Willard McCarty, King’s College London

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Rolena Adorno, Yale University

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Edward Ayers, University of Richmond

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George Miles, Yale University

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Roundtable Discussion

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Video of this event is hosted at the Internet Archive.

Alexandre Monin
Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University
Panel: “Theorizing the Digital Archive”

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February 19, 2010
Peter Stallybrass
Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

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You can also download a podcast of this address at Making History.

April Merleaux
Yale University
Panel: “How-To Digital Humanities”

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Micah Stupak and Garret Voorhees
Rochester Institute of Technology
Panel: “Finding the Words: The Digital Linguistics Database”

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Rachael Sullivan
University of Texas at Dallas
Panel: “Evolving Reading Practices”

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On the Internet—where banner, pop-up, and in-text ads interweave with content—literature and seemingly unrelated words and images collide. When poetry is remediated on the Internet, the boundaries we set between the poetic object and contextual frame become apparent as choices that are worth interrogation. Emily Dickinson’s poetry appears on a variety of scholarly and nonscholarly web sites, some of which are filled with online ads. Without a doubt, her words have come a long way from the manuscripts and fascicles that once filled the drawers of her desk in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet, tracing origins does not always bring clarity to texts. As Sharon Cameron points out in Choosing Not Choosing, unity or understanding is not produced through reading Dickinson’s poems in a fascicle context. “What is more radically revealed,” Cameron writes, “is a question about what constitutes the identity of the poem” (4). Online advertising, as it becomes more intrusive and targeted, also reveals questions about what constitutes a literary text and a poem in particular. The Internet is not so much a threat as it is a new textual dimension from which we can learn to be more attentive to language and the interpretive choices we make as readers.

Talk: “Dickinson Meets DoubleClick: Remediating Poetry”
Panel: “Evolving Reading Practices”

Rachael Sullivan holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is currently an M.A. student in Literary and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her scholarly interests include contemporary poetry, media history and theory, and electronic literature. Her current project examines the implications of hybrid literary texts, particularly lyric and confessional poetries, that have both a print and digital identity or version. Next fall, she will begin a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Media Studies.

Scott Nesbit
University of Virginia
Panel: “Mapping History”

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Scholars have increasingly called for new tools that would enable them to organize the large digital collections that are increasingly available online. In a previous era of massive documentary publishing, historians at the Carnegie Institution and elsewhere found that the Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States provided a helpful addition to the large collections of suddenly accessible documentary records. This paper takes its cue from those efforts to suggest that an online atlas would be a useful complement the recent large-scale digitization of historical documents.

Talk: “Layers of the Past: GIS, Social Process, and Contingency in Historical Mapping”
Panel: “Mapping History”

After attending Swarthmore College and the University of Virginia architecture school, Scott Nesbit began PhD work in History at UVa. His dissertation looks at how men and women talked about forgiveness in religious and political contexts during the Civil War era. He has published on digital humanities resources in Academic Commons and Perspectives on History, and recently became the associate director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he is working with other scholars to build an atlas of American history.

Panel Chair, “The Material Object in Digital Culture”

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Yale working on the history of the book, poetry, and authorship from the mid-seventeenth century through the eighteenth century. My dissertation, entitled “Monumental Remains: The Author and the Book in Early Modern English Literature,” investigates how poets envisioned their relationship to their printed books in light of the emerging literary marketplace and lack of copyright laws. The mechanics of print production, I argue, drew authors’ attention to the materiality of their books in new ways, prompting them to consider the monumentality of their work. My project thus attempts to reorient our understanding of early modern print culture and authorship by taking seriously what early modern authors thought about the durability or transience of the printed book. Other general research interests include Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, media studies and digital culture, and poetry.