Preserving and Analyzing Digital Texts

Date: 21 April 2023
Time: 3:00-4:30 p.m. ET
Location: Zoom
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography

Join us for a virtual symposium exploring the materiality and historical value of digital texts, with special attention paid to methods for preservation and analysis.

This event was held on Zoom on 21 April 2023. See below for a link to the YouTube recording.

James A. Hodges is Assistant Professor in the San José State University School of Information, where he studies digital archives and preservation with a particular focus on the history of computing. His current book project uses digital forensics to uncover the technical legacy of 1960s counterculture in early multimedia software. Prior to joining SJSU, James was Bullard Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. He is also a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School as well as Senior Book Reviews Editor for Information & Culture. He earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2020, and his work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Documentation, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Internet Histories, New Media & Society, and Information Research.

Emily Maemura is Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on data practices and the activities of curation, description, characterization, and re-use of archived web data. She is interested in approaches and methods for working with archived web data in the form of large-scale research collections, considering diverse perspectives of the internet as an object and site of study. She previously worked as an academic librarian at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and the International Journal of Digital Humanities. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, with a dissertation exploring the practices of collecting and curating web pages and websites for future use by researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

Ryan Cordell’s scholarship seeks to illuminate how technologies of production, reception, circulation, and remediation shape the meanings of texts within historical communities, as well as how the complexities of historical texts pressure modern scholarly infrastructure. He is currently Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the UIUC iSchool, Ryan Cordell was Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University and a core founding faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Cordell primarily studies circulation and reprinting in nineteenth-century American newspapers, but his interests extend to the influence of digitization and computation on contemporary reading, writing, and research. He collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. He is also a practicing letterpress printer who explores intersections between historical and contemporary information technologies through the lens of maker culture. Cordell is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and serves as the Delegate Assembly Representative for the MLA’s Forum on Digital Humanities.

Benjamin Charles Germain Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he works with Professor Daniel Weld and is a member of the Lab for Human-AI Interaction. Previously, he was a 2020 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. He is currently pursuing research toward a dissertation at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction, with application to cultural heritage and the digital humanities. His Ph.D. research is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in machine learning. Before beginning his Ph.D., he was the inaugural Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s History Department. Benjamin also writes essays, which have appeared in Current Affairs, Gawker, Real Life, and GoldFlakePaint.

You are invited to watch the April 2023 recording of the event below via our RBS YouTube channel.