- Current research interests
My work is centred on computing across the arts, humanities and interpretative social sciences. Because computing is a techno-scientific activity this work is also concerned with and looks for collegial help from the sciences. Hence it leads to questions of interdisciplinary research as a whole, especially how such research is to be understood and done.
Computing in the humanities is nowadays usually known as the "digital humanities", which seems to be a collective term for the various disciplinary practices in the humanities that computing informs and from which it learns. Apart from but symbiotic with the digital humanities is observation and reflection on the present, past and possible futures of computing in the disciplines. This observation and reflection is what I do. Its basic purpose is to open up the possibilities of the interdisciplinary common ground where computing and disciplinary research affect each other. My work is philosophical and historical in character but is based on enquiry into computing in 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 arts, sciences, engineering and popular culture.
I am an active member of the Dictionary of Words in the Wild project [X].
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 [X]
- 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
- Exploring Disciplines, a course for the Graduate School on interdisciplinary research [X].
- Admissions Tutor, PhD in Digital Humanities, and convenor of the departmental PhD Seminar.
- Co-Convenor (with Claire Warwick), London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship [X].
- 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].
- Forthcoming
- 2011-12. "The PhD in digital humanities". In Teaching Digital Humanities, ed. Brett D. Hirsch. Ann Arbor MI: digitalculturebooks [X] (University of Michigan Library and Press).
- 2011-12. "A telescope for the mind?" In Debates in the digital humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- 2011. "Working digitally". In #Alt-Ac: Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, ed. Bethany Nowviskie. Mediacommons [X].
- 2011. "Foreword", in Language Technology for Cultural Heritage: Selected Papers from the LaTeCH Workshop Series, ed. Caroline Sporleder, Antal van den Bosch, and Kalliopi A. Zervanou. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence / Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
- 2011. Introduction, in Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities: A volume in honour of Harold Short on the occasion of his 65th birthday, September 2010, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty. London: Ashgate.
- ? (submitted 2007). "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. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer Verlag. [X].
- Recent publications & public lectures
- 2011. "Look down go down". A Vision for the Digital Humanities in Ireland: Where do we go from here?, 25-6 March [X].
- 2010. Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions (edited volume). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers [X].
- 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].
- The Analytical Onomasticon
- This is no longer in development but is kept available by popular demand :-) [X]
