Projects
Direct Address:
My current book project, Keeping You Close: The Data of Direct Address, employs computational text analysis techniques to examine the frequency and variance of direct address in a corpus of over 3000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone novels. I argue that these moments provide insight into how authors characterize themselves and how they conceive of their reading public.
You can read more about this project in the Dear Reader GitHub repository and in my article "Computation as Context" in College Literature.
Gender and Action:
I worked on and led a series of collaborative projects that examined the relationship between character gender and character behavior in 3500 nineteenth-century novels. The study found a strong correlation between character gender and action: a machine-trained model was able to correctly guess the gender of a character based on the action the character was performing 81% of the time. You can read more about this work in the Journal of Cultural Analytics and in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
Cultural Analytics Engagement:
Much of my work falls under the umbrella of Cultural Analytics (CA), an emerging field that uses data-driven methodologies to engage the humanities. I do not position computational tools as affording us the opportunity to objectively "answer" humanities questions. Instead, I argue that computational tools offer the potential to raise new questions and that the humanities have much to offer data science (a longstanding attention to nuance, identity, affect, etc.) I advocate for the collaboration of the humanities and STEM disciplines in a number of spaces, including WashU's Humanities Digital Workshop and the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences. I am also part of a collective of early career scholars working towards submitting an NSF RCN grant to develop CA infrastructure.
Videogames in the Classroom:
I teach several classes that involve game analysis and game creation. By creating games, students can enact the types of change they wish to see in contemporary media. My work on games in the classroom is available from The Programming Historian and in Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom. To play a short game I created as part of a forthcoming article, check out First Day in the Office.
I have also taught game creation workshops and helped organize the first North Texas Gaming Symposium.
Digital Approaches to Willa Cather:
Digital Archives and editions produce vast troves of valuable data and metadata. In the case of the Cather Archive's Complete Letters project, this data includes over 8,900 references to people, 4,000 references to places, and 3,500 references to works. This data has the potential to provide rich insight into the works of the celebrated American novelist Willa Cather and into the places, historical events, and social issues she engaged in her fiction. I have collaborated on several projects that use digital tools to explore both the places that Cather writes about and the social networks that emerge from her letters. You can read more about this work in the volume In the Country of Lost Borders: New Critical Essays on My Ántonia, in a forthcoming essay in Cather Studies, and on The Datebook App.
Digital Archives:
As a graduate student, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work for the Cather Archive as an editorial assistant from 2014 to 2018. My efforts focused on the NEH-funded Complete Letters of Willa Cather, a project to digitize and publish 1500 of Cather's letters. While a graduate student, I also had the opportunity to work with and learn from the William Blake Archive and the Walt Whitman Archive. These experiences greatly influenced my conception of computational data as a form of context.