Invited Lectures and Keynotes
Bloomsbury Chapter Stevenson Lecture, “The Scissors, the Paste-Pot,
& the Large Language Model,” Institute of English Studies,
University of London, 23 May 2024
“Hands-On History” lecture, “The Dynamic Networks of 19th Century
Newspaper Reprinting,” Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital
History, University of Luxembourg, 22 May 2024
Dahlem Humanities Center Lecture, “The Scissors, the Paste-Pot, &
the Large Language Model,” Freie Universität Berlin, 15 May 2024
Keynote, “All Data is Small (If You Zoom Far Enough), with David
Smith, Final Conference for the Thematic Einstein Seminar on Small Data
Analysis, Einstein Foundation Berlin, 12 March 2024, https://mathplus.de/topic-development-lab/tes-winter-2023-24/final-conference/
Invited Lecture, “From C19 to GPT: How Historical Reprinting Can Help
Us Understand Large Language Models,” Illinois Digital Humanities
Speaker Series, Loyola University Chicago, 15 November 2023
Invited Lecture, “Reprinting, Composition, and Large Language
Models,” Nancy Brownell Lecture on the History of the Book, University
of Iowa Center for the Book, 28 September 2023
Invited Lecture, “Towards a Bibliography for AI Systems,” Library
Lecture, Freie Universität Berlin, 8 June 2023
Keynote, “What Information Can Historical Newspapers Provide?”
Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel Research Association Mid-Term Conference,
Theme: “Verschwinden: Engaging with material & medial losses in the
archive and library,” 14 October 2021
Invited lecture, “Machine Learning + Libraries: A Report on the State
of the Field,” presented online for the Library of Congress, 24 June
2020
Invited lecture, “Novels in the News: The Reprinting of American
Fiction in Nineteenth Century Periodicals,” with Avery Blankenship, Penn
Price Lab in Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, 5 March 2020
Invited lecture, “Platform Literature: Printers’ Memes in
Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” Digital Humanities Roundtable Keynote,
Colby College, Waterville, Maine, 26 October 2018
Invited talk, “(Some Ideas About) How to Teach Digital Humanities,”
Davis Digital Pedagogy Zoom Session, Middlebury College, 21 September
2018
Keynote, “A Pre-History of Fake News,” Numapresse Final Conference,
Montpellier, France, 15 June 2018
Invited lecture, “Viral Texts: Aggregating Exchange in
Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” University of Technology, Sydney,
Australia, 9 May 2018
Invited lecture, “Fake News: Mapping the Pages of 19th-Century
Newspapers,” with M. H. Beals, National Library of New Zealand,
Wellington, 3 May 2018
Invited lecture, “Speculative Bibliography: Probabilistic Texts and
the Editions of Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Reprinting,” University of
Otago, New Zealand, 23 April 2018
Invited lecture, “Programmable Type: the Craft of Printing, the Craft
of Code,” Edward S. and Melinda Melton Sadar Lecture in Writing in the
Disciplines, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 23 March
2018
Invited lecture, “Speculative Bibliography: Probabilistic Texts, Page
Maps, and Propagation Networks,” with David Smith, University of
Richmond, 28 February 2018
Invited lecture, “A Pre-History of Fake News: Virality, Authority,
and Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” University of Oregon, 9 November
2017
Keynote, “Programmable Type: the Craft of Printing, the Craft of
Code” THATCamp
Vanderbilt, Nashville, 27 October 2017
Keynote, “Programmable Type: the Craft of Printing, the Craft of
Code,” Congreso
Internacional Las Edades del Libro, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, Mexico City, 20 October 2017
Invited lecture, “Viral Texts: Bottom-Up Bibliography and the
Networks of 19th Century Newspaper Exchange,” with David Smith, Center
for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina, 20 September
2016
Invited lecture, “Scale as Deformance: The Particulars of ‘Big Data’
in Humanities Research,” Centre for Digital Humanities, Glasgow
University, 24 May 2016
Invited lecture, “Scale as Deformance: The Particulars of ‘Big Data’
in Humanities Research,” Centre for Digital Humanities, University
College London, 18 May 2016
Invited lecture, “‘The Best Mechanical Paper in the World’:
Scientific American, Reprinting, and the Circulation of Popular Science
in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” Institute for Historical Research,
London, UK, 17 May 2016 (audio
online)
Invited lecture, “Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in the Nineteenth Century
Newspaper,” University of East Anglia (UK), American Studies Research
Seminar Series, 11 May 2016
Invited lecture, “Scale as Deformance: The Particulars of ‘Big Data’
in Humanities Research,” Universität Stuttgart, 21 April 2016
Invited lecture, “Scale as Deformance: The Particulars of ‘Big Data’
in Humanities Research” and “Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in the Nineteenth
Century Newspaper,” University of Turino (Italy), Foreign Languages and
Literatures Department, 17-18 March 2016
Invited lecture, “Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in the Nineteenth Century
Newspaper,” Utrecht University (Netherlands), Seminar for Cultural
History, 10 March 2016
Invited lecture, “Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in the Nineteenth Century
Newspaper,” Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany), 2 February
2016
Invited lecture, “The Circulation of the City: How Information Spread
in Nineteenth-Century America,” Universität Siegen (Germany), Seminar
für Anglistik, 18 January 2016
Invited lecture, “‘The Best Mechanical Paper in the World’:
Scientific American, Reprinting, and the Circulation of Popular Science
in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” Umeå University (Sweden), 16 November
2015
Invited lecture, “Fugitive Texts: Replication, Attribution, and
Bibliography in the Digitized Archive,” Australian National University
College of Arts and Sciences, 25 June 2015
Keynote, “Melville in the first Age of Viral Media” Keynote, Melville
Electronic Library Project’s Fifth Annual Meeting (MELCamp 5),
cosponsored by the NEH and the MIT Literature and Comparative Media
Studies Groups, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 30 April 2015
Keynote, “Listicles, Vignettes, and Squibs: A Proto-History of Viral
Media in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” North Carolina Digitized
Newspaper Symposium, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, 24 March
2015
Invited lecture, “Viral Texts and the Technologies of Authorship,”
Cologne Center for eHumanities, Universität zu Köln, 16 December
2014
Invited lecture, “Viral Texts and the Technologies of Authorship,”
Passau Universität, Germany, 9 December 2014
Invited lecture, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” Plenary
Address, “Pedagogy and Practices” Colloquium, Freedman Center for
Digital Scholarship, Case Western Reserve University, 7 November 2014
(video
online)
Invited lecture, “Viral Texts and the Technologies of Authorship,”
Penn Digital Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania, 5 November
2014 (video
online)
Invited lecture, “Viral Texts and the Technologies of Authorship,”
Bowdoin College, 6 October 2014
Invited lecture, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” University of
Michigan Institute for the Humanities, 28 March 2014
Invited lecture, “7 Reasons 19th Century Newspapers Were Actually the
Original Buzzfeed,” Breakfast @ Buzzfeed, 21 March 2014 (video online)
Invited lecture, “Viral Textuality: Uncovering Reprinting Networks in
Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” Digital and Computational Knowledge
Initiative, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 21 November 2013
Keynote, “Viral Networks in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers,”
with David Smith, National Digital Newspaper Program Annual Meeting,
sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Washington, DC, 11 September 2013 (video online)
Invited lecture, “Infectious Texts: Viral Networks in 19th-Century
Newspapers,” First Fridays Lecture Series, University of New Hampshire
English Department, 5 April 2013
Invited lecture, “Mapping the Networks of Viral Texts in
Nineteenth-Century America,” Empowering the Humanities Lecture Series,
Wentworth Institute of Technology, 5 March 2013 (video online)
Invited lecture, “Mapping the Networks of Viral Texts in
Nineteenth-Century America,” Southern Methodist University, 7 February
2013 (video
online)
Invited talk, “Mining for Hawthorne,” Scholars’ Lab Digital Therapy
Luncheon, University of Virginia, February 2010
Conference Papers and Symposia
“Cliche Machines for Scholarly Primitives,” for the “AI in the
Communications Circuit” Roundtable, SHARP Annual Conference, University
of Reading, 3 July 2024
“From C19 to GPT,” Exploring Digital Humanities Conference, Illinois
Wesleyan University, 30 June 2023
“Toward a
Bibliography for AI Systems,” symposium on “Preserving and Analyzing
Digital Texts,” sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in
Critical Bibliography, online, 21 April 2023
“Computationally Modeling Publication Format,” second author; with
Wenyi Shang and J. Stephen Downie, BH+DH Conference, 23 September
2022
“Teaching Critical Bibliography,” Annual Meeting of the Andrew W.
Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, UCLA, May 2022
Invited conference talk, “Closing the Loop Between ML Research &
Library Systems,” FEDLINK Spring 2022 Exposition, 12 May 2022
Invited conference talk, “Closing the Loop Between ML Research &
Library Systems,” AI & Cultural Heritage series, Loughborough
University Institute for Advanced Studies, 28 March 2022
Invited expert panel participant, “Cultural Heritage Interfaces as
Explainable AI,” ASIS&T SIG AI workshop on “Artificial Intelligence
in Information Research and Practice: Fostering Interconnected
Communities,” 30 October 2021
Respondent, “New Directions in Textual Studies and Book History,”
Northeastern University Humanities Center, online, 4 February 2021
Roundtable participant, “Critical Bibliography in the Time of
Covid-19,” Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, online, 7
August 2020
Roundtable participant, “The Letterpress Studio as a Campus Maker
Space,” Modern Language Association Convention, Seattle, Washington, 12
January 2020
“Speculative Bibliography,” Modern Language Association Convention,
Seattle, Washington, 10 January 2020
Poster Presentation, with Avery Blankenship, “Novels in the News: The
Reprinting of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” Association for
Computers in the Humanities Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, 24 July 2019
Panelist, “Digital Humanities and Career Opportunities,” sponsored by
the Digital Americanists Society, American Literature Association
Conference, Boston, MA, 25 May 2019
“Teaching
Humanistic Data Analysis,” Gale Digital Humanities Day, British
Library, London, UK, 2 May 2019
“A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual OCR,” Coalition
for Networked Information Annual Meeting, St. Louis, MO, 5 April
2019
“A Pre-History of ‘Fake News’ in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,”
“Humanities in Five” Contest, Presidential special session, Modern
Language Association Convention, Chicago, IL, 5 January 2019
“Book Dummies” poster, “Teaching with Material Texts” roundtable,
sponsored by the Forum on Bibliography and Scholarly Editing and the
Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, Modern Language
Association Convention, Chicago, IL, 5 January 2019
“Stranger Genres: Computationally Classifying Reprinted Nineteenth
Century Newspaper Texts,” with Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Digital
Humanities 2018, Mexico City, Mexico, 27 June 2018
“Speculative Bibliography,” Society of Fellows in Critical
Bibliography Annual Meeting, Charlottesville, Virginia, 24 May 2018
Consulting Scholar, “Viral Networks: An Advanced Workshop in Digital
Humanities and Medical History,” National Institutes of Health,
sponsored by the NEH, 29-30 January 2018
Invited Respondant, “Public History and Digital Humanities
Symposium,” Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, 19
January 2018
“Little Bits of Paper,” BH and DH Conference, University of
Wisconsin—Madison, 22 September 2017
“What
Makes Computational Evidence Significant for Literary Historical
Argument?” position paper for Mellon-funded “Arguing With Digital
History” workshop, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 15
September 2017
“What News is New?: Ads, Extras, and Viral Texts on the
Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Page,” with David Smith and Shaobin Xu, DH
2017 Conference, Montreal, Quebec, 10 August 2017
“Abundance &
Usurpation while Building a DH Curriculum,” DH 2017 Conference,
“Challenges for New Infrastructures and Paradigms in DH Curricular
Program Development” roundtable, Montreal, Quebec, 9 August 2017
“Transoceanic Newspaper Exchange in the Nineteenth Century,” with
Thansis Kinias, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference,
Freiburg, Germany, July 2017
“Aggregating Exchange in the Nineteenth-Century Newspaper,” with
David Smith and Shaobin Xu, “Technologies of Circulation and Remaking
Texts” panel, SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and
Publishing) conference, Victoria, British Columbia, June 2017
“A Pre-History of Fake News”; Keeping the Public Sphere Open
Conference; NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; 24 March 2017
“The Sentiment of Circulation,” Modern Language Association
Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 2017
Closing Panel Discussant, “The Refuge of Objects / Objects of Refuge”
International Symposium, Mainz University, Germany, December 2016
“Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in the Nineteenth-Century Newspaper,” with
Jonathan Fitzgerald, American Literature Association Symposium, “The
American Short Story: An Expansion of the Genre,” Savannah, Georgia,
October 2016
“‘Q i-jtb
the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Modern Language Association
Convention, Austin, Texas, January 2016
“Nineteenth-Century Systems of Circulation, Reprinting, and
Remediation,” European Summer University in Digital Humanities, Leipzig
University, Germany, August 6, 2015
“‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Canadian DH and
Association for Computers in the Humanities Joint Conference, University
of Ottawa, Canada, June 2015
“Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century Virality from Unstructured
Newspaper Archives,” invited talk with David Smith, “Cultural Analytics:
Computational Approaches to the Study of Culture” Conference, sponsored
by Global Literary Networks, a project of the Neubauer Collegium for
Culture and Society, University of Chicago, May 2015
“Listicles, Vignettes, and Squibs: The Bibliographical Challenges of
Mass Media History,” invited talk, Arclight Symposium on Digital Methods
for Media History, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, May 2015
“Fugitive Verses: Replication, Attribution, and Creativity in C19
Newspapers,” invited paper, Symposium on Replication, Texas Christian
University, Fort Worth, Texas, April 10, 2015
“‘Many
Facts in Small Compass’: Information Literature in C19 Newspapers,”
“Textual Assemblage: Readers, Re-Mixing, and the Re-Construction of
Books” session sponsored by the discussion group on bibliography and
textual studies, Modern Language Association Convention, Vancouver,
British Columbia, January 2015
“The Computational Railroad: What Digital Archives Can (and Can’t)
Tell Us about C19 Reprinting,” award-winners roundtable sponsored by the
Research Society for American Periodicals, American Literature
Association Conference, Washington, DC, May 2014
“Newspapers as/and Antebellum Literature: What”Viral Texts” Can—and
Can’t—Tell Us about Antebellum American Reading,” “Comparative
Literature in a Digital Age” seminar, American Comparative Literature
Association Annual Meeting, New York University, March 2014
Panelist, “Networks and the Commons: A Roundtable on Digital,
Archival, and Theoretical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Literary
Culture,” C19 Conference, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
March 2014
Invited Panelist, “Thinking with Your Eyes: Visualizing the
Humanities and Sciences” Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, February 2014
Invited Panelist, “Viral Media 150 Years Before the ‘Like’ Button,”
at “The Myth, Money and Business Value of Viral Content,” sponsored by
Social Media Club Boston, January 2014
Invited Panelist, “What strategies do historians of science and
literature use to make sense of vast textual archives?” discussion,
“Understanding Literature and Art Cultures for Transformative Research”
Workshop, co-sponsored by the Arizona State University Center for
Science and the Imagination and NASA, Tempe, Arizona, January 2014
Panelist, “Beyond the Digital: Pattern Recognition and
Interpretation” roundtable, Modern Language Convention, Chicago,
Illinois, January 2014
“Infectious Texts in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” New Media in
American Literary History Symposium, Northeastern University,
Boston, MA, December 2013
“Newspapers as a Proto-Internet: Did Media ‘Go Viral’ 150 Years
Before YouTube?” Northeastern Humanities Center Viral Culture Series,
Boston, MA, November 2013 (video online)
“Infectious Texts: Uncovering Reprinting Networks in
Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” with David Smith, Wolfram Alpha Data
Summit, Washington, DC, September 2013
“Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth-Century American
Newspapers,” with David Smith and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Digital
Humanities 2013, University of Nebraska—Lincoln, July 2013
Panelist, “The Future of Undergraduate Digital Humanities”
roundtable, Digital Humanities 2013
“Visualizing Antebellum Reprinting Networks,” Digital Humanities
Summer Institute Colloquium, University of Victoria, Canada, June
2013
Invited panelist, “Why Humanists Need Data—New Uses for Electronic
Archives,” American College and Research Libraries New England Meeting,
Northeastern University, April 2013
Invited panelist, “Viral Media 150 Years Before the ‘Like’ Button,”
at the “Catching a Virus: Brands and People Monetizing Viral Media in
Real Time” event, sponsored by the New York Viral Media Meetup, April
2013
“Visualizing Antebellum Reprinting Networks,” “Literacy’s Material
Histories” roundtable, Northeastern Modern Language Association
Convention, Boston, Massachusetts, March 2013
Invited Panelist, “DHCommons and ProfHacker,” Inaugural
George Washington University Digital Humanities Symposium, January
2013
“Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth-Century American
Newspapers,” with David Smith, Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities
and Computer Science, University of Chicago, November 2012
“Mapping the Pamphlet and Piratical System,” New England American
Studies Association Conference, “The Spatial Turn in American Studies: A
Pecha Kucha Roundtable,” Providence, Rhode Island, October 2012
“Reading C19 Print Culture Spatially,” C19 Americanists Conference
2012
Panelist, “In Memoriam: The Life and Work of Greg Colomb,” Conference
on College Composition and Communication, St. Louis, Missouri, March
2012
“Mapping the Antebellum Culture of Reprinting,” Modern Language
Association Convention, “Text:Image” panel sponsored by the Society for
Textual Scholarship, Seattle, Washington, January 2012
Invited Panelist, “Teaching DH 101: Introduction to Digital
Humanities,” NITLE Digital Scholarship Series, online, December 2011
“‘Taken Possession of’: What Digital Archives Can Teach Us about
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Religious Readers, and Antebellum Reprinting
Culture,” Modern Language Association Convention, “Analog and Digital:
Texts, Contexts, and Networks” panel, Los Angeles, California, January
2011
“‘This Flattering Millennium Theory’: Denominationalism
Against Millennialism in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater,”
Millennialism and Providentialism in the Era of the American Civil War
Conference, Rice University, Houston, Texas, October 2010
“Theorizing an Online, Interactive Red Schoolhouse (and Pouring Its
Foundations),” Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 2010
“‘Taken Possession of’: Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the
Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Canon,” C19: The Society of
Nineteenth-Century Americanists Inaugural Conference,
“Nineteenth-Century American Literature and New Media” panel, State
College, Pennsylvania, May 2010
“Digital Archives and Future Bibliographies,” Virginia Bibliographic
Society Annual Meeting, Pre-Doctoral Scholars’ Forum, Charlottesville,
VA, May 2010
“‘Coming to an End for Certain’: Apocalyptic Skepticism in Poe and
Lippard,” Poe Studies Association’s Third International Edgar Allan Poe
Conference (The Bicentennial), “Poe, Lippard, and Place” panel,
Philadelphia, October 2009
“Thoreau’s Walden and Freshman Comp,” American Literature
Association (ALA), “Teaching Thoreau in the Twenty-First Century”
roundtable sponsored by the Thoreau Society, San Francisco, May 2008
Moderator and respondent for the “Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Nineteenth-Century Religious Communities” panel, sponsored by the
Harriet Beecher Stowe Society, ALA, San Francisco, May 2008
“‘The Light Which Puts Out Our Eyes’: The Spring Apocalypse in
Thoreau’s Walden,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language
Association (PAMLA), “Promethean Visions and Communities of Belief in
Nineteenth-Century American Literature” panel, Bellingham, WA, November
2007
“‘Dim and Wondrous Imagery’: Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the End of
Time,” Popular and American Culture Associations of the South
(PCAS/ACAS), “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Antebellum Culture” panel,
Jacksonville, FL, September 2007
“‘Mas’r isn’t good to himself’: Temperance Rhetoric in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” American Literature Association Conference, “Future
Directions in Stowe Scholarship” panel, sponsored by the Stowe Society,
San Francisco, May 2006