The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

This is the peer-reviewed submission version of the essay, which focuses on the role that digital communication platforms can play in teaching and engaging with Wallace’s work.

Part of the Digital Media MA / Texts & Technology PhD Digital Media track at the University of Central Florida. In this graduate course, we’ll engage with the making and critique of interactive works ranging from “Choose Your Own Adventure” comics to electronic literature and interactive fiction. Drawing on readings including Janet Murray’s Hamlet…[Read more]

This short chapter began as a blog post arguing that collaboration and sharing is one of the defining aspects of the digital humanities.

The syllabus for DIG 220: Death in the Digital Age, a course taught by Mark Sample at Davidson College in Spring 2019.

A critical introduction to the keyword “code” as it relates to video games.

“Location Is Not Compelling (Until It Is Haunted).” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Chapter 21 of The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 296-310.

As the digital humanities have rapidly gained prominence and attention over the last decade, learning has shifted from individual experiences at training environments such as THATCamps and Institutes to more formal institutional instruction. This means that the number of people teaching digital humanities (DH) has had to increase. Who are these…[Read more]

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and “core” series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a…[Read more]

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in…[Read more]

Syllabus for the introductory course in UCF’s Texts & Technology PhD program. Builds on a previous iteration of the course taught by Mel Stanfill.

The integration of interactive stories into digital humanities practice has taken several forms. Interactive stories are certainly an object of study, and the intersection of digital humanities with media and games studies (as well as communities dedicated to making and studying interactive stories, such as the Electronic Literature Organization,…[Read more]

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither “history of the book” nor “media studies,” this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio.

This talk focuses on peer review models, considering issues of labor and credit within them. It then turns to the ethos of care to discuss how peer-to-peer review processes can be structure with care to ensure that participant labor is valued. The talk ends with a focus on the nature of the labor in peer-to-peer review, arguing that it is…[Read more]

History and theory of video games with a focus on cultural impact.

DTC 392 explores the cultural and historical impact of video games. We will learn about these issues by engaging in a semester-long project where we will prototype a video game. Video games are not just entertainment: they can be art, a form of political resistance, even a way…[Read more]

Digital humanists have a labor problem, but it’s not what you might think. In this chapter, I describe the problem of student labor in digital humanities as I see it, and examine some of the structural issues that drive the use of student labor. I place the labor economy of digital humanities projects within the broader context of the innovation e…[Read more]

Behind the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a deep substrate that includes a vast data management system, highly detailed SGML markup conventions, extensive international labor, and the enormous cultural weight of the Victorian-era DNB. In this article, I argue that it is only by investigating components of our historiographical…[Read more]