- Current research interests
My work is centred on humanities computing, but in consequence is also concerned with the interrelations between the humanities and the sciences in particular and the nature of interdisciplinary research as a whole. The last of these concerns is quite recent as a formal activity. It takes the form of a PhD-level course taught for the King's Graduate School; see below for details.
By my lights "humanities computing" studies the intersection of computing with the disciplines of the humanities and with the nearby arts and interpretative social sciences. I distinguish it from the "digital humanities", a collective term for the various disciplinary practices that humanities computing informs and from which it learns. The basic purpose of my work is to help make the case for humanities computing and to improve understanding of the field as a distinct interdisciplinary common ground. My research is philosophical and historical in character but is based on enquiry into what computing can do for literary criticism. For some years I focused on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Now I am working on a history of literary computing, ca. 1949 (though with many backward looks) to 1991 (when the Web was released to public use); a first draft is "Computing and reading", a series of 5 lectures at the University of Alberta, listed below. This work aims among other things to establish the intellectual and cultural backgrounds for literary computing in the sciences, engineering and popular culture.
As time, energy and native ability permit, my research spans or at least touches on most disciplines sufficiently mature to provide the outsider with clear explanation of their methods, materials and purposes. All of them have something essential to contribute to an understanding of what the computer might be able to do that is currently in doubt or unknown.
- Appointments
- 2010--2012. Professor (fractional), Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney
- 2008--. Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (July 2008-) [X].
- 2007--. Professor of Humanities Computing, King's College London.
- 2007--. Academic staff member, Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication [X], King's College London.
- 2005-7. Reader in Humanities Computing, King's College London.
- 2005-8. Core Resource Faculty, "Contextualizing Classics. Renewal of Teaching Practices and Concepts", University of Sofia, St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria (Open Society Institute, Higher Education Support Program, Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching) [X].
- 1996-2005. Senior Lecturer in Humanities Computing, King's College London.
- Honours and awards
- 2006. Richard W. Lyman Award, National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. [X].
- 2005. Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities, The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs, Canada [X].
- Teaching & and related responsibilities
- I teach postgraduate courses in literary and linguistic analysis [X / X] and a course for the Graduate School on interdisciplinary studies [X]. I am Admissions Tutor for the PhD programme and convene the departmental PhD Seminar.
- Main things
- 2010. "Attending from and to the machine". Inaugural lecture, King's College London, 2 February [X], ppt slides [X] and podcast (with introduction and appreciation by Principal Rick Trainor) [X].
- 2005. Humanities computing (London: Palgrave [X]); note also the Bibliography [X]. Reviews: Johanna Drucker, in the Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.1 [X]; Susan Hockey, Literary and Linguistic Computing 20.4: 463-71; Peter Boot (Huygens Instituut) [X, in Dutch]; Germaine Warkentin, in SHARP News 17.1 (2008) [X].
- Recent publications & public lectures
- 2010. "In the age of explorations" [X] and slides [X]. Closing keynote address for Exploring the Archive in the Digital Age [X], King's College London, 8 May.
- 2010. "Computing and reading". A series of 5 invited lectures, as Distinguished Visitor, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta, 7-14 April. Summary [X]; podcasts and slides:
- A Pisgah-sight of readers and texts. Podcast [X], slides [X]
- The profits of anxiety and failure: Critics and computers 1949-1991. Podcast [X], slides [X]
- Emergent theory: Writing a recent history of the present. Podcast [X], slides [X]
- Excitement elsewhere: Cybernetics and complementarity. Podcast [X], slides [X]
- The Future: What's going on?. Podcast [X], slides [X]
- 2010. "Making friends, or before the science". Invited lecture, Undergraduate Research Conference 2010: UG Research in Computer Science -- Theory and Applications [X] , 24 March. Paper [X] and slides [X].
- 2010. Roundtable discussion, "The Past's Digital Presence", Yale University, 20 February [X (with podcast)].
- 2010. "Pasts, present and futures of the digital humanities". Digital Humanities Lecture Series, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University, 16 February.
- 2009. "Literary enquiry and experimental method: What has happened? What might?" In Storia della Scienza e Linguistica Computazionale: Sconfinamenti Possibili, ed. Liborio Dibattista. 32-54. Milano: Francoangeli. Paper from the International workshop, Crossing boundaries: History of science and computational linguistics, Università di Bari, Italy, 28 April 2008 [X] and ppt slides [X].
- 2009. "That uneasy stare at an alien nature". Festschrift in honour of Ian Lancashire. Digital Studies / Le champ numérique [X].
- 2009. "Quondam et futurus". Workshop on Problems and Futures, Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Scholarly Editing, University of Birmingham, 25 September 2009 [X].
- 2009. "Imagining the hunt: Cutting-edge, collaborative, digitally human & reciprocal" [X] and slides [X]. Keynote lecture for InferFace 2009 [X].
- 2009. Two for the Alumni College, Reed College, 4 June [X]: (1) a lecture, "Without its machinery not more than a machine", notes [X] and slides [X]. (2) a seminar, "A counterfeit life? The humanities in a technoscientific world" [X];
- 2009. "Exploring the archipelago of disciplines", a seminar for the Interdisciplinary Leadership Seminar Series [X] at King's, for which I have designed a PhD-level course [X].
- 2009 (2005). "Being reborn: the humanities, computing and styles of scientific reasoning". New Technology in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1: 1-23 [X]. Invited paper originally delivered at the Renaissance Society of America conference, Clare College, Cambridge, 7 April 2005.
- 2008. Review of Mind Technologies: Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community, ed. Raymond Siemens and David Moorman (Alberta, 2006). University of Toronto Quarterly 77.1: 138-40. [X].
- 2008. "Evidence in and evidence of 'Evidence of Value'". AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminar, 5 November [X]
- 2008. "What's going on?" Literary and Linguistic Computing 23.3: 253-61. Originally given as a plenary lecture for "Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA" [X], Institute for Digital Research and Education, University of California at Los Angeles, 10 May 2007 [X], [X].
- 2008. "Response: Perspectives of Literary Theory". Journal of Literary Theory 1.2: 458-60.
- 2008. Three very closely related talks on literary computing (and another listed above, "Literary enquiry and experimental method", 2009):
- "Digitising is questioning, or else". Long Room Hub Lecture Series, Trinity College Dublin, 16 April 2008 [X] and ppt slides [X]
- "Can we build it? Lessons and speculations on literary computing". Talk for the An Foras Feasa seminar, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 8 April 2008 [X] and ppt slides [X]
- "Neglected, not rejected: Is there a future for literary computing?" Talk for the School of Humanities 20/20/20 Lecture Series, 12 March [X] and ppt slides [X]
- 2008. "Knowing...: modeling in literary studies". Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford: Blackwell [X, 21].
- 2007 (forthcoming 2010). "Special Effects; or, The Tooling is Here. Where are the Results?" In Nachum Dershowitz and Ephraim Nissan, eds., Language, Culture, Computation: Studies in Honour of Yaacov Choueka.
- 2007 (published 2008). "An Anomalous End-Maker Conversation: Foreward for Digital Humanities and the Networked Citizen". Text Technology 15.1: 1-10 [X].
- 2007. Two closely related talks touching on the relation of computer science and the humanities:
- "'Steaming down the sunlight'". Keynote lecture for the first conference of Humanities Serving Irish Society, Galway, Republic of Ireland, 17 November [X] and ppt slides [X]
- "Beyond retrieval? Computer science and the humanities". Keynote lecture for the CATCH Midterm Event, Den Haag, Netherlands, 30 November [X] and ppt slides [X]
- 2007. "Four views of computing: disciplinary, cultural, philosophical, historical". Presentation for Thinking through Computing [X], Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, 2-3 November [X].
- 2007. "Looking backward, figuring forward: Modelling, its discontents and the future". Paper for Digital Humanities 2007 [X], 2-8 June. Paper [X] and ppt slides [X]
- 2007. "Teaching the classics digitally". Annual conference of the Classical Association, University of Birmingham, 12 April [X].
- 2006. "Beyond the word: Modelling literary context". Plenary lecture for "Breadth of text: A joint computer science and humanities computing conference", Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis [X], Fredericton, New Brunswick, 12 October 2006. [X]. Forthcoming (?) in a special issue of Text Technology.
- 2006. "Bridge-building; or, talking at parallel purposes in a non-Euclidian situation". First conference of the project, Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities [X], National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 9 November 2006 [X]
- 2006. "The imaginations of computing". Lyman Award Lecture, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 6 November 2006 [X].
- 2006. "Tree, Turf, Centre, Archipelago -- or Wild Acre? Metaphors and Stories for Humanities Computing". Literary and Linguistic Computing 21.1: 1-13. Originally delivered as a plenary address for Computing Arts 2004: Discipline, Medium, Continuum, University of Newcastle NSW Australia, 8-9 July [X].
- 2006. "Individual matrix, communal workshop and 'the living condition of the human mind'". Keynote address for VALA2006, "Connecting with users", Melbourne, Australia, 8 February 2006. Text and podcast [X].
- The Analytical Onomasticon
- This is no longer in development but is kept available by popular demand :-) [X]
