New Work in Digital Humanities
This podcast presents interviews with digital humanists about their recent projects and publications. Each episode offers scholars the chance to discuss the methods, tools, and findings of their work in the digital humanities. It is part of the New Books Network, which hosts author interviews across many academic fields.
Episodes
Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026)
We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: cou
The MANTRAMS Project and Digital Mantra Research: A Discussion with Borayin Larios
Every day, tens of millions of people use mantras all around the globe. Originating in South Asia and then spreading via practitioners, texts, rituals, and iconography, mantras have been grounded in speech and sound but also take a range of material forms. For instance, they are inscribed on surfaces, written in manuscripts, printed on posters, visually encoded in diagrams, or worn as amulets and
Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)
The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history—became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY–new media geeks to capture the attention of the art w
Ian M. Cook, "Scholarly Podcasting: Why, What, How" (Routledge, 2022)
Exploring what academic podcasting is and what it could be, Ian Cook's Scholarly Podcasting (Routledge, 2023) is the first to consider the why, what, and how academics engage with this insurgent, curious craft.
Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting d
Suzette van Haaren, "The Digital Medieval Manuscript: Material Approaches to Digital Codicology" (Brill, 2025)
We increasingly encounter medieval books as digital facsimiles—zooming in on high-resolution images, clicking through virtual pages, or engaging with interactive displays. But what actually happens when a parchment manuscript is translated into a digital object? How does this change affect our understanding of cultural heritage?
In The Digital Medieval Manuscript: Material Approaches to Digital C
Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI
Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. With Rebind, you can read A Tale of Two Cities with Margaret Atwood, Huck Finn with Marlon James, and Candide with Salman Rushdie. John and his team have recently launched the Rebind Study Bible, an interactive way to read, listen, and interpret the Bib
Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner, "The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last" (Crown Currency, 2025)
In my interview with Jimmy Wales, father of Wikipedia, we celebrate his new book, The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last (Crown Currency Publishing, 2025). We talk about how the book came about, how Wikipedia took flight, and how the challenges of maintaining trust and preserving neutrality shape the key to Wikipedia's future.
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Elisabetta Ferrari, "Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies" (U California Press, 2024)
Activists utilize digital technologies to communicate, coordinate, and organize for social change. In Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies (U California Press, 2024) Elisabetta Ferrari examines both the politics of Silicon Valley's technological imaginary and how leftist activists appropriate, negotiate, and challenge Silicon Valley's vi
Samuel Arbesman, "The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future" (PublicAffairs, 2025)
In the tradition of classics such as The Lives of a Cell, a bold reframing of our relationship with technology that argues code is "a universal force--swirling through disciplines, absorbing ideas, and connecting worlds" (Linda Liukas).
In the digital world, code is the essential primary building block, the equivalent of the cell or DNA in the biological sphere--and almost as mysterious. Code can
Human Leadership for Humane Technology
In this episode, we spoke with Cornelia C. Walther about her three books examining technology's role in society. Walther, who spent nearly two decades with UNICEF and the World Food Program before joining Wharton's AI & Analytics Initiative, brings field experience from West Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to her analysis of how human choices shape technological outcomes.
The conversation covered
Andrew Fialka, "Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates two exceptional incidents of occupational and guerrilla violence in Missouri during the American Civil War. The first is a Union spy's two-week-long murder spree targeting civilians, and the second is a pro-Confederate guerrillas' mutilation of almost
Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, "The Future of Memory: Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic" (U of Illinois Press, 2025)
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Jimi Jones and Dr. Marek Jancovic, authors of The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive (U of Illinois Press, 2025), to the New Books Network.
In this book, Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic document the development and adoption of JPEG 2000, FFV1, MXF, and Matroska while investigating the social and material aspects of their
Liz Fischer, "Network Analysis for Book Historians: Digital Labour and Data Visualization Techniques" (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)
Researchers and archivists have spent decades digitizing and cataloguing, but what does the future hold for book history? Network Analysis for Book Historians: Digital Labour and Data Visualization Techniques (ARC Humanities Press, 2025) explores the potential of network analysis as a method for medieval and early modern book history. Through case studies of the Cotton Library, the Digital Index o
Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark, "Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark
In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book
Paul A. Thomas, "Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typograph
How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research
Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and schol
Pāṇḍitya: Mapping Sanskrit Texts Online
Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network.
Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is here.
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Peter Krapp, "Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation" (MIT Press, 2024)
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Network.
In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy.
Nothingism
In this episode of High Theory, Jason Schneiderman talks about Nothingism. A term of his own coinage, a tongue-in-cheek manifesto, nothingism is an invitation to refuse the values of digital culture in favor of the values of print.
You can read more about poetry at the end of print culture in Jason’s new book, entitled Nothingism (Michigan UP, 2025).
In the episode Jaason refers to M.B. Parkes’s
Peter B. Kaufman, "The Moving Image: A User's Manual" (MIT Press, 2025)
Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image: A User's Manual (MIT Press, 2025) is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first de
Cosmic Visions in Sound
Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space?
Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hof
Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers
Ashley R. Sanders, "Visualizing History’s Fragments: A Computational Approach to Humanistic Research" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Visualizing History’s Fragments: A Computational Approach to Humanistic Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) combines a methodological guide with an extended case study to show how digital research methods can be used to explore how ethnicity, gender, and kinship shaped early modern Algerian society and politics. However, the approaches presented have applications far beyond this specific study. Mo
Astrid J. Smith, "Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age" (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)
Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age (ARC Humanities Press, 2024) explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, Astrid J. Smith interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also ask
Spacing Out with Dallas Taylor of 20,000 HZ
Today we talk to Dallas Taylor, host of the most popular sound podcast on the planet, Twenty Thousand Hertz. I like to think our show sounds pretty good, but Twenty Thousand Hertz is next-level audio production, some of the very best in the podcasting business. And Dallas prides himself on making a podcast for absolutely everyone. As he told me, he tries to make a show that’s just as mainstream an
Giovanna Ceserani, "A World Made by Traval: A Digital Grand Tour" (Stanford UP, 2024)
In the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of travelers journeyed to Italy on the Grand Tour. These travels in the age of Enlightenment contributed to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, and of ideas about education and leisure.
A World Made by Traval: A Digital Grand Tour (Stanford UP, 2024) combines —in dynamic format— original research with data and visu
Awfully Viral
It’s summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We’ve also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There’s other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned!
But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin’s Sound Expertise. For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there’s a great chance you’re
Liliana M. Naydan, "Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America" (U Georgia Press, 2021)
Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don De
The World According to Sound
The World According to Sound is the brainchild of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. It began as a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Then it became something much more ambitious: a live sonic Odyssey in 8-channel surround sound. Starting January, Harnett and Hoff bring their realtime sou
Tyler W. Williams, "If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi" (Columbia UP, 2024)
In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizin
Dariusz Wojcik et al., "Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money" (Yale UP, 2024)
From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented.
Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale Un
Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)
Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights ad
Kathleen McGoey and Lindsey Pointer, "Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools for Online Learning: Games and Activities for Restorative Justice Practitioners" (Good Books, 2024)
Teaching, training, and gathering online has become a global norm since 2020. Restorative practitioners have risen to the challenge to shift restorative justice processes, trainings, and classes to virtual platforms, a change that many worried would dilute the restorative experience. How can people build relationships with genuine empathy and trust when they are not in a shared physical space? How
Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to
Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)
Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation.
The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding i
Behind the Mic: How Danielle D’Orlando is Transforming Academic Audiobooks at Princeton UP
Princeton University Press publishes some of the best books every year, racking up accolades and launching the careers of thousands of scholars. As an editor at the New Books Network and a frequent host, I love speaking with Princeton UP authors. A striking feature of many PUP books is the quality of writing. Their books are simultaneously detailed and highly readable. No wonder PUP books have fou
Michael Gavin, "Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford UP,
Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Are you a musical theatre fan who loves TikTok? Or are you curious about how this social media app has changed musical theatre fandom - and even the concept of the musical itself?
TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2024) takes readers inside the world of TikTok Broadway, where fans create, expand, and canonize musical theatre through viral videos. It argues that
Beth Driscoll, "What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
What is reading? In What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2024) Beth Driscoll, an Associate Professor in Publishing, Communications and Arts Management at the University of Melbourne, explores this question by situating reading in a variety of contemporary social contexts. The book’s analysis engages with a range of academic fields to understand the stud
Stephen Pinfield, "Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic and Participatory Openness" (Routledge, 2024)
Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices.
Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylo
Craig Gent, "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" (Verso, 2024)
Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.
In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work (Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule
Goth Diss
With My Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels
Miguel Escobar Varela, "Theater as Data: Computational Journeys Into Theater Research" (U Michigan Press, 2021)
In Theater As Data: Computational Journeys Into Theater Research (U Michigan Press, 2021), Miguel Escobar Varela explores the use of computational methods and digital data in theater research. He considers the implications of these new approaches, and explains the roles that statistics and visualizations play. Reflecting on recent debates in the humanities, the author suggests that there are two w
Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023)
We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our p
AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities"
In this debut conversation, we speak to Dr. Nina Beguš, a researcher at UC Berkeley and the founder of InterpretAI who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Listen to learn about Nina’s path at the intersection of AI and the humanities, the challenges and rewards of working across disciplines, what questions to ask as an ethical researcher, and practical advice for how to
Joanna Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History (Cambridge UP, 2022) celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors. The book opens with a rogue's gallery of errors, then tours the
Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)
What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging t
Natalia Grincheva and Elizabeth Stainforth, "Geopolitics of Digital Heritage" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
How are digital platforms transforming heritage? In Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge UP, 2023), Dr Natalia Grincheva, Program Leader of the BA (Hons) Arts Management at the University of the Arts Singapore and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Dr Elizabeth Stainforth, a lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the Univer
Grazia Ingravalle, "Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Am
Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)
The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death.
In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them
Religious Minorities Online
Religious Minorities Online (RMO) is the premier academic resource on religious minorities worldwide, reflecting the state of the art in scholarship. It is written by leading scholars and is rigorously peer-reviewed.
Available as an Open Access publication and written in an accessible style, Religious Minorities Online is an indispensable resource not only for students and academics but also to br
Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, "Tudor Networks of Power" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Tudor Networks of Power (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Ruth Ahnert & Dr. Sebastian Ahnert is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specialising in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (15
Refqa Abu-Remaileh, "Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford UP, 2023) is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of
Ross S. Purves et al., "Unlocking Environmental Narratives: Towards Understanding Human Environment Interactions Through Computational Text Analysis" (Ubiquity Press, 2022)
Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and their surroundings. Situated at the intersection of the environmental and digital humanities, Unlocking Environmental Narratives: Towards Understanding Human Environment Interactions Through Computational Text Analysis (Ubiquity Press, 2022) examines the potenti
Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, "Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
Featuring perspectives from educators, undergraduates, and archivists who are affiliated with community and institutional archives, the contributions to Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives (U Michigan Press, 2023) explore efforts to deconstruct and transform the institutional authority of the archive and describe new possibilities for arc
James St. André, "Conceptualising China through Translation" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Conceptualising China through Translation (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. James St Andre provides an innovative methodology for investigating how China has been conceptualised historically by tracing the development of four key cultural terms (filial piety, face, fengshui, and guanxi) between English and Chinese. It addresses how specific ideas about what constitutes the uniqueness of C
André Jansson, "Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition" (Edward Elgar, 2022)
How are geographies of communication changing with contemporary digital media and data infrastructure? What is ‘geomedia’ and ‘transmedia’? Where are the possibilities for human agency to emerge in the increasingly digitally mediated world? André Jansson, Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, introduces his latest book, Rethinking Communica
Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI" (MIT Press, 2023)
A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.
We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to
Simone Gigliotti, "Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced" (Indiana UP, 2023)
The global refugee, the ship passenger, the displaced person. How did their homeseeking routes and visual motifs intersect and diverge in the early Holocaust film archive? Simone Gigliotti's Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced tracks the footsteps and routes of predominantly Jewish refugees and postwar displaced persons in what I call a “restless archive” of photographi
Robert Houghton, "Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
The Middle Ages have provided rich source material for physical and digital games from Dungeons and Dragons to Assassin's Creed. Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games (Bloomsbury, 2023) addresses the many ways in which different formats and genre of games represent the period. It considers the restrictions placed on these representations by the mechanical and gameplay req
Anne Baillot, "From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis" (Open Book Publishers, 2023)
How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future?
In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary signif
Kat Mustatea, "Voidopolis" (MIT Press, 2023)
Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, Kat Mustatea's Voidopolis (MIT Press, 2023) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.
Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely
Stefan Tanaka, "History without Chronology" (Lever Press, 2019)
In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's
William B. Eimicke et al., "Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Will the COVID-19 pandemic be remembered as a turning point in how universities deliver teaching and learning? How might the widespread use of digital tools change higher education?
Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the role of digital education at this crucial crossroads. Built on interviews with more than fifty leading pr
Txt
In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text?
In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail (Macmillan, 2019) as an excellent example of writing about the end of the internet, and Emily St. John Ma
Paul A. Thomas, "Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typograph
Teaching (and Learning) at a University Online
There is a lot of talk about online learning, and particularly universities going online. Today I talked to Caleb Simmons, Executive Director of Arizona Online (and notable scholar of religion and South Asian Studies). We talk about how online learning is done at Arizona and the promise of online learning generally.
Listeners might be interested in Caleb's article Narrative Pedagogy and Transmedi
Michael D. Smith, "The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World" (MIT Press, 2023)
For too long, our system of higher education has been defined by scarcity: scarcity in enrollment, scarcity in instruction, and scarcity in credentials. In addition to failing students professionally, this system has exacerbated social injustice and socioeconomic stratification across the globe. In The Abundant University, Michael D. Smith argues that the only way to create a financially and moral
Avery Dame-Griff, "The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet" (NYU Press, 2023)
Avery Dame-Griff's The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others inte
A Better Way to Buy Books
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho
Stephen Ramsay, "On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Stephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English depart
Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and the Future of Academic Publishing
Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts discusses the how advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping academic publishing. Avi offers various solutions and remedies to concerns around misuse, in addition to offering several tools that can support academics in their writing and research.
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Becoming Justice Thomas
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Seas
Academic Publishers Grapple with Advances in AI
Niko Pfund joins the podcast to discuss the value of scientific content for building out Large Language Models and some of the challenges around tracking the quality and ownership of aggregated content from unknown sources. We also discuss potential avenues for collaboration between Generative AI companies and scholarly publishers.
Niko Pfund is Academic Publisher at Oxford University Press and P
Martin Paul Eve, "Close Reading with Computers" (Stanford UP, 2019)
Most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope instead. The first monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear on a single novel in a sustained fashion, it focuses on the award-winning and genre-bending Cloud Atlas (2004). Published in
Academic Aunties: A Conversation with Dr. Ethel Tungohan
You’ve probably heard by now that there’s a hidden curriculum in academia. But it’s called hidden for a reason—only some [privileged] people are in the know about what it contains. And when you can’t find the answers you need, earning your degree is much harder than it should be. Today, higher education podcast host Dr. Ethel Tungohan of the Academic Aunties joins Dr. Christina Gessler, the produc
Jade E. Davis, "The Other Side of Empathy" (Duke UP, 2023)
In The Other Side of Empathy (Duke UP, 2023), Jade E. Davis contests the value of empathy as an affective or critical tool. Whether focusing on technology, colonialism, or racism, she shows how empathy can obscure relationships of dominance, control, submission, and victimization, arguing that these histories taint the whole concept of empathy.
Drawing on digital archives of photographs, memoirs,
Sangraha: Digital Cataloguing of Sanskrit Manuscripts
Sanjaya Singhal discusses Sangraha, an ambitious digital enterprise cataloguing India's millions of decaying Sanskrit manuscripts. Sangraha is a detailed, descriptive catalogue allowing users to find relevant manuscripts with a wide range of search terms. Eventually it will have 2.5 million entries.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu
The End of Books: A Lecture by Robert Coover
Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992 New York Times essay. Coover established Brown University’s MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on expe
The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)
Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.
Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, fi
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