrote a sort of manifesto about the possibility of a critical approach to text mining for Core 1, and I am hoping to carry on in this vein in Core 2.

On a more practical level, I have been working on developing software to help with scholarship and teaching in the humanities. One project that is fairly far along in its development is the Distance Machine, a program that identifies words in a text that were unusual at a particular point in time based on a statistical model of the Google Ngrams corpus. I also have been experimenting with ways of manipulating outlines of texts using computer logic, either as a way of helping people come up with ideas for writing or for playing with conjectures about the structure of an existing text (this program is not online at the moment, but I have a prototype that I could demo on my computer if anyone is interested). Last but not least, I am a fan of Twitter bots. I created one so far—Coleridge Bot—and I have a few more ideas in the pipelines.